United Kingdom

The Times Online UK took a look at what they called Quickie Dating Websites recently. When I think of a quickie I assumed they were referring to an adult dating site where people go looking for casual sex. I was only partly right. They were talking about Affair / Infidelity dating sites for married people. On this side of the Atlantic, the most popular dating site for people looking to have an affair is Ashley Madison, where it is even guaranteed. In the Times article they took a look at Forget Dinner (ForgetDinner.co.uk) which is very popular in London. It is not advertised really as an affair dating site but most people on the service seem to be married. Profiles tend to be straight to the point and a lot of the photos contain nudity. There appears to be about 10 men for every 1 woman on the dating site.

Here are some infidelity related figures for the UK. In 2008, there was 115,200 divorces granted and 29 percent of these divorces were the result of adulterous behavior. According to a Grant Thornton UK Survey (2009), 9 percent of women would cheat on their partner as long as there was no way to be found out. In comparison, 24 percent of men said they would cheat. In the same survey 20 percent of men admitted to having an actual affair where only 10 percent of women did.

In the United Kingdom every month 7 million people visit online dating sites. This is a 27 percent increase over last year, whereas the percentage of the UK population that used the internet only grew by 4 percent.

For more on this story, and to get a couple of men's and one woman's experience on Forget Dinner read Times Online.

Online Dating in the UK is booming. Last year more than five million adults in the UK used the internet to find their partner and the money these online daters spent on dating sites was over £80 million. Now days, one in five people who marry, met that person online. By next year (2010) it is estimated that there will be 16 million singles in the UK, which means there is only room for online dating to grow.

One segment of the dating industry which is becoming more popular are services that offer psychological questionnaires. Dating sites like Match.com UK, Chemistry (North America), DatingDirect.com and eHarmony all offer services that use science to determine matches. Each of these sites will ask you dozens (or hundreds) of questions on your values, attitudes, emotions and personality traits. These questions help the dating site to scientifically analyze how you interpret situations, how you react to problems and how you make decisions. With this information in hand the service then pairs you with potential partners who you should be highly compatible with. This goes beyond love at first sight.

But where did psychometric testing come from?

Developed in the early 20th century by scientists, these tests are detailed questions assessing your intellect, personality traits and knowledge. They were used to recruit spies by the British during World War II and were then later taken up by the CIA.

In the Sixties, Professor Raymond Cattell invented questionnaires that looked at a range of personality traits in the workplace. The Civil Service still uses the system today both in recruiting and to help its managers find the best way to manage their staff according to their psychometric profiles.

Psychometric testing does work but it is still only part of the matching process. People need to be honest with themselves about who they are or they are not going to get real compatible matches from these sites. Members also need to realize that what their perceived ideal match may be, it may not be what the science of matching has found to be the most highly compatible with their personality type. Members of these dating sites need to take a chance and go into online dating with an open mind.

For more on the story, read the Mail Online. To find further details about the dating sites mentioned in this story which offer psychometric assessments, read our Match.com UK review, Chemistry review, DatingDirect.com review and eHarmony review.

Match.com spent around £6m on advertising in the United Kingdom according to Nielsen. Hanft Raboy and Partners previously held the Ad account for Match.com in the UK but this year the new marketing director, Karl Gregory decided on using Mother instead.

The only details we have on the new marketing campaign so far is, it starts in the new year, and it will attempt to engage people at an emotional level.

For the full story visit Marketing Magazine and to find out more about this UK dating site, read our Match.com UK review.

eHarmony in the United Kingdom launched in July 2008. It is just over a year later and they now have 400,000 members. For the first couple of months eHarmony was giving out free 90 day subscriptions to all new members (see Story), but beyond that they did not do a lot of marketing. According to Greg Waldorf, eHarmony's chief executive,

... last year's launch was deliberately "soft" so the company was not left in the awkward position of having lots of members of one sex signed-up without a sufficient number of the opposite sex to provide enough suitable matches.

For comparison, a competitor of eHarmony's in the United Kingdom, Match.com, has had 6.5 million singles signup as members since launch (a number of years ago).

We got word that there will be a Free Communication Weekend at eHarmony in the United Kingdom (eHarmony.co.uk), starting Friday August 28th to Monday August 31st, 2009. Having this popular promotion and combining it with their big TV advertising campaign going on at the moment, means eHarmony UK members should have lots of matches to review and communicate for free with during the last weekend in August.

There is no information yet of a Free Communication Weekend coming soon for eHarmony here in Canada and the United States but we expect it will happen at the same time or in the first few weeks of September.

Read our review of eHarmony for more information on this popular online matchmaking service.

In an article on the UK website, The Guardian, author Tanya Gold asks the question, Are Britons who are searching for love online, looking in the wrong place? At the point of writing the article Tanya had been internet dating for 3 weeks. She so far has mixed feelings. On one had she is dazzled by the possibilities but on the other, she feels "sleazy and slightly vulnerable".

Tanya gives four examples of online dating gone wrong. Two are her own dating experiences and all seem to point to men as the ones causing all of the problems 😲. I had a laugh at one of her dates named Clive. Apparently he had broken his dentures the day of the date and asked if he could pick her up toothless. What was he thinking? She also gave 4 positive examples of how online dating worked and created successful matches. One of her examples was Jane, who in 10 years, went on more than 200 internet dates before she met her soul mate.

Lets look at some of the UK stats more closely in which Tanya compiled. According to her information, fifteen million people in Britain are single, and almost five million are looking for love online. 20 percent of married people between the ages of 19 and 25 met their spouse online and a YouGov survey of 2000 people found that, for all age groups, 15 percent of couples met through the internet. The surprising twist here is that according to research at Bath University, a relationship that was started online lasts on average 7 months. I wonder how long an average relationship lasts that was not formed on the internet?

Across the pound and in America, Tanya found that according to the Plenty of Fish dating site, 33 percent of online daters form a relationship, 33 percent do not, and the last 33 percent give up on internet dating altogether. She also discovered a poll from the University of Texas which found 30 percent of women who met men online had sex on their first date. From these encounters, 77 percent of men did not wear condoms (how about other birth protection?) When compared to the information from the Centre of US Disease Control, almost 50 percent of all women required men to wear a condom during their first sexual experience.