General News

We all recognize that the digital age is changing our lives in many ways, including our social lives. Online dating is a popular way to meet singles, and many people connect via texting and Facebook. What we don't realize is that these capabilities are also changing the way we think about dating.

A recent study conducted by Match.com shows that singles today are challenging old gender and age stereotypes. In a comprehensive survey among 5,000 singles across the nation, researchers inquired about everything from whether or not singles Facebook friend a date to how quickly you can tell whether or not there's chemistry.

Some findings include:

Dating is no longer a waiting game. Over half of women reach out after a date instead of waiting for the guy to call. The majority of men however (68%) will wait one to three days after the date to pick up the phone. So if you want the guy to reach out first ladies, it pays to have a little patience.

Text equals success. About a third of both men and women will text after a successful first date. Of those, almost 60% are between the ages of 21 and 34.

Tradition may apply...sometimes. Women still expect men to make the first move to ask them out, and although 41% of women would offer to pick up the check on a first date, a majority of men (37%) still feel they should foot the bill.

Dating today means quick assessments. Both men and women agree that 15 minutes into the date is long enough to tell if there is chemistry. However, if the date isn't going as planned, only 12% of singles would actually call it a night and leave within the first 30 minutes of the date.

Facebook is a factor. Twenty-six percent of younger singles between the ages of 21-35 think it's perfectly acceptable to add a date as a Facebook friend after 2-3 dates. One out of six think it's fine to friend your new date before the first date ever occurs. On the other hand, 11% of singles between the ages of 35-44 are more cautious and wait to friend a date on Facebook until it becomes an exclusive relationship.

How you dump a date depends on your age. Although 52% of those surveyed agree you should politely explain that you're not interested, 25% of women between the ages of 21-34 will either be evasive about their availability or simply ignore their calls, emails, and texts to signal they are uninterested in another date. Women over 35, however, are more inclined to say directly that they aren't interested.

Conversations still rule. Although 64% of singles are open to having post-date conversations via text and email, more than 80% of singles still prefer conversations on the phone.

Men can be more eager to solidify a new relationship than women. Men are more likely to introduce someone they're interested in to their friends within the first month of dating than women are, regardless of their age group (nearly 50% of men vs. 35% of women).

To find out more about this popular dating site, please read our review of Match.com.

It's Just Lunch in the San Francisco Bay Area is offering their clients a new option for a membership. It is called "Private Search Membership". Along with the traditional matchmaking services that the single will receive when opting for this membership, matchmakers at It's Just Lunch will actually broaden their search beyond the members of It's Just Lunch and search the entire Bay Area to find a suitable and quality match for the member. Along with the Private Search Membership, members will also receive date coaching.

For more information on the story you can read the press release and to find out more about this popular matchmaking service, please check out our It's Just Lunch review.

I have finally closed the poll on Online Dating Spending during the recession (are we out of it yet?). I have been meaning to do it a while ago as it has been up since 2009.



Anyways, from the 579 votes the poll received, about 49 percent of voters was planning on to spend about the same or more on dating sites. A further 25.5 percent was going to spend less due to the global recession and the rest (25.5 percent) had decided to quit dating all together. It's hard to say if the recession changed anything since we do not have a comparison poll of a similar question before the recession but, with almost 50 percent still continuing to spend at least the same amount and a further 25 percent still planning to spend at least some money, means about 75 percent of visitors who voted still was planning to spend money on dating services. I bet this number wouldn't have changed much if we had done the poll a year before the recession.

What do you think?

To streamline the profile creation process for mobile users eHarmony announced last month that they put together a questionnaire for their profile that can be completed in about 10 minutes. eHarmony's normal relationship questionnaire can take about an hour or so to complete.

The mobile questionnaire has 100 questions that eHarmony has tested and experimented with to ensure that mobile users who fill out this shorter version will still receive very high quality matches. They have also updated the interface to use the touch screen much more effectively with less key strokes or touches. Users question will now auto save as well so they can come back at any point and finish up the questions if something comes up.

The look and feel of the dating app also has changed to make it more personal. The test is now constructed like a book with chapters. To help people answer questions more accurately some of the profile questions also have been re-phrased into first person statements.

To try out this new version (1.4.1) of eHarmony's dating app you can visit iTunes.

For more information you can visit the official eHarmony blog and for more details on the dating service you can read our review of eHarmony.

"Every ten years in the United States we take a census, the purpose of which is to determine how many people live in different areas of our country, so that the makeup of the House of Representatives reflects the makeup of the nation. Along with a simple count of heads, the census asks other questions which give us insight into our income, jobs, homes, ages, and backgrounds. This information is analyzed and published by the government, telling us who we are.

But these facts and figures, interesting and useful as they may be, are not really us."

With that interpretation of the U.S. census, artist R. Luke DuBois introduces his latest project, a piece entitled "A More Perfect Union." In an effort to define Americans more accurately and create his own version of the 2010 United States census, DuBois joined 21 online dating sites - from Match.com to AsiaFriendFinder - and analyzed the profiles of 19,095,414 single Americans. The results are "a road atlas of the United States, with the names of cities, towns, and neighborhoods replaced with the words people use to describe themselves and those they want to be with." The maps contain 20,262 unique words, each of which appears in the location in which it's used more frequently than anywhere else in the country.

DuBois found, among other things, that the nation's happiest people seem to be living on the coasts, particularly in Washington, where online daters in Seattle take the title for most instances of the word "happy" appearing in their dating profiles. The least happy women appeared to be living in New York, in the Bronx, while the least happy men call central and western Nebraska home.

Ladies in parts of Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, and Ohio - and men in parts of Texas, Wyoming, and Georgia - are the most "lonely" in the country. The least lonely women are in Illinois, and the least lonely men have settled in California, around Los Angeles.

Some of DuBois' more scandalous findings trace instances of words like "naughty," "virgin," and "kinky." No one in Wyoming, it turns out, uses the description "naughty" in their profiles, though many women in Colorado do. The highest concentrations of virgin men and women are in New York's 12th congressional district (which includes Williamsburg and the Lower East Side) and Louisiana's 2nd (New Orleans), respectively. New Orleans does, however, come in first when it comes to the least virgin men, an award that went to Houston, TX for the women. If kink is your thing, search San Jose, CA and southern West Virginia, which tied for most kinky women, or New Mexico for kinky men. Kinksters would do well, on the other hand, to avoid Wyoming completely.

Though DuBois doesn't theorize about why certain words are more prevalent in certain parts of the country, his experiment tells us a lot about what it means to date in contemporary America. "Online dating requires a very specific, complex act of self-identity," he told ABC. "If you don't do online dating, you assume everyone says the same thing, e.g. 'I'm nice, cute, smart, fun'.... But it turns out that the real objective of an online dating profile is to stand out from the crowd and get noticed, so people talk openly and honestly about their aspirations, their hobbies, their life history. It's really fascinating."

For 14 days eHarmony Australia is running a free guided communication event starting April 13th and ending on April 26th, 2011. This means starting tomorrow for a fortnight, singles in Australia can visit eHarmony.com.au, create a profile, receive matches, and then communicate with those matches through the guided communication process at no cost.

As winter approaches in Australia it is a good time for singles to check out their local online dating site since this is typically the busy period for dating and matchmaking services.

To find out more about this online dating site in Australia, you should check out our eHarmony review.