Online Dating

“Japan's Fukui prefecture has the nation's biggest share of dual-income households, the highest ratio of working women, and the lowest unemployment rate. What it doesn't have is enough babies.”

With those arresting leading lines, Aki Ito, a reporter for Bloomberg News in Tokyo, opens “Japan's Government Plays Matchmaker,” an article that details an interesting new initiative that’s about to be launched in the island nation.

Introducing…the Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café, the government’s new online dating site for Japanese singles. The idea of government-sponsored matchmaking might sound crazy, but Japan is not the first country to set up a service with the intention of encouraging and aiding the love lives of its citizens. The Social Developmental Network of Singapore, for example, runs LoveByte, a Web site that doles out dating advice and has a search function that allows registered users to find other single users.

The Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café is a unique solution to a potentially-devastating problem Japan now faces: “At 1.34 children per woman, Japan's fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, well below the 2.1 that is considered the minimum for a developed nation to maintain a constant population.” According to census data, 32 percent of Japanese women between the ages of 30 and 34 were unwed in 2005, a figure that is more than twice the number from 15 years earlier. As an increasing number of Japanese women postpone marriage, or decline to marry at all, the country’s birthrate is dropping to a dangerously low point with serious financial consequences.

Approximately “23 percent of the population is over 65, the highest ratio among the 62 countries tracked by Bloomberg,” which means that the “ranks of pensioners are swelling” while “the pool of workers and consumers is shrinking.” To combat this problem, Japan’s Democratic Party promised to lessen the burden of child rearing by offering families a monthly allowance of 13,000 yen ($150) per child and abolishing the fees for public high school. Naoto Kan, the current Prime Minister, also supported relationships and procreation in his former job as Finance Minister by encouraging his employees to leave work at 6 p.m. to go on dates.

The Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café will go above and beyond traditional online dating sites and Japan’s previous efforts to increase the country’s sagging birthrate by offering money or gifts to couples who marry partners they met using the site’s services. While government-sponsored matchmaking is an interesting idea, critics of the scheme note that “the central government's previous attempts to nudge up the birthrate have not met with success.”

So what do you think, readers? Should governments attempt to play cupid for their populace, or should they steer clear of citizens’ love lives?

An online dating profile can tell you a lot about a person - Does she smoke? Does he want children? What are his hobbies? Where did she go to school? - but there are a few key things that you will probably never find in someone's profile, like arrest records, sex offender status, and financial history.

When you're meeting someone in person, things like body language, tone of voice, and pace of speech offer a lot of clues about the truthfulness of what your date is telling you. But when all of the information you know about someone has been gathered from the text of profiles, emails, and instant messaging conversations, it is much more difficult to determine if your date is being dishonest.

So how do you protect yourself from predators?

You could try asking something along the lines of "Hey, you don't happen to have a criminal record, do you?" but it's not the smoothest of pickup lines and I have a tiny hunch that most prospective dates would consider it a turn-off. Instead, I recommend a more subtle (and confidential!) approach: the online criminal background check.

A background check is the ideal way to discretely find out if someone you're interested in is a liar or a potential lover. If you find nothing suspicious, you haven't hurt your date's feelings or made them uncomfortable with the aforementioned awkward pickup line, and if you do find something that makes you nervous you still have time to walk away from the situation easily.

Some Web sites, like DateDetective.com, cater specifically to online dating, but most sites conduct general background checks on either a statewide or a nationwide level. FreeBackgroundChecksUSA.com, for instance, presents basic facts about each state (like population and largest city) as well as information on crime rates within the state. They also provide links to the National Sex Offender Registry, and places where you can find out more about criminal records, incarceration records, and court records.

SnoopStation.com offers a free option that takes you through a short questionnaire to determine exactly what information you'd like to acquire and what information you already have. If you know the person's name, you then have the option to search his or her criminal history, financial history (or occupational details), marital/relationship history, vital details (like name, age, and SSN), location, or to simply find out as much information as possible about the person. If you do not know the person's name, you can search using his or her phone number, address, email address, or Web site URL.

CriminalSearches.com is a very easy-to-use site that provides information using a simple system of symbols that puts offenses into several categories: Behavioral, Business, Drug & Alcohol, Sex Related, Theft/Robbery, Violent, and Traffic/Other. Like many other online background check sites, CriminalSearches.com offers basic information for free and redirects to a paid service for a more detailed report.

I recommend searching several different sites and comparing the results, to ensure the accuracy of their information. You can also check accuracy by running a search on your own name. If you ever find yourself worrying about the honesty of someone you've met online, don't hesitate to conduct a quick search on an online background check site. The old adage is true: better safe than sorry!

Wow, there has been a lot of eHarmony news lately. Here is some more dealing with the marketing and media side of the business.

Industry insiders are reporting that eHarmony has reached out to a number of media agencies including Omnicom Group, WPP, Publicis Groupe and Interpublic Group of Cos. It looks like they are shopping around with their rather large marketing account. According to Kantar Media, eHarmony "spent a total of $85.4 million in domestic measured media in 2009".

For more on the story, read Advertising Age. To find out other details about this dating site you can check out our eHarmony review.

Opps, we missed this Chemistry free weekend by a day. Still, it is not too late to give them a try since the free communication weekend ends Sunday, August 22, 2010 at midnight. What does a free communication weekend give you at Chemistry.com you may ask? Well, a new member will be able to create a profile, take the personality test, receive matches and communicate with those matches, all at no cost and with no credit card required. You receive most features that a paid member at Chemistry would.

The last Chemistry free communication weekend was during the same weekend in July (see Story). This type of promotion is the ninth time Chemistry has run one. To find out more information on this popular dating service which delivers highly targeted matches based on your personality, read our Chemistry.com review.

From an article over at Madison.com about seniors and how popular online dating is with this demographic, they talked briefly about Match.com. In the piece, Match.com's public relations coordinator, Jaklin Kaden, stated that over 6 percent of Match members are 60 years old or older. For Match members 50 or more, this statistic jumps to 22 percent.

To find out more about this dating service, read our review of Match.com.

eHarmony commissioned a new marriage metrics study from Harris Interactive in 2009. They have released the statistics from the study this week in part to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. The last Harris Interactive study done for eHarmony was in 2007 (see Story); it concluded that 236 eHarmony users get married every day. This was based on data from April 1, 2006 to March 31, 2007. So, it has been about 3 years since this statistics has been updated. Let's see what Harris Interactive found out.

What they found was that the number of marriages per day resulting from eHarmony has doubled. On average, 542 people are married every day in the United States because of meeting online at eHarmony. Wow, this means there will be another 271 happy couples who married today, thanks to using the dating site eHarmony. This new data came from an online study from Harris Interactive which they ran during July and August of 2009. 7,994 people responded to this study, aged from 20 to 54 and who were married between Jan 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009. If you calculate it out, during this 18 month period, 148,311 eHarmony couples got married. This equals to 4.77 percent of all new marriages in the United States.

For more on this story you can read the 2009 summary of the eHarmony Marriage Metrics Study. For more about this dating site and how it matches members together, read our popular eHarmony review.