- The picnic project – Dating site
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- Internet dating: We just clicked - Telegraph
- Internet dating: We just clicked
I begin, detached and full of contempt at the sleazy banality, but every so often I get a message — a grammatically accurate, urbane one-liner — that makes me smile, coquettish as a schoolgirl, at the screen. These men have never met me, yet are asking me out for a romantic dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant. How fabulous is that? In a single mouse-click, years of feminism are reversed. The pleasure centre in my pre-frontal cortex is flashing like Blackpool illuminations.
I have logged on in the cause of journalistic research which, I will concede, can be used to legitimise virtually every activity, bar phone hacking. More than a million Britons subscribe to these sites; maritalaffair. The bottom line seems to be that whatever your morality or religion, profession or hobby, there is a dating website out there for you. But while the social stigma of online dating has long vanished, shadowy dangers do remain. This week has thrown up a salutary tale, namely the shocking assault and rape of a year-old woman by a man she had met on the general dating website PlentyofFish.
They had met for dinner and drinks, but when Peter Ramsey, 26, attempted to kiss the legal secretary at her front door, she pulled back. Much was made of the fact they had met via the internet, where half-truths, lies and misrepresentation are commonplace. But 17 per cent of newly married couples now meet this way and one in five single people has dated someone online. So is it reasonable to blame the medium wholesale? According to Brett Harding, founder and managing director of Lovestruck. Most of our members work in the City of London and we cross-reference the personal details that prospective members give us with social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, so we know they are who they say they are.
The picnic project – Dating site
Dating sites range enormously in cost. The signs are that niche dating is the future. So why is internet dating so popular? For the simple reason that flirting is fun. We are hardwired to feel flattered and the anonymity makes it easier to generate a sense of intimacy that may be wholly at odds with reality. But that can lead to dissonant expectations; women regard online chit-chat as wooing and revel in the heady feeling of being pursued. A lot of men online are narcissists who suck the life force from women and use them.
Stories of more comical mismatches are also legion; the sexy blonde who turns out to be a man not even a man dressed as a woman , the silver fox who is nearer 80 than 50, the misfit who sounded nicely quirky online, but arrives carrying too many plastic bags and refuses to make eye contact. It was insane; we ended up eating ice lollies on a park bench. Not that it stopped him logging on again, but it did make him wary. Checking out other people via a webcam is also becoming more widespread and GPS technology can alert you to suitable mates nearby.
There is, it appears, no end to how the search for love, sex or just an internet dalliance can be outsourced. At Pen My Profile, a team of writers will write profiles for those too busy or tongue-tied to do it themselves. I had whittled down the field to the cleverest, best-read correspondent. It never occurred to me that he might slit my throat and toss my body into a dumpster. He was tall and rangy with very fetching dark stubble and lived in East Anglia with Mrs Piers and little Piers and said I should call him Dominic. I insisted he continue calling me Madame Bovary, the online identity I had chosen for myself.
I set an age range, attached photos of women I fancied and hit Send. Less straightforward was my attempt to get that profile memorialised in the contract somehow. Yet my matchmaker was very good at not using aggressive sales tactics.
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Take your time; look at other options, she advised, while emailing me teaser profiles: In any other realm finding a home, hiring a key staff member I would never entertain paying all of the fees up front, with no part contingent on the basic delivery of the service let alone a successful outcome.
However, matchmaking is different. It deals in affairs of the heart. A contrarian, non-commercial streak in me embraced the romanticism of it all. Certainly I was persuaded that it would be odd, and probably indeed impossible, to pay a financial bounty upon meeting a romantic partner. Moving in together, marriage? None of this adequately explains why per cent of the fees needed to be paid up front. This was never convincingly answered, perhaps because my agency never needed to. It would be unfair to call introduction services confidence tricks, but my role in the arrangement increasingly came to feel like that of the mark.
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There would be no close matches — not even a short-term relationship, let alone anything serious or marriage. One of the very first matches was the most promising: But a month later, her calendar miraculously opened up. Within six months, my matchmaker had gone on maternity leave and was replaced by two other staff members. Before long, I asked for a partial refund and you can guess how that went. One curiosity throughout these match-made dates was that I, the man, invariably felt an obligation to foot all bar and restaurant bills.
This was, apparently, the norm in these higher-end dating arrangements: Why should this be, in an era of greater gender equality? Just how unbalanced could things get on this expensive dating journey?
I was about to find out. Here, a deeper truth about the way this exclusive dating world works was revealed: There are different theories as to why this is, one being that women are more willing to invest substantially in finding the right life partner, another being the perception of a depleted pool of eligible men in other walks of life. Unwittingly I asked whether this was pounds or dollars.
It was pounds, of course; we were sitting in a Chelsea pub, not in the West Village. Her own eyes narrowed. Finally I offered alcohol. Champagne, that ever reliable pick-me-up.
Internet dating: We just clicked - Telegraph
Most dates were pleasant enough. Indeed, two women became friends.
Matchmakers meet clients in person for just a couple hours of their lives, and feedback given after each date does little to alter this reality. Understandably, everyone wants to put their best side forward on paper and in photos; profiles tended to be of little use ahead of dates. In exclusive dating as in life generally, much comes down to happenstance. Far more effective for me have been events where it is possible to meet several people on the same night.
The most promising of all have been activities that I enjoy doing anyway, which include literary events, yoga and travel the Weekend FT is crammed full of suggestions for such activities, should you ever be stuck for candidates.
Internet dating: We just clicked
Online dating services such as Match. It makes conversation easier as you immediately have something in common with your fellow attendees. Traditional matchmakers are entering the space as well. One distinctive newcomer in London is The Sloane Arranger, catering to a set that founder Lara Asprey defines as much by shared values as by type of education or physical appearance.