Life in the United Kingdom, UK, and indeed in Nigeria is such that it is difficult to find love. Singletons in their thirties and forties often leave England for Nigeria in the hope that they would meet Mr or Miss Right, get married and settle.
The UK and Nigeria have many women in their thirties who are still single. The truth is that for some of these women (and men), they will never get married. The marriage vows, after all, are not meant to be undertaken by all. These days, beauty, education and success are no guarantees to love. There are many women who are super successful and beautiful who are still single. Some of these women don’t even want to get married. For those that are still interested in the union, the Internet offers another place to keep the search for ‘Mr Right’ or ‘Miss Everything’ alive.
Unlike the ‘good old days’ when girls married their university sweethearts, finding the perfect man or woman seems to be a job on its own requiring meticulous planning, articulation and deliberate projection. Thankfully, online dating offers uncapped opportunites to find genuine love. After all, we all need to love and be loved. Indeed, dating websites offer to some the best place for casual sex, most especially after the first date. Online dating makes it possible – and love veterans would attest to this – to find sex as when it is needed. Most people know the difference between a ‘booty call’ and an ordinary phone call (you don’t need the Internet for ‘booty calls’ though), but online dating sites improve, for some, the chances of getting some sex.
There are genuine people whose lifestyles make it difficult for them to find members of the opposite sex to date. The three top dating websites are Eharmony, match.com and perfectmatch. Twenty-nine million subcribers log in every month to match.com, while 20 million people do same for Eharmony. Perfectmatch boasts of a respectable four million subcribers monthly.
Internet dating is very competitive. There are thousands of these sites. For instance, match.com, which is highly mainstream, appeals to a broad audience, and there are all sorts of niche sites. There are sites that target people over 50. There are sites for people wanting to find others of the same religion or ethnicity. There are sites that are quirky, like Stachepassions.com, for women who like men with moustaches or for women who like men in uniform. There are also dating websites for Nigerians to meet Nigerians. Some of these sites include naijadating.com, nigeriandateline, sexynaija.com, nigeriansconnect.com, naijaplanet and so on. It is unclear the percentage of men versus women who use Nigerian dating sites but in the United States, US, 58 per cent women and 48 per cent men use online dating agencies.
The online dating industry is worth $1 billion in the US and still growing by 10 per cent every year. Online dating sites have, in fact, become big business. In 2007, dating sites earned about $1.03 billion in revenue. In 2012, that figure is expected to climb to $1.65 billion. Online dating sites generate more revenues than online pornography. In fact, online dating sites rank as the third most popular of the paid content sites behind only digital music and video games. The projections are that the revenues earned by online dating sites will just continue to grow.
The appeal of Internet dating is cross-generational. Grandparents who choose not to spend the rest of their lives alone go online to look for love. The stigma associated with Internet dating has subsided substantially; people are more Internet-savvy and the sites are more user-friendly. Our lifespans today are longer, and there has been a cultural shift towards people valuing fulfilment later in life, hence the average age of 48 (for a typical online user). Others may find themselves widowed and long-term relationships may end. People especially in the West don’t see themselves as sentenced to being alone, whatever their age, so they clean up, lose weight, date and meet in various ways, including on the Internet. It is safe to suggest that Internet sites have become pretty good matchmakers over the last 17 years, a far cry from the first personal advert in 1695.
The advent of super mobiles has also made it easier to find love, be it on the social networking sites like facebook or the specialised sites like eHarmony. So technically, love is only a click away. The disadvantage though is that you can get sucked into just browsing the sites and the profiles rather than actually going out and meeting people. In Nigeria, it would seem that midnight phone calls and sex texting (sexting) are the easiest ways men and women get love. As there is no harm in flirting over the phone, many people who traditionally would not are seeing the love potential in an android modern phone with access to the Internet. The Internet is revolutionary because it makes it easy for us to make contact with people we don’t know and, better yet, those who don’t necessarily live within our life patterns.
According to a new survey by psychologists at the Univeristy of Rochester in the US, online dating is the second most common way of starting a relationship – after meeting through friends. It has become popular in part, says one of the authors of the report, Professor Harry Reis, because other methods are widely thought of as grossly inefficient. “The Internet holds great promise for helping adults form healthy and supportive romantic partnerships, and those relationships are one of the best predictors of emotional and physical health,” he says.
Last millennium, 72 per cent of us met our partners at school or university, at work or in networks of family or friends. The other 28 per cent, presumably, met the loves of their lives in other places. The Guardian, for example, has had its own and very successful online dating site, Soulmates, since 2004, with more than 650,000 registered so far. Online dating offers the dream of removing the historic obstacles to true love (time, space, your dad with a shotgun across his lap and an expression that says no boy is good enough for my girl).
eHarmony likes to stress how many members get married as a result of being matched via the service (236 every day, according to data gathered in the US in 2008.) Match.com did a survey last year indicating that an impressive 58,500 people found a partner on the site over a 12-month period – and they still offer a six-month guarantee of ‘finding love’, albeit underlined (understandably) by a 500-word list of conditions. But you rarely hear from those who, having failed to find a partner online, back away from the computer, shaking their heads at the way the process distorts social conventions and leaves you slightly shell-shocked. Many wives blame the absence of their husbands on Internet dating and even more wives would be shocked if they had access to their husband’s active email accounts.
Online dating is not all it is hyped to be; one in ten sexual offenders use online dating to meet people. It is still wise to meet up first in a public place than in one’s home for tea/coffee. A wise truth to remember is whatever the case, knowledge of the sexual history of ‘Mr Right/Miss Right’ may forestall future tears. Internet websites often infringe on one’s privacy rights long after accounts have been closed. One has to read between the lines before signing up to some of these websites. In conclusion, singletons who are looking for love and marriage need to keep believing that it will happen some day for them. And if it doesn’t, they have the Internet to look forward to for their ‘happily ever after’ Cinderella romances.
