Online Dating

I found an article discussing the growth of online dating and the different motives that have been displayed by the different people who are found on these websites. The article which is entitled Online Dating and Mating: The Use of the Internet to Meet Sexual Partners by Danielle Couch discusses many views on online dating in Australia and the dark-side of some people on these dating sites. She begins the article by giving a statistic about online dating services in the United States. Couch says that about 9.8% of the people found on online dating sites are actually trying to find a relationship with someone that they are matched with, but immediately following that she says that there is also 9.8% of the people on the site who are looking for strictly sexual relations. She tells of a study in Sweden that was done that shows that men and women are equally guilty in using the internet for looking for sexual relations and men and women are also equally looking for relationships on these sites. An interesting statistic found by the Swedish study is the percentage of both men and women who use the online sites for sexual purposes. It was found that 45% of women and 55% of men use online dating sites for sexual purposes and 40% of those women and 35% of those men reported that they had met with people that they found on the internet and had sexual relations. The article then goes on to give people's thoughts on online dating and several other statistics about online dating and how it is becoming more and more popular to meet people online rather than in person.

I thought that it was interesting the percentages of women who have found a sexual partner online and that it is more than men who have done so. It is some people's beliefs that men usually are the ones to use online dating sites for sexual partners but for women to have sexual encounters with people they meet on these more frequently than men is very interesting to me.

I am curious as to what everyone else thinks about online dating and how they think it will develop with time. Does anyone think that meeting online will become more popular than meeting people in person as online dating continues to grow or is this just a phase?