Finding love online pays off

Beatrice Gruss , left, and her two sons Emanuel Citron, center, and Jeremy Citron, in their ``Traditional Matchmakers'' office. The mother-and-sons team is bringing matchmaking expertise online. Gruss, who immigrated to the US as a child, dipped into her eastern European cultural roots to start Traditional Matchmakers in the early 1980s. But about 18 months ago, she realized that her dating business needed to be updated and asked her sons to help modernize it. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Two of singles in Britain looking for love turned to electronic dating agencies last year, figures published in the Times showed this week.

Experts that online dating has revolutionized the dating game and become a "perfect example of technological Darwinism."

A survey by Parship.co.uk, the British subsidiary of Europe's largest dating service with more than 1.5 million members, reported that 3.6 million Britons used online dating services last year.

That amounts to 65 percent of the 5.4 million Britons who were looking for a relationship and used a dating service last year.

A spokeswoman for Relate, a leading British relationship counselling agency, said, "The Internet is the way people are looking these days. The stigma from dating agencies seems to have gone."

According to the Times, there are more than 100 independent online dating agencies in Britain, chasing a market that is valued at about US$20 million and expected to rise to US$83 million by 2008.

Parship that 50 percent of single people believe they will meet a suitable partner through the Internet, up from 35 percent six months ago.

Chris Simpson, commercial director of the agency Telecom Express, said that greater interaction on the Internet had lured singletons online.

"If you could pick one single thing that's changed everything, it's the ability to see a picture of the person," he said.

At the top end of the online dating business, companies were emulating some of old agencies' attention to detail by asking clients to fill out extensive questionnaires.

This "weeded out" half-hearted fling-seekers and improved the chances of finding a good match.

Parship detailed psychometric tests similar to the personality profiles that many large companies employ to screen potential employees.

Love Friends, an agency which has 75,000 British members, asks singletons to spend about an hour completing its form.

Mary Balfour, founder of Love and Friends, where a full "hand-holding" matchmaking service can cost more than US$8,800, said the Internet had revolutionized the dating industry by raising its profile and placing a new reliance on getting to know a date before meeting.

"It's like a return to old-fashioned love letters," she said. "You don't base your initial judgment on how someone looks but what their profile is like."

"Everybody you know who is single these days has at least had a good look at a dating Web site, introduction agency or personal ad.

"They have to, because all the old matchmaking institutions have gone, from the Church, the extended family, local community and factory floor to the ball and party circuits," added Balfour.

Richard Giordarno, a lecturer on Web-based social forms at Birkbeck College in London, said that electronic dating conferred a degree of control that people could never obtain from a face-to-face encounter.

"You can pick and choose the person you want to meet and you have control over the way you display yourself," he told the Times.