|
|
I like this article that just came out in the Boston Globe. It features just the folks I write for and coach, those singles over 35 or 40 who want to find the love of their lives. Too bad the author didn’t find me, because as you all know, I found my love on Match.com, am a Romance Coach, and am from Maine—so is Stacey Chase! Oh well, maybe next time. But anyway, back to the article. I LOVED how the author treated the gay male couple exactly as she would have a heterosexual couple, right down to the question of getting married. I do think that the women’s expectations of the guys at the dating event were too high. Go easy, ladies. Thye may not see you as that much of a catch, either.
Older, Wiser, and Available The middle-aged dating scene, filled with singles weighing one another’s emotional baggage, isn’t for the weak of heart.
By Stacey Chase
July 27, 2008
IT’S A MONDAY NIGHT AND Gretchen Grufman, a home remodeler with freckles and strawberry-blond hair, has just met eight men in a series of six-minute “predates” - the romantic round robin better known as speed dating - at a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, sports bar. There was the soft-spoken, baldheaded Briton; the goateed general contractor who loves ballroom dancing; the 48-year-old grandfather of seven in a suit; and the Harley-riding IT manager who divorced a second time three months ago. * Single since 1992, Grufman is herself twice divorced with two grown sons. “I’ve been engaged a few times, but I haven’t worked up the courage to get married again,” says the 55-year-old who recently moved to Amesbury from Wells, Maine. Still, middle-aged dating is not for the faint of heart. Baby boomers like her, born between 1946 and 1964, are more likely than previous generations were to find themselves - graying and with badly bruised egos - on the youth-obsessed dating scene. The high incidence of divorce, declining marriage rates, and longer life spans have contributed to the single-boomer phenomenon. An AARP analysis of 2007 US Census Bureau data found that of the 76.7 million baby boomers, 18.5 percent were divorced or separated, 10.6 percent had never married, and 2.8 percent were widowed, making nearly a third of the generation (24.5 million) single.
“Fifty, 60 years ago, dating among this age group would be unheard of,” says 46-year-old Mary Elizabeth Hughes, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University and coauthor of a 2004 study The Lives and Times of the Baby Boomers. “Most people would already be married, and if they weren’t married they probably weren’t dating.”
For those looking for love with like-minded and like-aged people today, it’s a brave new world often complicated by love-gone-wrong histories with ex-spouses or lovers, and by children and grandchildren, dependent elderly parents, careers, health problems, and emotional baggage that won’t fit into the overhead compartment. Framingham State College sociology professor Virginia Rutter says all that can be good: “The baggage is actually part of what makes the person you’re with a human being, and you have this opportunity to connect with them in the middle of the plot of their story.”
Many older daters, like those at the speed-dating event sponsored by Cupid.com/PreDating, are embracing Cupid and other online dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony.com. Though helped along by modern technology, much of the conversation Monday night was painfully predictable: weather and work. One man mentioned the diarrhea outbreak at his mother’s assisted-living facility. Another told Grufman afterward that he’d frequented a strip club in her old town.
Sally LaRochelle, a 49-year-old two-time divorcee and administrative assistant in Dover, New Hampshire, sporting ultra short white hair and dark-rimmed glasses, was turned off by the potential suitors. “On a scale of one to 10 . . . they’re probably like twos,” she says. “They seemed a little desperate, and some of them just seemed to be too old.”
The newly re-divorced IT manager, Charlie Petrikas, 56, from South Berwick, Maine, confesses: “I still think I do need to heal a bit, but I don’t want to sit around.”
Susan Fox owns Personals Work in the South End, a matchmaking service that provides its largely female boomer clientele with tools such as ghostwriting personal ads and flirting and style tips for finding a mate. Says Fox: “I’ve even told women who’ve come in that they need to color their hair.” She helps singles to first figure out who they are and what they’re seeking - physical characteristics, occupation, religion, interests, smoking habits - and then create a list of “non-negotiables” for Mr. or Ms. Right, often disregarding a client’s “wish list.” (One client rattled off 142 deal breakers and, needless to say, was not a success story.)
Her advice? Forget love at first sight. Take a second look - and a third, and a fourth.
“We’re not all pulled together with the same level of hormonal urgency that we were when we were 27 or 33,” says the 50-something Fox. “People really need to be able to say, `OK. I like this person well enough to see him or her again and see if something develops here.’”
Bostonian Beverly Summer is a slender brunette in her mid-40s, never married, childless, Ivy League-educated, and runs her own financial-services company. “If I were a guy,” she quips, “I would be the most eligible bachelor in Boston.”
Having tried everything from charity events to pub crawls, Summer turned to Personals Work two years ago in her hard-charging hunt for a husband. Since then, she has viewed dozens of profiles and dated two men from Match.com, going out for several months with each of them, but she still hasn’t met The One. “There’s no science to it,” she says. “It’s a just a matter of time, kissing frogs.”
THEY SPARKED THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION, but for many boomers - those in the first wave are turning 62, while late boomers are hitting 44 this year - reentering the dating game, sometimes after decades, or continuing to search despite long odds, is both unnerving and liberating in ways that hooking up in their younger days was not. “The romance of your 20s - whether you actually decide to have children or not - is the script about how, especially in the heterosexual ideal, we get together, and we make a family, and we have our little dream world,” says the 44-year-old Rutter, who became a widow at age 35. “That is no longer on the table when you’re in your 40s, 50s, and 60s.”
By shedding stereotypical gender roles, Rutter says, midlifers have a lot more freedom to be themselves, and romance becomes less of a fantasy than a practicality that involves negotiating complexities such as child-custody arrangements, retirement planning, and medical directives. “That isn’t less romantic,” she says, “but the romance is different.”
Michael Walsh, a 50-year-old landscape designer in Braintree, and his partner, David Richman, 52, of Aventura, Florida, had a whirlwind courtship after viewing each other’s profiles on Match.com on October 2, 2006. That Monday night, they exchanged e-mails. Tuesday morning, they talked by phone. On Friday, Walsh was picking up Richman, a commercial property manager, at Logan Airport. By Sunday, they were in love.
The blissful pair, who currently maintain separate homes in their respective states (and another in Seattle), are together roughly 70 percent of the time. They have yet to decide whether they’ll marry, or to work out the logistics - primarily their careers and assets - in order to live in the same city. “My home is where David is,” Walsh says, “and his home is where I am.”
“It’s such a relief [not to be looking anymore] because that was my life - I was always looking for a partner,” continues Walsh, who eats only organic food and advertised himself on Match as Upbeat Buddhist Jock Seeks Attachment. “Other people stop looking; they give up.”
Boomers still on a quest for a mature, meaningful relationship say they have learned from their mistakes and heartaches and - though the peer dating pool is significantly smaller - seem to even cherish the peculiar bittersweetness of middle-aged love: that the biological urge to reproduce is typically over, that expectations of love are more realistic, that women tend to have a greater level of equality, that partners understand neither person will be molded to fit the other’s desires.
“With the mush comes the gloom,” Richman says. “I want to be able to be naked in front of somebody . . . and be completely comfortable. And naked in even more than the physical sense, emotionally be naked.”
Annie McCormick, a 51-year-old graphic artist in Burlington, Vermont, has had her heart repeatedly ripped out in a series of long-term, monogamous relationships since her 1984 divorce. “I tend to choose men who have addiction problems,” she says. “One cheated. One was violent. One was an alcoholic who drank. And, then, the last one was a pothead.”
McCormick blames herself, not the men. “I’m not honest from the start, as far as: `This is me. These are my needs,’ “ she says, “I’m a people pleaser.” Five years ago, after she and her last, live-in boyfriend split, McCormick says she “kind of went into hiding” but is timorously ready to seek love again. “I do get lonely lately, a little bit.”
Boomers, who took the first birth-control pills and campaigned for women’s rights, are leading active sex lives, surveys show, but those out of practice and on the prowl can be as nervous as fumbling teenagers when it comes to physical intimacy. “Generally, for people who are widowed or gone through a really painful divorce, there’s a fear,” says Fox, the matchmaker and a trained psychologist. Others are free-lovebirds who want “to get back out there and have sex to kind of get them in the swing of things again.”
“I’ve worked with women clients who regularly have sex on the first date!” she adds. “And older boomers!”
In 2004, a sexuality study by AARP revealed that slightly more than a third of the midlife and older respondents - and half of those with regular sexual partners - reported having sexual intercourse once a week or more. In addition, 53 percent said they engage in sexual touching or caressing, while 69 percent reported they kiss or hug their partner on a regular basis.
Leonard Steinhorn, a communications professor at American University and author of The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy, predicts boomers will continue to transform American society even as they age. “Boomers are going to also reinvent the idea of what it means to be elderly,” says the 52-year-old former political speechwriter. “They’re going to look at being elderly as being vital, as vigorous, as still irreverent. Boomers are going to grow old but stay young.”
They may, or may not, decide one is the loneliest number. Cathy Chamberlain, a 59-year-old human resources manager in South Burlington, Vermont, has had boyfriends but never gotten married or had children and says she’s committed to her singlehood. “The loss I feel is more the sense of family,” she says. “I have it with a variety of girlfriends - you create your own family - and I just don’t know what that’s going to look like 10, 15 years from now.”
Meanwhile, Grufman, the speed dater from Amesbury, continues her pursuit of a mate. On her Cupid.com score card, she selected the option “Let’s Talk!” over “No Thanks” for five of the eight men she’d recently met; three men indicated they would like to hear from her again. (She believes some of them didn’t pick her because they thought she was an actress or model hired as a ringer.)
“My uncles, and my dad, and my grandfathers all treated their wives like they were on pedestals,” Grufman says. “I don’t really expect to be on a pedestal, but I sure expect to be treated pretty good.”
Looking wistful in a dark corner of the bar, she adds: “I’m not an unhappy person, but I definitely don’t want to grow old alone.”
As far as I am concerned, I can never warn you too much about scamming. You have to pay attention when you are dating, online or otherwise. It is all too easy to let what you want to happen get in the way of what actually is going on. Here’s an article from ConsumerAffairs.com that says it all again, with some good guidelines that I have put in bold.
Love’s Labors Looted: Internet Dating Scams Can Get Expensive
Organized crime preys on the lonely; sites don’t check backgrounds
By Joseph S. Enoch
ConsumerAffairs.com
July 28, 2008
Like so many others who go looking for love on Internet dating sites, Annette was lonely.
She thought she had found the answer to her loneliness when in early March, Eharmony.com matched her with John, a fair-skinned 41-year-old Christian building engineer from California.
The only problem was that he was working on a project in Nigeria, but would be back in the U.S. soon with his daughter, Hailey.
John was everything a lonely woman could want. He was attentive, sent lots of text messages and e-cards and even called Annette’s cell phone. He even said he was a millionaire.
Everything was fine until John said the customs agents at the airport in Nigeria confiscated his luggage for a week containing his $45,000 in travelers’ checks, he told Annette. He just needed $1,300 to get him and his daughter by for a week. Annette didn’t think twice about helping the man of her dreams.
But John’s situation worsened by the day after that. His luggage was stolen, his daughter was kidnapped, they were ambushed by thugs and by the end of it all in June, Annette had wiped out her life savings by wiring $36,300 – not to mention $733 in wire transfer fees—to Nigeria.
John kept pushing until she had nothing left to give, said Annette’s brother, Warren, who spoke on the condition that he and his sister’s full identities would not be published for fear of shaming their family. Warren spoke for Annette because she was too embarrassed to be interviewed by ConsumerAffairs.com over the phone.
In saved chats Annette provided, John wooed her by calling her cutesy names and making promises of a life together. Despite his terrible grammar and her hesitancy later in their relationship, she still gave him everything he wanted.
“Honey,i just wanted you to know the sitaution here is getting worse and i’ve negotiated with the man that brought me back to Africa,” John wrote. “He said i should bring the sum of $2600 before i would be able to sign the document belonging to my house. ... Honey i know i’m causing you alot of stress but i want to promise you this problem i’m facing here will end in time. ... I want to spend the rest of my life with you and Hailey.”
He repeatedly promised he would pay her back in full with interest.
John made repeated comments about “God” and “going to church.”
God will provide
“I believe the almighty God will see both of us through,” he wrote.
When she balked at his requests, John would say, “If you don’t give me the money, it means you don’t love me,” Warren said.
Although Annette’s case may be the most extreme, it’s not the first. ConsumerAffairs.com has received at least 20 complaints from consumers who fell or nearly fell for scammers they met on online dating sites.
“I met someone whom I thought was special and he turned out to be a con artist from Nigeria who asked me for $300,” Minerva of Long Beach, Calif. wrote. That was not an isolated incidence. “These predators contacted me about eight different times on Match.com, but I learned from the first one.”
In October 2006 ConsumerAffairs.com published the story of Eduard of Mantua, N.J. who wired $13,000 to a woman in France he met online.
Mark Brooks, editor of the Internet dating publication, OnlinePersonalsWatch.com and a consultant for the industry, said every dating Web site has problems with scammers from all over the world.
“This is organized crime,” Brooks said. “This is not necessarily individuals out there. They are targeting lots of different industries, but idating is one of them. They have it down to a science – knowing what threshold people will take.”
Organized crime
Many of these scammers work together to create enormous fraud rings and share data on how best to scam people, said Scott Olson, vice president of marketing for iovation, a company that tracks computers so that Web sites can block devices that have a history of being connected with fraud.
“We’ve seen fraud rings that have hundreds of accounts per device that they basically are repeating their scams over and over again with many different people,” Olson said. “These are organized fraud rings that do this as a big business. They have a formula very much like telemarketing where they have a script.”
Brooks said he has spoken with many consumers who have been the victim of fraud on Internet dating sites.
“You look at these cases and you think ‘how could anybody be daft enough to part with so much money?’ But one only needs to talk to these victims one on one to realize that these are vulnerable people and these people open up their hearts and minds to meeting new people and trusting Internet dating sites with these very precious things,” Brooks said.
Scammers sometimes take several months to develop relationships before they start asking for money, Brooks said.
“They’re very good at pulling on the heartstrings,” Brooks said. “They want to get as much emotional connection with their victim as quickly as possible so they can convert them to whatever scam they want to. The main thing is that they want to open up the wallet as soon as possible and as soon as they have the wallet open for any amount ... then they know they can extend that and they can keep upping the ante.”
Besides Nigeria, Brooks said Russia is also on the cutting edge of online date site fraud.
“The males tend to fall for the picture of the beautiful Russian woman and they get to the stage that they want to fly her into the country, she can’t buy a ticket on her side ... so he’ll spring a thousand plus dollars to fly her from Russia, (he waits) at the airport and no one shows up,” Brooks said. “That’s a very common scam.”
Eharmony.com’s vice president of marketing, Fiona Posell, said the company is not responsible for any money its consumers lose to scammers that Eharmony.com matches them up with.
“We are very clear with our users, but ultimately it’s their responsibility and with many things, finding a relationship is an emotional experience and judgment can be clouded and that’s why we tell them to follow the guidelines we give them,” Possell said.
According to Eharmony.com’s Web site, customers should avoid those who:
• Ask for money
• Ask inappropriate questions
• Want to speed up the pace beyond the user’s comfort level
• Tell stories with inconsistencies, some which may sound grandiose
• Give vague answers to specific questions
• Urge consumers to compromise their principles
• Constantly blame others for troubles in his or her life
• Insist on getting overly close, overly fast
• Ask for the user’s login or password information
Eharmony.com relies on its network of 20 million users to turn in those who break the rules so representatives can remove them, Posell said.
In the case of “John,” Eharmony.com discovered he was using a stolen credit card 15 days after he signed up and notified Annette three days later on March 14, three days before she wired John the first loan of $1,300, Posell wrote in an e-mail.
“This is a very unfortunate, very unusual case and we feel really bad about it,” Posell said.
No background checks
Eharmony.com clearly states on its Web site that it does not perform background checks.
“There is no way to do that with complete certainty that it can be done in a way that wouldn’t convey to our users some sort of safety net that we can’t provide,” Posell said. “It’s very hard to perform a background check on an individual to the extent that you would want to. We are very clear that we don’t do that.”
Some Web sites do offer background checks, but Brooks agreed with Posell that most background checks would be costly with little increase in safety.
“They inspire a false sense of security, they don’t really work that well and they kind of cost a lot,” Brooks said.
A very basic background check costs about $10, Brooks said but warned that most scammers would still be able to get around that layer of security.
“If you did a real background check that actually did sophisticated phone verification and friend verification and other things like that, it would be so cost prohibitive the industry couldn’t even exist,” Brooks said.
Everyone ConsumerAffairs.com interviewed for this story said consumers should never give any money to anyone they meet online and that’s why Warren said he doesn’t completely blame Eharmony.com for what happened to Annette.
“Ultimately, it’s my sister’s fault,” Warren said. “I believe people should take personal responsibility. Maybe (Eharmony.com) was a bit too lax, but at the end of the day, we should all be grown ups. ... We should be smart enough, mature enough and wise enough not to fall for these things.”
I’ve thought for a long time that it would be the money that gay people have to spend that would be the key to unlock the proverbial closet. Gay folks, particularly gay male couples, have a lot of money to get rid of—just think about it: Usually two wage earners, both men, who tend to get paid more than women, and most often, no financial responsibility for children. Gay male couples can be economic powerhouses, and just look at ads in the New York Times to see how the tonier businesses are going after their bank accounts.
This article below spotlights businesses that are leaving gay money on the table, eHarmony being number one. eHarmony may be getting enough straight dollars to pooh pooh potential gay clients, but in this economic downturn, no markets can be ignored.
What I don’t like about this article is the use of the word “cater.” The word implies “giving special treatment to” and that is just what the political right tries to portray gays as trying to get: Special treatment. It is not special treatment to get the same service—or rights—as anyone else. The dollars may be gay ones, but they are worth exactly the same whether a gay or straight person spends them, and the money is indistinguishable once it is spent.
Homosexuals’ Money Is No Good Here
Some Businesses Don’t Cater to Gays, Lesbians at a Cost to the Bottom Line
By CLOE SHASHA
June 19, 2008 —
Some businesses still don’t cater to homosexuals, ignoring a potentially lucrative source of revenue, says University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee economist Keith A. Bender.
One of the most well-known examples is eHarmony.com, even as California, the country’s most populated state, began performing same-sex marriages this week. The online dating Web site bills itself as a provider of what it calls unique measurements for compatibility that, according to a representative, do not cater to same-sex partnering.
“The research is based on six Ph.D. psychologists and 29 variables for compatibility called the compatibility matching system,” said David D., an eHarmony representative who refused to give his full name.
The Pasadena, Calif.-based site, which began in 2000, says it serves about 20 million members across the United States, Canada and Australia.
On the sexual orientation issue, “It is false to say eHarmony discriminates against gays or lesbians,” the company said in a statement. “Nothing precludes us from providing same-sex matching in the future. It’s just not a service we offer now.”
The Web site’s measurements for matches were developed by Neil Clark Warren, who says that eHarmony is the first online dating service to use relationship science to pair its singles.
Bender, the Wisconsin economist, believes that the Web site eHarmony and other companies could be more profitable if they offered their services to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.
“These companies are cutting out a certain segment of the population that they could be getting revenue from,” Bender said. “Statistics I’ve heard say that around 10 percent of the population expresses some homosexual tendencies. One way to think about these businesses is that companies like eHarmony could increase their revenues by about 10 percent, assuming that the same rates of homosexuals as heterosexuals would take advantage of these kinds of dating sites.”
There are 417,044 pairs of unmarried male partners and 362,823 pairs of unmarried female partners living together in this country, according to a 2006 American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. That does not take into account homosexual singles or married couples.
Robert Lee, the owner and editor of aLoveLinksPlus.com—a dating service directory—said that while some dating Web sites explicitly exclude homosexual singles, others do not make their policies as obvious.
“EHarmony.com is a standout,” Lee said. “But there are also some smaller niche sites that are only for straights, which are not as vigilant in saying you have to be straight to join.”
Some fitness centers, resorts and other services continue to exclude homosexuals as well.
Recent examples include:
In New Mexico, Elaine Huguenin, a professional photographer from Albuquerque, told a lesbian couple in April that she would not photograph them because she only works with straight couples.
In July 2007, Rochester, N.Y., couple Amy and Sarah Monson were refused membership at the Rochester Athletic Club. These two women said that they were in a committed relationship and that they should be allowed to buy a membership.
It took until June 2007 for the University of Virginia to allow same-sex couples to join its gym, according to the Washington Post.
In May 2008, Drs. Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton refused to give infertility treatment to a lesbian couple because of their religious views. One of the patients wanted to be artificially inseminated, and the doctors’ refusal led to a case that reached the Supreme Court.
Clinical Coordinator Christopher Johnson of the Gay Men of African Descent advocacy group says these practices are offensive and discriminatory.
“In terms of a social decision, it keeps people who are of the lesbian-gay-transsexual-bisexual community outside of society where they can’t connect to one another through those institutions or those businesses,” he said.
“That is discrimination. Although society has made some progress, there is still a lot of work to do to make people know that gay people have rights as well. The decision to have people keep us out of their businesses is unconstitutional.”
But the legal issues are unresolved, said Emma Dickson, a New York attorney.
“There has been discussion about whether sexual orientation is necessarily included under our civil rights laws,” she said. “As we are moving towards recognizing gay rights as civil rights, we could make a parallel between not serving a black person in a diner because of his or her race and not being able to participate in a dating Web site because of one’s sexual orientation.”
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
Now, if the following piece isn’t enough to put you off those millionaire sites, I don’t know what is. This guy was able to swindle eight women by posing as a music mogul. It seems pretty clear that these women assumed that the guy was telling the truth. Likely, that he had presented himself as rich and that these women were looking for rich (since both were listed on MillionaireMatch) blinded these ladies. The guy was HOMELESS. They sent the money to his ex-wife’s address! A simple background search would have alerted a wise single.
I’m working all the time to help singles avoid being scammed. Take a look at my One Page $1 Wonders ... Not only will you be better able to protect yourself with my concise, digestible reports on scamming, but also, you get a 25% discount from my favorite background checking source, AssetSearchPros.com
Homeless man gets more than $100,000 from online conquests
By Sofia Diogo Mateus
Last updated: 1:17 PM BST 05/06/2008
A homeless man posing as a millionaire was arrested for scamming 13 women for more than $100,000.
Through the website MillionaireMatch.com, Paul Kruger, 50, met and convinced eight women that he was a Grammy-nominated music mogul who had worked with Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, amongst others.
He met the other five alleged victims through one of the women he met on the website.
Later he said needed money for a CD and DVD manufacturing investment, for which the women sent him a total $102,000.
One of the victims was even shown a false stock reports, the court heard, since the operation apparently involved group investment in stock options.
“He did have a good story,” said one victim, a sales manager in Costa Mesa, Calif., who records show gave him $10,000.
The website, which describes itself as the “number one dating site for succesful singles and admirers”, is free and unregulated and anyone can join and claim to be a millionaire, simply by saying that they win $150,000 or more annually.
Steve Kasper, the marketing vice president of Successfulmatch.com, the parent company of MillionaireMatch.com, both bases in Toronto, said it was up to users to self-police.
“We do tell all of our members on all of our sites that you have to take precautions when you’re on the Internet and looking at people that you’re going to meet,” he said.
Charges were filed in Souderton, Pennsylvania, because that is where he told women to send him money; it is also the address of the home of his ex-wife, authorities said.
The money was used to fuel his gambling addiction, since he had various VIP casino accounts, authorities said.
Mr Krueger declined to comment to reporters as he was arraigned on charges of theft by unlawful taking or disposition, theft by deception, deceptive or fraudulent business practices and Pennsylvania Securities Act violations.
The Californian woman said she was willing to be a witness but that the experience had not put her off online dating.
“You have to be careful whereever you go,” said the woman, who is in her 30s. “You could get scammed meeting someone at a bar. It doesn’t matter. You just have to do your due diligence, and I didn’t.”
Barry Schwartz in “the Paradox of Choice” wrote about the phenomenon the following article describes, the dilemma of having too many choices. Dating sites, the big ones particularly, can overwhelm you with numbers of possible mates. Developing good search techniques is key to keeping overwhelm at bay. What I think the researchers miss here is while getting the numbers of choices down to reasonable is important, having a large pool to draw from is preferable. Particularly when you are older and probably choosier. I’d go for Match or Yahoo! any day. The more to pick from, the more likely a good match.
Online Dating: Where Technology and Evolution Collide
When searching for a soul mate, you might think that the more options, the better. But the rise of technology – notably, the Internet – has thrown a wedge in that perception.
The Internet offers us an abundance of options when selecting everything from bicycles to mates that is unprecedented in human history. Although we may think that the extra options are good, new research has shown that we may be more satisfied when choosing from fewer options – and we may not even be cognitively equipped to correct this misconception.
Throughout most of human history, we’ve had significantly fewer options for choosing a mate, and so we would strongly welcome any additional options when they came along. For instance, when our neocortex was developing, in part to deal with social networks, the average human group consisted of roughly 150 individuals. Healthy group members of reproductive age of the opposite sex would total about 35 – slim pickings, by the Internet’s standards.
Because we developed in this kind of social environment, we have a tendency to desire ever more options. That’s why, for example, people are enticed by dating Web site Match.com’s offer of “millions of possibilities.” But, as a team of researchers has shown in a recent study, this abundance of options may not make the chooser feel or choose any better than a pool of just a half dozen or so options. Psychologist Alison Lenton from the University of Edinburgh, Barbara Fasolo from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and cognitive scientist Peter Todd from Indiana University have presented their findings on this subject in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.
As the researchers explain, people tend to anticipate that they’ll feel better about “shopping for a mate” when there is a large number of options. However, in actuality, people feel equally good when faced with few as opposed to many options. The scientists performed two experiments demonstrating this clash between anticipation and experience.
In their first experiment, the researchers asked 88 participants (with an average age of 22) what they thought was the ideal number of potential mates to choose from, with a range between 1 and 5,000 options. Participants judged each set (very small to very large) of potential mates on four criteria: expected difficulty of making a selection, anticipated satisfaction with their decision, anticipated regret after making their decision, and expected enjoyment of the selection process.
On average, participants predicted that they would be overall most satisfied when selecting from about 20-50 possible mates. So, in the second experiment, the researchers investigated how satisfied people were when choosing a mate from this range compared with the less favored fewer options. Interestingly, they found that participants who chose from 20 personal profiles had roughly similar experiences compared with participants who had to pick from just four profiles. Also, participants’ actual experiences when faced with four options were significantly better than anticipated.
As the researchers summarized, “the expected preference for the larger set-size in terms of more enjoyment and satisfaction and less regret did not materialize.” Instead, there is a significant mismatch between what people think they will feel and what they actually feel, the team concluded.
Misjudgment of an optimal number of options has been observed in several other situations besides choosing a mate. Generally, the greatest disadvantages when having more options include being more frustrated by the complexity of the selection process, sometimes not making a selection at all, and experiencing decreased satisfaction and increased regret after making a selection. (When you’re faced with a million possibilities, you have a much smaller chance of picking the “right” one than if you had to pick from just four.)
The study also offers suggestive evidence that people aren’t paying very close attention to all of the various information provided in the profiles when they have many profiles to sift through and, thus, they might be missing out on interesting/suitable potential mates in this choice context.
“The information overload result was well known to consumer researchers since the ‘70s,” Fasolo told PhysOrg.com. “But the context was always consumer – a bit artificial and more ‘novel’ in an evolutionary sense. It was not at all obvious that the same result would occur in the more naturalistic context of mate choice. True, we are examining a more modern mate choice world – not sequential encounters in the jungle, but simultaneous fast-paced encounters with men zooming from one café table to the next – to which humans are relatively less accustomed (though lekking animals are). So, all in all, I would say that the fact that greater variety backfired even in the context of mate choice was non-obvious.”
Researchers have previously tried to explain our misjudgment of option number in evolutionary terms. At the time our brains were evolving to deal with making decisions, humans rarely had too many options to deal with. Therefore, we’re not adapted to deal with the excessive numbers of choices available today. The Internet, which has no physical space limitations, presents us with a problem that never existed for our ancestors. (As the researchers note, about 1% of the 600,000,000 people who use the Internet visit online dating sites.)
After millions of years of seeking more variety under conditions where variety was relatively limited, it may be very difficult to persuade people that more isn’t always better. For one thing, people may not have a point of comparison where they can experience the benefits of fewer options. Also, recognition of the disadvantages may not come until much later on.
Further, even if we do learn from our experiences, it may not matter much. Research has shown that people’s expectations, rather than previous actual experiences, play a larger role in determining whether they will participate in the same event in the future.
In light of these findings, the researchers suggest that Web designers of online dating sites consider this contrast and try to appease people’s desire for more options while making it easier to narrow down large sets. Currently, some sites do the opposite: when a search results yields fewer than 50 (or more, in some cases) profiles, the site encourages users to broaden their search criteria. Instead, the researchers encourage developers to keep in mind that they must balance people’s desire for more choices with the knowledge that giving people such choices may lead them to evaluate potential mates in a more superficial way.
“I find it interesting (and a bit worrying) that the underestimation of the costs of too much choice which we (and other consumer researchers alike) find plagues not just the daters, but the designers of dating Web sites,” Fasolo said. “If we want people to make sensible choices, researchers need to ‘nudge’ (to say it with Thaler and Sunstein) dating Web site designers towards simpler and more manageable Web sites.”
More information: Lenton, Alison P.; Fasolo, Barbara; and Todd, Peter M. “’Shopping’ for a Mate: Expected versus Experienced Preferences in Online Mate Choice.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Vol. 51, No. 2, June 2008.
Here’s a piece for the gay community, though as we know, HIV is an issue for gays and straights. It introduced me to terms I hadn’t heard before—do you know what a pozzer is? Well, read and find out. But the sites listed offer a real service to an important and under served population.
HIV+ Dating Sites Offer an Alternative
by Ambrose Aban
EDGE Contributor
Friday Jun 27, 2008
“Poz-only” dating sites have finally arrived online. Their owners are hoping they help people infected with HIV meet others without the fear and exclusion they might encounter on other gay dating sites. Even more, they hope to foster a sense of belonging within a larger HIV-positive community.
The focus is one of being out and proud as an HIV-positive gay man--and away from the stigma of HIV. The sites also give the men a forum to talk about it. The hope is that, when the secrecy and shame of it is removed, HIV will lose some of its power over their lives.
The sites include BeOneCity, launched recently in Los Angeles, PositiveSingles, PozitiveLiving, PozMatch.com, PositivePersonals--all personals web sites for HIV+ people.
Angelenos Peter Brook and David Purdue created BeOneCity. Brooks says his site fills the void he found online when he seroconverted not so long ago. “We intend to expand our online services to provide a global HIV positive ’sister’ site within a year that will serve the heterosexual positive community,” Brook says.
BeOneCity isn’t your typical dating or meet-up site. For one thing, it offers relevant news. It also aims to be a forum for pozzers. But like the others, it is above all a relationship site catering to those living with the virus.
“We bridge the gap between the myriad non-profit and for-profit HIV organizations, all working against HIV,” Brook says. “We put a lot of effort into supporting other groups and partnering with them. This offers us a real-world focus for us and for our members, and gives us a community experience in the real world--something often neglected from our life with HIV.”
Why Self-Serosort?
The policy among many gay men remains “don’t ask, don’t tell” on dating sites. General gay sites like Manhunt also currently offers serosorting for its members as well. “We know being able to serosort is valuable to many of our HIV-positive members,” Manhunt’s new chief marketing officer told EDGE.
Robert Brandon Sandor founded Poz4Poz, a series of parties for pozzers a decade ago and the new HIV-UB2.Net (http://www.hiv-ub2.net). He has been a strong advocate for serosorting among gay men.
“Years ago, those who tested HIV-positive had few places to turn for support,” he says. “Fortunately, much has changed. We know more about HIV now. No one is going to be infected with HIV if they have sex with partners who are sharing the same serostatus.”
Many organizations and HIV experts have not embraced serosorting. Although serosorting is entirely based on the foundation of trust, it is still a good way to reduce (if not stop) the spread of HIV to negative men, Sandor argues.
The men who have developed these sites say they are driven by a strong social mission. They believe that their sites can be unifying places where they can mobilize together to help stop HIV. Part of the reason for such sites now is the movement away from HIV from an eventual death sentence to a far more manageable condition.
This is true for straight men living with HIV as well as gay men. Donald Johnson, who founded PositiveLiving.com in 1997 in Austin, Texas, shortly after he was diagnosed with HIV, created his site at a time when there was no way to meet other pozzers.
Like other most online dating sites, Johnson’s site lets users post statistics from height to education, as well a paragraph describing what they are looking for in a relationship. The site also includes advertisements from people looking for roommates or potential friends. If two people decide they want to meet, it is up to them to exchange phone numbers and addresses through e-mail. So far, the free Web service averages 100,000 unique visitors per month, many of them international users.
For Johnson, the success of the site is especially sweet because he met his new wife after she posted a personal ad.
A Safe Space
Chad Morrett, who created and runs PositivePersonals out of Seattle, said the Internet provides a safe, secure place to meet others living with a disease that can be difficult to discuss in person. “When I was diagnosed, I didn’t know anyone else who was HIV-positive,’’ Morrett told a Florida newspaper, recently. “It was a little frightening.’’
AIDS advocates say many people prefer to use online dating services because they provide a sense of control. Also, those on other dating sites might be scared off by the disease--or tell others, says Terje Anderson, director of the National Association of People With AIDS.
“If you do tell someone you’re HIV-positive and do it face to face in a small town, you don’t know what that person will do with the information,” adds Anderson. On these sites, they can put their HIV status out there with an ad, but still be anonymous.
PositivesDating, founded by best friends, Brandon Koechlin and Paul Graves, both 24, in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005, offers free and paid memberships. Visitors can log in to the site’s chat rooms and search through thousands of available member profiles. Paid memberships allow users to keep in contact via e-mail and see who’s been viewing their profiles.
The founders told Entrepreneur, that during the first four months, PositivesDating operated as a free site to build membership. They also sent out informational postcards to support groups all over the country, such as AIDS Project Los Angeles. PositivesDating has close to 2,500 paid members. Monthly memberships start around $14 a month.
As on dating sites like eHarmony, users can take a personality profile survey, after which they receive an analysis of their personality type and what kind of partner would best suit them. They also receive a list of possible member matches based on their characteristics and personality.
These sites tell you that testing positive is not the end of your life or the end of your chances at love. They certainly tell you that it is not the end of your great sex life. The sites are saying that testing positive is, while a tough thing to hear and a tough challenge to overcome, also offers a new beginning.
In fact, the sites’ growing popularity could lead to a battle against the non-serosorting sites like Manhunt and Adam4Adam.
The sites can make the claim to be fighting AIDS in other ways BeOneCity donates 20 percent of proceeds to charities, the American Foundation for AIDS Research and Keep a Child Alive.
Brooks considers it his mission to help educate people to the fact that HIV is not a death sentence. He became HIV positive fairly recently. Although he was gay, he was fairly naïve about the disease. He thought of HIV as a disease that would never happen to him.
“I was simply too smart and too careful to get it,” he says. “I realized my criteria for understanding HIV and indeed understanding myself, was quite lacking. Very quickly I realized that I was ’blessed’ to have contracted HIV in a new era when it is no longer aligned with death and decay; rather it is now a chronic and fairly manageable disease and thankfully, I can expect to live a long life.”
BeOneCity’s articles and links are selected to help people cope with HIV. “You Are Not Alone”, for example, was recently published for the newly diagnosed. Authors Jim Lewis and Michael Slocum, formerly of BodyPositive (http://www.bodypositive.com), discuss the difference between HIV and AIDS.
All the sites also share a common love of sharing and listening.
Finding out that you are infected can be overwhelming. Testing HIV-positive has led some people to quit their jobs, quickly write out their wills, and say goodbye to their friends and family, only to discover that they aren’t sick and will probably live for many years to come.
But one of the truths of joining these sites after you’ve been infected with HIV is that once you know, you can never not know again. Life will always be different. You may be experiencing great feelings of loss about this. You may feel that certain areas of your life are now in the hands of doctors, insurance companies, or symptoms. This can make you feel as though you have less control over your own life and may cause you incredible anxiety. And you’re far from alone: Today, over 1 million Americans are infected with HIV.
“A lot of people afflicted with HIV become social outcasts,” Brook says. Maybe that’s why BeOneCity and other sites have attracted members from as far away as India and Africa. Membership encompasses men and women gay and straight, aged 25 to 70 and from several ethnic backgrounds.
“There is no need for you to handle your loneliness and fear by yourself, and it is probably a mistake even to try to do it alone,” Brook says. “Just hearing how someone else has adjusted to living with the virus can be enough to help you realize that life is still good, that you can still have love and laughter.”
If there is one complaint, it comes from Sandor. Ever the activist, he believes that these sites should discuss serosorting itself. “There are three forms of serosorting,” he says, “and two involve safe sex--but none of the sites stress the importance of serosorting.”
“BeOneCity is a nice site and I understand its usefulness, but I really wish sites like these weren’t necessary,” says Nir Zilberman, the founder of Just One LA (http://www.justonela.com). “As gay men and women, we are all one community. I don’t understand why we need to divide ourselves into smaller segments”
Brook obviously disagrees: “We offer a safe place to unite together. At BeOneCity we can be ourselves, without the judgment or the stigma we often experience from the outside world because of our HIV status.”
Research shows positive guys want to date, hang out and hook-up with other positive guys. But Brook disagrees with Sandor’s straight-down-the-line position on serosorting.
“It takes the disclosure, the worry and any legal issues out of the equation and it provides us with the assurance that there is no chance for us to spread HIV,” Brook says. “We do not suggest that positive guys should not be with negative guys. I have had negative boyfriends myself, and you cannot stop love or lust with your serostatus--nor should you.”
This article below is a bit misnamed, because it’s about singles who have never been married before meeting up and marrying when they are over 45, not about singles over 45 finding love. We know that the over-45’s have been finding love, but it is interesting to see that older never-marrieds are saying the vows. I have viewed never marrieds over 45 or 50 with some suspicion, particularly if the proposed partner has been coupled or married before. Long time singles have not had the chance to learn what is only possible to learn when you are grappling with a real partner in real time and space. I suppose if neither partner has been married or attached before, then they are on fairly similar footing (little relationship experience). The positives are that career concerns, money, and the question of children are pretty much decided by then. What do you think?
More singles finding love after age 45
By SHARON JAYSON
USA TODAY
When she was still single in her 40s, Debra Siegel made a list of qualities for her yet-elusive perfect husband: honest, family-oriented, a hard worker and physically fit.
But the years passed and the list went unfulfilled.
“When I hit 50, the bells went off,” she says. “I didn’t want to be alone for the rest of my life.”
That’s when she took what she calls “drastic action.” Her future husband, Dan Furlin, was of a similar mind.
“I didn’t think marriage was in the picture for me,” he says. “Once you hit 50, you don’t want to go through the rest of life without your soul mate. I was a little bit more aggressive.”
Both went the online dating route and met within months. The Dunedin, Fla., couple are both fitness-conscious and vegetarian. They were also both natives of New York state, and each had lived in Los Angeles. They moved to Florida — Furlin to Clearwater and Siegel to Orlando — before meeting online. They married in 2003.
Siegel-Furlin, 56, and Furlin, 58, are among a small but growing group of older adults marrying for the first time after age 45. Years ago, these older singles would have been known as the “spinster” neighbor or the confirmed “bachelor” friend.
But now, longer life spans mean 50 is the new 30 — there’s plenty of life ahead.
That, coupled with the baby boomer “never-wanna-be-old” attitude and a greater number of aging singles in the population, makes it more likely that those who want to marry actually will.
A USA TODAY analysis of Census records of Americans ages 45-55 shows that the percentage of those who said they had never been married in 2006 had doubled since 1990, and the percentage of those who were currently married had dropped by 9 percent.
It’s fairly difficult to get a real handle on this segment of the singles population because no federal entity tracks first marriages at specific ages. The closest count is the median age at first marriage, which in 2006 (the latest year for which data are available) was at its highest point: men at 27.5 and women at 25.5, according to the U.S. Census.
A tally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is available just for a 20-year period, 1970 to 1990, shows that in 1990, only 0.4 percent of women and 0.6 percent of men married for the first time at ages 45 to 49.
According to the most recent data from the federal Survey of Income and Program Participation, which includes marriage, 13 percent of those who wed in 2003 were 45 and older.
Internet dating has largely made it possible for many of these later-life first marriages. It’s only in recent years that some sites have started monitoring that demographic.
Among them is Yahoo Personals, based in Santa Clara, Calif., which reports a 33 percent increase from January 2006 to November 2007 among users ages 45 and over who say they have never been married.
Since 2005, Match.com reports an increase of almost 10 percent of new members 45 and older and who have never been married; these now make up almost 14 percent of its members.
New patterns, new people
“As people get older, they tend to find themselves in fairly established patterns, so the ability to meet new people goes down over time. They’ve got to do something new if they want to meet different people,” says Craig Wax of Dallas, senior vice president and general manager for Match.com for North America.
Brian Lebowitz, 57, and Lise Goldman, 53, were married earlier this month. They met online almost two years ago and found out at the time that they lived within blocks of each other. Lebowitz, an attorney, lives in Washington, D.C. Goldman, who works in economic development, now lives in suburban Chevy Chase, Md.
Lebowitz says his job and his hobby as a book collector took up most of his free time. But when he turned 55, he decided to give online dating a shot.
“I’d pretty much given up, but then thought I would give it a try and see what it was like,” he says. “Some people — myself included — would be more comfortable starting off communication by e-mail rather than going up to somebody at a party. It’s a less threatening way to go about it.”
Goldman says she always wanted to be married. She had been engaged twice — once in her mid-20s and again more than a decade ago — but she says it just wasn’t right until she met Lebowitz, whom she says is intelligent and kindhearted.
“There are wonderful people still out there who are hiding away in their work,” she says. “He’s an international lawyer, so he needs to work evenings a lot. That’s been one of the blessings that kept him away from the dating scene.”
Dating Web sites have been reinventing themselves since online dating took off in the mid-1990s. They’ve refined their methods, largely emphasizing a more scientific approach, which often includes compatibility and personality testing.
Others have focused on niche marketing, including Spark Networks, whose online dating sites include JDate for Jewish singles, as well as CatholicMingle.com, InterracialSingles.net, BlackSingles.com, LatinSinglesConnection.com and PrimeSingles.net. That site, as well as lavalifePRIME and BOOMj.com, is among those offering social networking for these older singles.
|
|
