geThe traditional social institutions that people used to rely on to meet potential partners have broken down. People move around more, between cities and countries. Local communities are less tight-knit, families more scattered and membership of things like churches has dwindled. Your chances of meeting your future partner at the local dance on a Saturday night are not so good.
What’s more, or perhaps partly due to these factors, the average age at which people marry has been steadily rising for decades. Not so long ago it was the norm for people to marry straight out of high school or university; the average age in New Zealand for a first marriage is now 28 for women and 30 for men.
There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence, too, that we all lead busy, busy lives. Our work lives are so all-consuming that socialising takes a back seat. And it’s just possible that we’re all spending so much time on the Internet that social interactions have moved online.
The stigma attached to looking for a partner has also lessened as it’s become more mainstream. In December 2007, there were almost 46,000 visits to New Zealand’s two major dating sites, NZDating (www.nzdating.co.nz) and FindSomeone (www.findsomeone.co.nz), according to Nielsen Online Market Intelligence. The average age of people registered on NZDating is 32; on FindSomeone it’s 39.
FindSomeone now operates in Australia and Canada as well as locally. It’s owned by TradeMe, and was launched in 2001 after the sister of the man who built it came out of a long-term relationship at 35 and wanted to meet new people. In an astonishing show of brotherly devotion, her brother built FindSomeone. She met her future husband on the site and now has two children with him.
FindSomeone is targeted at people like this, says its commercial director, Mike O’Donnell: people looking for a genuine relationship. Its target demographic is 30- to 55-year-olds.
“They’re often people that may have been dead focused on a career and wake up one day and they’re 36 and single and all their friends might have settled down, and they think, ‘Crikey, I better get onto this’,” O’Donnell says. Its second demographic is people 40-plus who’ve come out of long-term relationships or marriages and haven’t dated for a long time. “FindSomeone provides a pretty convenient and safe way to start that journey again,” he says.
It’s free to register on the site, which means creating a profile, adding a photo if you wish and being able to see others’ profiles. If you’re interested in someone, you can send them a ‘smile’. If you want to contact them you need to sign up to a Gold membership, which costs $20 a month. FindSomeone is a stringently moderated site, with a compliance team that works 24x7, vetting user photos and keeping an eye out for inappropriate behaviour, taking action where it’s needed.
NZDating, which launched in 2001 and is owned by NZCity, relies more heavily on moderation by its members. An NZDating spokesperson told NetGuide that the community is “self-policing, in a big way. Our community is so protective of itself that very, very quickly if anyone is doing something they’re not supposed to be doing, they get reported.” So is the site moderated? “We have people that respond to member reports,” is his reply.
The site’s free service includes private messaging and chat. Gold membership gives your profile more visibility on the site and more levels of chat and messaging, and costs $12.95, $24.95 for three months, $39.95 for six and $59.95 for a year.
NZDating’s target membership is younger than FindSomeone’s, and it also caters to people who aren’t looking for something long-lasting. You might imagine if you’re new to the site that this is, in fact, all it’s about. NZ Dating told NetGuide that the sexual hookups level of its site was not accessible unless users specifically signed up to see it: “We’ve built a system whereby you can control more tightly the types of people or the types of content that you’re interested in seeing. For example, by default when you sign up it’s not possible to see any of that stuff. It’s only if you explicitly turn it on.”
Yet, without signing up to anything, the first thing I see when I select a geographic area is men looking for sex, with often quite explicit photos and profile intros. Charming. I can’t read their full profiles without joining up and choosing this capability, but I already know more about them than I want to.
There are other local dating sites, but most unfortunately seem to have this seamier side too - couples looking for couples, distasteful profiles, suggestive photos. Dating Buzz (www.datingbuzz.co.nz) would appear to be an exception. Our advice to those looking for romance online is to thoroughly check out a site first and make sure its members are looking for the same thing as you.
NetGuide doesn’t recommend using Internet dating sites for casual sex. However, although this is clearly a popular service on NZDating, we have also spoken to people who are now happily settled down with someone they met on that site. And there are rules in place there to ensure people have to communicate at least twice before sharing contact details.

Staying safe
Both FindSomeone and NZDating have detailed advice about how to stay safe when you’re dating online. This is mostly commonsense stuff, but it’s surprising the risks people are prepared to take in their search for a partner.
*Susan is a young, single mother who rarely got to go out in the evening. Most of her friends were married, with young kids. Former work colleagues were using online dating and seemed to be having a lot of fun, so Susan joined up and dated three men. The first man she went out with was fun, the next was adventurous and the third cute and charming. She started corresponding with him by instant messaging and soon fell for him.
“As it was happening I remember thinking, this is weird; how can you fall in love with someone you’ve never met? By the time I met him in person I was already quite hooked in. And then meeting him it felt odd, but I adjusted quite quickly.”
After speaking on the phone once, they met up. Susan thought he was “lovely” and began travelling to the city where he lived to spend weekends with him. Until one night they were chatting in a bar and he revealed that he’d been convicted of manslaughter when he was younger.
“It really shocked me,” says Susan. “I thought, ‘Here I am, a mum. He’s met my girls and been into my home. I felt really ashamed and stupid for allowing that to happen. It was a big wake-up call and I thought, ‘I‘m not doing this anymore. My number one priority is to keep my kids safe’.”
Susan broke it off immediately. Two years later she is engaged to someone she met at his workplace, “where you can get an accurate gauge on the person,” she says.

The rise of social networking
The phenomenal growth in New Zealand of sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo has likely contributed to the fall-off in numbers at the main dating Web sites in the past two years.
In January, Nielsen Online reported that “17% of Internet users who have created a profile on a social networking site have used the site to find someone to date. Nineteen percent have used it to flirt with someone”. Its research shows the most popular social networking site in New Zealand is OldFriends (also run by TradeMe), followed by Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.
*Claire (23) got to know her current boyfriend, a workmate’s friend, on Facebook after meeting him once at a party. She looked him up on the site, invited him to be her ‘friend’ and sent him a message. They chatted for a couple of weeks before going on a date.
“It gave us a chance to talk to each other first and when we did meet up we already knew a bit about each other and what our interests were,” Claire says. She’d been using social networking sites for two years, starting with MySpace, followed by Facebook and Bebo, and says they are a great place to make friends.
“I think it is easier to chat on line to people than on a phone. I tend to check Facebook in the morning before I start work and it is easier to send a message to a friend rather than calling them. I also think it is easier to ask someone out through sending them a message rather then asking them out in person,” she says.
Whether or not romance is part of your plan on social networking sites, you should take note of what NetSafe, the Web site of the Internet Safety Group, has to say about safety. Keep your profile private, only accept as friends people whom you know offline, and don’t post private details about yourself. There is absolutely no reason to include things like your home phone number and address, especially if you are intent on building up a big network of ‘friends’.
“Wherever you have a digital footprint, keep a really close eye on what it is that you are providing to the world. Because it is the world,” says Rachel Harrison, a spokesperson for NetSafe. “It is very easy to forget that in fact anybody around the world can see it.”
Harrison says social networking sites can appear to have an element of assurance, in that they’re often people you know to some degree offline. It’s still crucial that you think carefully about how much you want to make public about yourself.
“It’s a bit like any kind of chat forum,” Harrison says. “These sites work because you’re sharing information and communicating, but just keep an eye on certain things that you shouldn’t share: your mobile number, your address, your phone number. If you’re young, your full name’s not a very clever thing to share.”

Losing the beer goggles
Both NZ Dating and FindSomeone have a lower age limit of 18, although there is no foolproof way to ensure that members are 18+. People often make analogies between meeting on a dating site and meeting in a bar, where you’re at least likely to be asked for proof of ID.
*Christine approached online dating when she moved back to Auckland after being overseas for a long time and wanted to increase her social circle. “I decided to try it because I believed it allows you to meet someone while they are sober and beer goggles aren’t being worn. There is a chance you’ll meet their true self, not their larger-than-life persona which you’ll meet at bars.”
Nielsen Online logged 188,698 visitors to FindSomeone in December 2007 and 269,535 to NZDating. There are cyclical patterns throughout the year, according to O’Donnell at FindSomeone, with numbers spiking in January-February and again in the depths of winter. Between July and December, he says, people are busier and the number of social functions they’re attending tends to increase.
If someone contacts you on a dating site, you can check out their profile before responding. You can get to know them, up to a point, before meeting them in real life.
FindSomeone offers psychometric profiling, devised with the aid of a psychologist. If you’re shy about starting conversations but want to engage with someone, the site will help via a questionnaire: what kind of food you like, how you approach social situations such as parties and so on. “It’s a nice sort of halfway house,” says FindSomeone’s Mike O’Donnell.
It also has the added benefit that you are getting to know people from the safety of your living room.
“You could go to a bar or a club and start talking to someone when you’re drunk and get yourself into some pretty tricky situations,” says *Kate (see boxout). “Doing it this way, in the comfort of your own home, you’re nice and safe at home, but you still get to talk to people and suss them out a bit before you actually meet them. It’s a lot safer.”

Meeting face to face
*Jennifer tried online dating after her marriage ended. Her experience of it has been mostly positive and she’s made several friends, but in one case she was harassed by text messages from someone she dated. On another occasion she arranged to meet a man for the first time at her house. “He had other things on his mind,” she says. “I definitely wouldn’t do that again.”
And that’s one basic rule that anybody who is engaged in online dating needs to stick to when you meet someone for the first time: don’t give out your address. Don’t give out your landline number. Tell your friends if you’re going on a date with someone you’ve just met online, and meet them in a public place. Walk, don’t drive. Have a strategy worked out if you decide you want to leave early.
If any of this sounds overly cautious, it’s not. A Huntly man was charged earlier this year with the rape and sexual violation of two women he met on a dating site, and police believe there may be other victims out there he has met through online dating.
Rachel Harrison of NetSafe says people need to be aware that not everyone registering on a dating site is looking for a relationship, and the strategy you use to set up a face-to-face meeting is crucial.
NetSafe is often contacted by people who are being harassed like Jennifer (above) by text, phone calls or email. They’re often people who have decided they are not interested in carrying on the relationship and are having trouble getting their message through.
“What happens then is that often the numbers have been swapped and they’re trying to work out how to stop texts or phone calls from keeping on coming through from that person,” Harrison says.
NetSafe’s site has advice for online daters (tinyurl.com/2s4thn) from interacting online and looking for warning signs from people you’re communicating with, to meeting face to face. It also tells you how to approach online dating in general. We’d recommend it as a must-read before you register on any dating site.
It’s not all negative, either. “If you treat this really carefully and don’t just throw caution to the wind,” says Harrison, “it can be an incredible tool for connecting with all sorts of people with similar interests.”

Getting serious
*Kate (33) was bored one December night and she decided to have a play around on the Internet.
“I was absolutely happy being single. I just thought I’d have a look. I didn’t know what to expect because I hadn’t thought about it too much. It was just a case of having a bit of fun.” Although it was fun she was after, she was instantly put off sites that catered to people wanting one-night stands.
For Kate, new to Auckland, it was a way of meeting new people. Once you start talking about it, she says, you find lots of other people are doing it too.
She had a date with one man, which didn’t go any further. In January, she started chatting online with *Philip. In April they went on their first date. “I liked what I saw. I thought, he’s pretty cool. You’ve already got that common base from talking and emailing. We had quite a lot in common; he goes horse riding and so do I.”
Two years later the couple are engaged and have an eight-month-old daughter.
“It’s all worked out really, really well,” Kate says.
Her advice for other online daters is to choose your site carefully (she used FindSomeone) and approach it in the same way she did - with an open mind.
“Don’t go on looking for your life partner. If you don’t have any expectations, you won’t be disappointed.”

Losing preconceptions
*Anita joined an online dating site simply to play a prank on a friend who had registered there. “At that point I knew a few people who had profiles on dating sites and the general consensus was that most people on those sites are weird, psychotic, stalkers or a combination of those things. After joining myself, I realised my friends were right on the mark,” she says.
Despite stipulating that she was only interested in women, Anita received lots of suggestive messages from men. And despite her negative opinion of dating sites in general, she did in fact meet her current partner online. “If there was ever a time that I was proven dead wrong, that was it,” she says.

Profiling yourself
Before you set up a profile, do as much research as you can. You want to get a balance between narrowing your search and not ruling out someone who is potentially a great match.
Use a recent photo and be honest about yourself, while talking up your good points. Think of things that will make you stand out from everyone else. Stating preferences for long walks on the beach is unlikely to get you much attention because it’s so clichéd.
One prospective dater advertised himself as: “Short, fat, ugly troll. Balding, bad eyesight, bad breath. Seeks kind-hearted, near-sighted woman with no sense of smell. Good sandwich-making skills a plus.” Not the best way of promoting himself, but you can bet he got a few responses from women looking for someone with a sense of humour.

International love
* Martin was at a stage where his social group in California had become too stable and he wasn’t meeting new people. Online dating turned out to be pretty much as he expected, he says, and he was pleasantly surprised to find that the one woman he went on to date offline matched her online personality. “For me it was easy - perfect,” Martin says. “I married her and moved from the US to New Zealand two years later.”

*Some names have been changed. Pictures posed by models.