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Article about best dating sites 2011:
Second Love at First Click. NATALIE FRIEND, a marketing contractor at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., was 65 and twice divorced when she decided to try online dating. “My daughter met her husband,†she explained, “my friend’s son met his wife, my cousin met her husband — all online.†She said she was looking for a “playmate†when she joined SeniorPeopleMeet.com, not husband No.
Click here for Best dating sites 20113. But a couple of months and $14.95 later, she met Mr. Right. Make that Mr. Wright. Frederick Wright, 74, was twice widowed and living in Virginia Beach. He joined SeniorPeopleMeet.com to find a companion who, like him, enjoyed travel and the arts. In October 2009, Ms. Friend met him for dinner. He was a bit older than she desired. But he loved opera. He seemed honest. And he had just sailed his boat around the world. The date lasted six hours. Ten months later, Ms. Friend and Mr. Wright married at the Boxwood Inn in Newport News, Va. “At our age,†she said, “you don’t have much time to waste.†If you think online dating is the domain of the young, maybe it’s time to check in with your mother. Now, people 55 and older are visiting American dating sites more than any other age group — up 39 percent in the last three years, according to the Internet tracking firm Experian Hitwise. The No. 2 group? Singles 45 to 54. According to IBISWorld, a market research firm, and the United States Census Bureau, about 37 percent of people 50 and older are unmarried. And the divorce rate among the 50-plus demographic is high. With so many older Americans unattached, living independently into their later years, and increasingly comfortable using the Internet, they, too, are logging on for
. Natalie and Frederick Wright, who married 10 months after meeting on SeniorPeopleMeet.com. Credit. Kirsten Luce for The New York Times. And they may be better at finding it than their younger cohorts. Dating industry professionals say that singles in their 20s and 30s are typically focused on marriage and starting a family, while older singles (many of whom have been married before) have a more relaxed approach and are careful to pick companions who share their interests. “Baby boomers have been one of the fastest-growing demographics for a lot of online dating companies,†said Caitlin Moldvay, an analyst for IBISWorld. The growth comes at the same time that some younger singles (18 to 34) are moving away from dating sites to social networking sites like Facebook as “a proxy for online dating,†said Bill Tancer, the general manager of global research for Experian Marketing Services. Greg Liberman, the president and chief executive of Spark Networks — which owns specialty dating sites including JDate, ChristianMingle, BlackSingles, SilverSingles — said that for the first eight months of this year, Spark had a 93 percent increase in new members 50 and older across all of its dating sites, compared with the same span of time last year. “We’re seeing significant growth,†Mr. Liberman said. He’s also observed that, while it’s been common for parents to buy dating site memberships for their adult children, now adult children have begun buying memberships for their widowed and divorced parents. Gone is the heyday of personal ads in The New York Review of Books. Niche sites like SilverSingles and OurTime (which also includes dating profiles from SeniorPeopleMeet.com and SeniorsMeet.com) are capitalizing on the demand. In addition to pooling people who want to date within their age group, the sites provide extra hand-holding for people who have been out of the dating game the last decade. For instance, SilverSingles encourages members to call its customer-care representatives for help with setting up a profile.
Best dating sites 2011
