Are you considering jumping in the online dating pool to find love? Perhaps you’ve already taken that plunge and have your own experiences to share?

OnlineSchools has compiled some statistics surrounding online dating that offers a glimpse into the world of internet romance.

A few revealing Online Dating highlights:

• One out of ten users on online dating sites are scammers; one out of ten users leave within the first 3 months; and one out of ten sex offenders reportedly use online dating to meet people.
• One out of three women who meet men online have sex on the first encounter.
• Men lie about age, height, income. Women lie about weight, physical build, age.
• The Average length of courtship for marriage of couples who met online – 18.5 months – of couples who met offline – 42 months

A psychologist-researcher and psychoanalyst has developed a comprehensive model of love relations that is to be used on the new Internet matchmaking site, RewardingLove.com (TM) http://www.RewardingLove.com). The model is based on research from evolutionary psychology, personality temperaments and traits, early attachment, family dynamics, cultural and societal beliefs. FULL ARTICLE @ PRNEWSWIRE

PR NEWSWIRE — According to research by a new online photo verification site, http://www.CheckedProfile.com, over 80% of online daters have suspected that the profile images being used online are fakes and over a third have actually discovered that a person’s identity does not match that of their online persona.

http://www.CheckedProfile.com is a new service that was launched in the US.

CheckedProfile.com works really simply with the following 5 steps:

1. You upload the profile picture that you would like to be verified
2. The site gives you a unique code
3. Take another picture of yourself holding the unique code (akin to holding up a copy of today’s newspaper)
4. One of CheckedProfile.com’s experts immediately checks that both images are the same person
5. If successful, you are given a unique stamp which you can upload onto any website (not just dating specific, e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc.)

Complete Article @ PR Newswire

Copenda, the revolutionary social people search engine that allows people to search for their soul mate or new friends in social networks and dating web sites. Their complex algorithms crawl semi-structured data from multiple social networks and online dating sites such as Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, hi5, friendster, match, plentyoffish and more.

More and more people are using the web to meet new people and communicate with their friends. The main places people use to meet new friends or look for dating are social networks and online dating sites.

One of the major problems in meeting new people in social networks is that users need to scan and dive deeply into the profiles to initiate a connection for relationships or dating. Although many users use social networks for dating purposes, the social network user experience is not suited for this purpose. Online dating sites, on the other hand, are designed for this purpose but suffer from low status among the younger generation.

Copenda uniquely integrates an innovative user interface with dating site features such as personality search and social network features such as ranking, comments and tagging.

Check it out!  What have you go to lose?  If Copenda can make like a little easier by pulling all your online accounts into one convenient location for dating, this could be quite a time saver for you.

Christopher Farah delves deep into a place most people who’ve ever had an online dating profile have been – wondering if something better is just beyond the next click…

When you’re sitting next to the “perfect match” does your mind wonder across the keyboard and just this side of the next click – questioning whether or not there is a more perfect person out there?

When should a person stop checking their profile? When should you make the decision to settle for what’s in front of you? And when you do, how will you know it’s not just settling?

Anyone?

It’s hard for a geek like me to imagine ever falling for a man online and sending him a rather large chunk of money without ever meeting him in person. But it’s happening — and obviously it’s happening quite often.

Susan, a Charlotte woman who went looking for love online, reads a man’s profile who she became involved with. She thought he was the love of her life.

“He was a widow. He had a daughter. He seemed like he really loved his daughter a lot and that really fascinated me,” she said describing the man she met.

But the man had the same picture all over the internet, with several different names. She instant messaged him seven days a week, two hours a day. They talked about everything.

“My Mom, my work, the people I work with, just everyday conversations. We just really built up a trust.,” she said. Within two weeks, he asked for $1,200. He told Susan he’d been robbed and his passport and wallet had been stolen.

Soon, he asked for more. Susan wired him the money every time, believing she was helping someone in need. Helping someone she had fallen in love with.

On my local news, several states away, another woman was interviewed who had sent the man she’d fallen for over $10,000.

It’s not just women who are falling victim to these scams, it’s happening to men too.

Anytime a person you are corresponding with online asks for money from you, that should send up HUGE red flags. You should delete every email from that person, block their email address and force the image out of your mind that you’d fallen in love with.

There are several informational tools listed via The Office of Fair Trading, I strongly urge anyone and everyone to read them, learn them and live them.

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