If there’s one thing you can learn from talking to people around the world, it’s that attitudes to dating vary widely. Some countries and cultures are more conservative than others.
Taiwan, for example is much more conservative than our more freewheeling dating culture, with partners mostly set up through their friends. Someone coming from a culture like that: where you need to look within your normal social circle for romance, would find our approach of going to bars and flirting with strangers rather odd, to say the least.
It’s something that online dating is struggling with all over the place: realising that adopting a cookie-cutter approach just won’t do. In America you’ll know you’re heading out for a grand romantic date because you’ll usually have been asked in a rather formal way. Here in Australia however, we’re a lot more chilled out about it all. I’ve known people be halfway through an evening and still not be entirely sure whether they were on a date or just hanging out with someone as a friend.
Times like last week’s Valentine’s Day can be a great boost for getting people out there, but at other times it can seem hard to meet new people because of that lack of formality. It’s one of the reasons that online dating is starting to take off here in Australia. People may not admit to it, or say they’re embarrassed to try it, but it provides a kind of structure so that we all have somewhere to start from.
You’ve only got to look at how online dating has changed its profile in the UK over the last few years to get some kind of inkling about the possibilities that do exist. Over there there’s been a cultural shift away from embarrassment and not talking about online dating services at all. Instead there are now adverts on public transport and in prime-time television slots and people of all ages readily talk about their experiences with them.
As a dating site, we look for new ways to find you the right person to hook up with, so we’re as interested as any anthropologist in fine tuning just what matches people up. Whether it’s noticing that people from Indian cultures are more focused on “friendship”, or on how the effects of testosterone, dopamine or serotonin influence how people experience attraction, we’re interested in finding new ways to help you reach out and find someone compatible.
As much as we talk about looking for someone with the right chemistry though, we just think that for the most part people would rather have the fun of finding out the old fashioned way in a bar on a night out than in looking up results in a lab.
So come on in and take both a look and a chance.