Sunday Times Magazine: Downloading Mr Right
By David Rowan
Louise Wright set one non-negotiable condition in choosing a man: he must accept her horse as part of the relationship. The 29-year-old blonde from Bristol has been riding since she was six, and with Tigs, her black Irish gelding, competes enthusiastically at weekend showjumping trials when not mucking out at the stables. Non-horsey boyfriends have generally been dismissive if not downright suspicious of the three hours a day she says that Tigs demands of her. So when she found herself in a romantic rut last winter, she began to despair of ever meeting Mr Right.
Then she stumbled across an item in Horse & Hound magazine that was to change her life. LoveHorse.co.uk was a slick new internet dating service for the equestrian community. Never having used a dating agency, and unaware that the site — along with LoveAir.co.uk for cabin crews and LoveYoga.com for the karmic set — was operated from an IT engineer's laptop, Wright wrote a profile under the nickname "Scrappydoo", describing herself as "a fun-loving country girl" and adding some eventing photos.
"You hear horror stories of people meeting weirdos online, but I figured that if I was careful I couldn't really lose anything," she recalls, in the cosy living room of a North Yorkshire farmhouse. This, her new home, belongs to her serendipitous LoveHorse match — a 33-year-old cattle farmer and divorcé who, logging in as "Martin", had sought a riding partner, a pen pal, perhaps even a soul mate to share his life.
"We got on so well online," Wright recalls with a grin, "that I had a mad moment when I thought, I'll take my dog up here, book a B&B, and if he's not nice then I'll just take the dog for Yorkshire walks." In fact, on her first country walk with Martin Baines, she knew this was it. Within weeks she had moved up here with Tigs and the dog, and they are now talking about a wedding. "It's definitely heading that way," she says contentedly. "I never used to believe in the 'you've met the one' thing, but now I really do."
Internet dating, long derided either as a virtual meat market or as a last resort for social misfits, has finally come of age. Between 3m and 7m of us are using these sites each month, depending on which survey you believe, and the numbers keep growing, with the biggest sites reporting a near-doubling of members in the past year alone. Men still outnumber women by three to two, a gap that is narrowing as overall internet use grows, and though London and the southeast make up a third of all UK users, the Midlands and northwest are catching up (at 15 and 11% respectively), according to the consultancy Hitwise, which has logged more than 800 dating sites in Britain. Another research body, Nielsen/NetRatings, says the typical user is a man aged 35 to 49 — although the under-24s and the over-55s between them make up almost a third of the market.
In other words, online personals are now a routine means for millions of Britons to seek out marriage or simply an illicit affair. With their personality-matching software and complex search algorithms, these sites have become the established way to peruse likely lovers according to religion, lifestyle, locality or physical attributes. Yet even as the bigger sites trumpet the thousands of weddings and babies for which they claim credit, some important questions remain about the safety of internet dating, its effect on marriages, and the degree to which prospective partners can be trusted as honest. In cyberspace you can be anyone you want — hardly an ideal basis on which to risk your heart to a stranger.
At LoveHorse.co.uk, the only "inappropriate" behaviour that Louise Wright has encountered was a posting by "Whippy", "a submissive male slave looking for a bossy/dominant horsey male/female", whose photograph depicted him with a whip and wearing little more than boots and jodhpurs. The site is free to browse and £9.95 a month to join. But despite its low-budget provenance — built with off-the-shelf software, and needing barely an hour's human intervention a day — the website, with its partner sites, is already responsible for dozens of successful matches this year. Its founder, Ben Lovegrove, a 45-year-old network engineer from Hampshire, can already see it becoming a full-time business. Next year, he suggests, it has the potential to earn him a five-figure spare-time income.
Louise Wright is not surprised. "It's bringing people together who'd never otherwise meet," she says. "We are proof that it works. In fact, Martin's horse is also completely in love with Tigs, and his rottweiler has fallen for my dog. I guess it's worked out all round."
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
Louise Wright set one non-negotiable condition in choosing a man: he must accept her horse as part of the relationship. The 29-year-old blonde from Bristol has been riding since she was six, and with Tigs, her black Irish gelding, competes enthusiastically at weekend showjumping trials when not mucking out at the stables. Non-horsey boyfriends have generally been dismissive if not downright suspicious of the three hours a day she says that Tigs demands of her. So when she found herself in a romantic rut last winter, she began to despair of ever meeting Mr Right.
Then she stumbled across an item in Horse & Hound magazine that was to change her life. LoveHorse.co.uk was a slick new internet dating service for the equestrian community. Never having used a dating agency, and unaware that the site — along with LoveAir.co.uk for cabin crews and LoveYoga.com for the karmic set — was operated from an IT engineer's laptop, Wright wrote a profile under the nickname "Scrappydoo", describing herself as "a fun-loving country girl" and adding some eventing photos.
"You hear horror stories of people meeting weirdos online, but I figured that if I was careful I couldn't really lose anything," she recalls, in the cosy living room of a North Yorkshire farmhouse. This, her new home, belongs to her serendipitous LoveHorse match — a 33-year-old cattle farmer and divorcé who, logging in as "Martin", had sought a riding partner, a pen pal, perhaps even a soul mate to share his life.
"We got on so well online," Wright recalls with a grin, "that I had a mad moment when I thought, I'll take my dog up here, book a B&B, and if he's not nice then I'll just take the dog for Yorkshire walks." In fact, on her first country walk with Martin Baines, she knew this was it. Within weeks she had moved up here with Tigs and the dog, and they are now talking about a wedding. "It's definitely heading that way," she says contentedly. "I never used to believe in the 'you've met the one' thing, but now I really do."
Internet dating, long derided either as a virtual meat market or as a last resort for social misfits, has finally come of age. Between 3m and 7m of us are using these sites each month, depending on which survey you believe, and the numbers keep growing, with the biggest sites reporting a near-doubling of members in the past year alone. Men still outnumber women by three to two, a gap that is narrowing as overall internet use grows, and though London and the southeast make up a third of all UK users, the Midlands and northwest are catching up (at 15 and 11% respectively), according to the consultancy Hitwise, which has logged more than 800 dating sites in Britain. Another research body, Nielsen/NetRatings, says the typical user is a man aged 35 to 49 — although the under-24s and the over-55s between them make up almost a third of the market.
In other words, online personals are now a routine means for millions of Britons to seek out marriage or simply an illicit affair. With their personality-matching software and complex search algorithms, these sites have become the established way to peruse likely lovers according to religion, lifestyle, locality or physical attributes. Yet even as the bigger sites trumpet the thousands of weddings and babies for which they claim credit, some important questions remain about the safety of internet dating, its effect on marriages, and the degree to which prospective partners can be trusted as honest. In cyberspace you can be anyone you want — hardly an ideal basis on which to risk your heart to a stranger.
At LoveHorse.co.uk, the only "inappropriate" behaviour that Louise Wright has encountered was a posting by "Whippy", "a submissive male slave looking for a bossy/dominant horsey male/female", whose photograph depicted him with a whip and wearing little more than boots and jodhpurs. The site is free to browse and £9.95 a month to join. But despite its low-budget provenance — built with off-the-shelf software, and needing barely an hour's human intervention a day — the website, with its partner sites, is already responsible for dozens of successful matches this year. Its founder, Ben Lovegrove, a 45-year-old network engineer from Hampshire, can already see it becoming a full-time business. Next year, he suggests, it has the potential to earn him a five-figure spare-time income.
Louise Wright is not surprised. "It's bringing people together who'd never otherwise meet," she says. "We are proof that it works. In fact, Martin's horse is also completely in love with Tigs, and his rottweiler has fallen for my dog. I guess it's worked out all round."
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
posted by David Rowan at Sunday, January 08, 2006
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