Ride the underground in London and you will soon be confronted with the wallpaper of dating site adverts that adorn its filthy interior. ‘Katie and Ben met for a quick coffee in between the Monday morning meeting and the working lunch!’ these adverts scream. ‘Look at their beautiful yuppie faces, temporarily stretched from their usual expression of stress and fear into forced grins for the benefit of the camera! If you, too, are overworked and alone in your ridiculously overpriced Canary Wharf apartment, join now for a very reasonable fee. You can buy happiness.’
Such dating portals for young professionals living in the rat race have proliferated in the last few years. The stigma of online dating is dropping off as the generation who grew up embroiled in social media enter Real Adulthood (not the adulthood that technically exists between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in university halls, but the kind incurring fast-paced jobs and H&M suits and perpetual loneliness.) Canadian-owned and astronomically successful free dating website PlentyofFish.com was launched in 2003 and by 2008 was being profiled in The New York Times, as journalists openly wondered how founder Markus Frind managed to purge 30 per cent of its customers for inactivity per year and yet double the number of members overall. As of May 2013, PlentyofFish had 3.3m daily users and, 70 per cent of its traffic was coming from mobile phones.
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