• by Seana Mulcahy , April 30, 2007

I remember a few years ago, my mom whispered the words, "Online dating." It was her answer to how a friend of ours met her boyfriend. Our friend was divorced with grown kids. She spent the bulk of her time working and with her family. She wasn't in the dating scene at all. I always remember hoping she'd meet someone because she is such a great lady.

One day I was at her house for a visit. She was beaming. Without a blink of an eye, she announced to us that she was in love and we just HAD to meet this guy. She said she'd never had such a connection with anyone. When my ultra-conservative mother asked where she'd met him, our friend bellowed, "ONLINE!" My mom's jaw dropped. It was all I could do to keep myself from laughing at her. You would have thought that our friend had said jail or something. This was the first of many conversations to come: talks that would force me into the world of teacher, translator and all things modern.

Skip ahead four years. Our friend is still with the same guy. My mother now has several friends that have met significant others online. While she isn't announcing it to the world, she isn't whispering the word anymore, either.

I thought about this demographic -- our family friend, my mom's friends. Many were divorced or widowed. All have families and have lived pretty full lives. However, they still feel young and energetic and want to engage in a new chapter of life. These are not netheads, fast typers, or SMS text messengers. Most of these folks in our little focus group are women who were soccer moms before the phrase was coined. They are the type who baked you cupcakes on your birthday and picked you and three friends up from school. They yelled at you to do your homework and get off the phone as they watched VCR-recorded episodes of their daily "soap" (soap opera). The ones that had a computer in the household, but it was something for the kids -- and they considered it even worse than "that damn phone," as the kids never got off the computer.

By no means did these ladies stumble upon a typing or computer class. They most likely asked their kids or their friends to show them enough to get by. Now they have computers, use free email accounts, have significantly less fear of the operating system, keyboard, typing, and computer skills in general. And the newsflash is, they go online and become members of online dating sites.

It seems online dating has become a household name. It has gained mainstream social acceptance in the States. To no surprise, different sites tend to attract different "daters." For instance, match.com and Yahoo personals seem to attract younger crowds looking for fun. Tween, teen, college and young twentysomethings flock to social media sites like MySpace and Facebook .

So what about our friend? Well, that was four years ago. The landscape has surely changed. So I did some digging to find where boomers are going. According to a recent Newsweekarticle, 63% of PerfectMatch.com's traffic is men and women between the ages of 35 to 60. Another popular site targeted to the 50-plus market is PrimeSingles.net, whose membership grew 39 percent two years ago. "As people get older, they definitely start dropping a lot of the look requirements they have in their mind," Joe Tracy, publisher of the Web-based Online Dating Magazine, told Newsweek. "They're more successful at finding what they want, and that's why they do well with personality sites that match them; it's easier for them to skip over the players."

Many of these sites say boomers are their fastest growing segment online. According to the Census Bureau, 29% of adults aged 45 to 59 are now single, compared to 19% in 1980.

According to Match.com, people over age 50 make up the site's fastest-growing segment of users, with a 300% increase since 2000.

Do you think online dating is now a household name? Which sites are leading the pack when it comes to segmenting such audiences and appealing to multiple demographics? The online dating segment surely is one to watch -- and one I'll blog about again, no doubt.