Free Republic

Despite our ever-greater mobility and even more efficient connectivity, sociologists continue to note that Americans struggle to form lasting, fulfilling relationships of all kinds, but especially marriages. We face a very real epidemic of loneliness, one that is, not coincidentally, accompanied by a steady decline in marriage. According to Pew Research, marriage rates have fallen to historic lows over the last 30 years, especially among younger people. At the same time, the typical age at first marriage has climbed to a historic high. Increasingly, Americans who are looking for love can’t find it, at least not in the traditional ways....

For nearly a century, an oak in a German forest has helped lonely people find love—including the mailman who delivers its letters. Every morning for 20 years, Karl-Heinz Martens steered his yellow mail truck through the narrow streets of Eutin, a market town arranged around a little castle in northern Germany, near the Baltic Sea. On his route, Martens would drive through miles of farms and fields before disappearing into a deep, enchanted forest, where he unlocked a gate using a special key and reversed into his parking spot—as all mailmen do—facing outward to ensure a quick exit. As he...

SCHATCHENS FIND BUSINESS BAD AND DEPLORE THE UNHAPPINESS SURE TO FOLLOW- This has been a hard year for the cupids of the ghetto, as the matrimonial agents of the Jewish quarter might be called. To the Jews he is known as the schatchen, but unless the marriage business picks up the broker is going to drop out of sight. Already he is branching out into other ways of making a living. He writes letters for the illiterate, acts as interpreter in business transactions or does odd jobs around the synagogue. Marriage brokerage used to be one of the best paying...

A former QVC executive filed a lawsuit on Thursday, against the matchmaking company she paid $150,000 to help her find a mate. In the lawsuit, divorced mother-of-four Darlene Daggett said Kelleher International promised to hand pick her wealthy bachelors, with the goal of finding someone she could spend her retirement years with. Instead, the 62-year-old former president of QVC's U.S. commerce, says she forked over six figures but ended up suffering a series of disastrous dates with men who were more than just unsuitable. 'Kelleher’s "highly screened" matches for Daggett included men who were married, mentally unstable, physically ill, pathological...

Love at first whiff is the idea behind Smell Dating, a New York matchmaking service that promises to help single people sniff out their perfect match by breathing in the odors from dirty T-shirts. Artist Tega Brain, who teaches at New York's School for Poetic Computation, and Sam Lavigne, an editor and researcher at New York University, created Smell Dating, which they describe as an art project.

Is Tinder not selective enough for you? Is OkCupid turning up dates that don't meet your standards? If so, you might want to look into The League, a new dating app recently released by a Stanford business school graduate. "You're smart, good-looking & successful. You don't need a dating app to get a date - you're too popular as it is. But you should join The League," reads the app's website. The site invites users to download the app and join the waiting list for its "private alpha." Once live, it promises to exclude all of the chaff you'd find...

On a characteristically foggy evening here, a group of predominantly single venture capitalists, tech executives, hedge-fund managers and philanthropists gathered for a cocktail party in a penultimate-floor suite at the St. Regis apartment complex. As guests ate oysters, baby lamb chops and perhaps the world’s smallest cheeseburgers, they were pitched a multiday, intellectually rigorous singles mixer to be held in January 2014 on Necker Island, Richard Branson’s 74-acre Caribbean paradise, “curated” by Kelleher International, a long-running, high-end matchmaking service that is targeting Silicon Valley with particular vigor. Wearing an Alexander McQueen dress and towering Valentino heels as she sold the...

First impressions often include nice eyes, a great laugh or a beautiful smile, but a relatively new dating technique could eliminate all physical and personality snap judgements and pair partners based on smell preferences. It’s called a Pheromone Party. Participants are asked to wear the same shirt to bed — sans deodorant or perfume — for three nights. The shirts are placed in their own bag, then passed around at a party were the guests choose their date by most the attractive smell. If we’re basing this solely on pheromones though, the smell itself shouldn’t really make too much of...

March 10, 2011 Finding a Soul Mate for North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un By MARK McDONALD SEOUL — At first she did not know what to make of being romantically matched with Kim Jong-un, that roly-poly bachelor, the presumptive future lord and master of North Korea. Should she be offended, amused, angry, what? After some thought, she said: “I felt proud to be selected. I thought, ‘Cool. It means you’re in the elite.’ If he was South Korean, he’d be in the top 1 percent of the men.” Miss Kim, 28, a Korean-American who declined to be identified by her full...

A female millionaire's public announcement to seek a life partner is becoming the talk of the town. It is rare in Korea for rich female singles to publicly seek a future husband through a match-making agency. The businesswoman has asked matchmaking company Sunwoo to find her future husband. The agency posted an open proposal on its website on May 21. According the agency, the businesswoman is 49 years old and is worth 20 billion won (about $16 million). The proposal starts with the headline "success in business, now looking to succeed in love! We are looking for a special man...

Few things are as in desperate need of repair as the singles scene, whose gatherings I address on a regular basis as I did last week on Valentine's Day. What you see is the typical scenario of the attractive women getting all the attention, the successful men drooling over them, and the "ordinary" people left to pick up the crumbs. Then there is the degrading spectacle of watching grown men and women walking around hoping to be noticed, or speaking to a member of the opposite sex while scanning distractedly to see if there is anyone "better" to connect with....

This is strictly vanity. OK, been awhile on eHarmony and still looking for the love of my life. Then I find Rush Limbaugh has signed with them. Guess his fling with Donna Karyn wasn't a match made in heaven or you'd have heard more about it by now. It makes me wonder if he's really looking to get married again. We all know he met Marta online back in the 90s. Will it it be another trip to the altar? Fire away!

KATY TABER doesn't hate Republicans. She just doesn't want to date them anymore. Ms. Taber, a 20-year-old part-time student from West Palm Beach, Fla., looked for potential partners at Internet dating sites for nearly three years. But the services kept coughing up conservatives. That was not going to work for a young woman who has been to her share of teach-ins, and caught "Fahrenheit 9/11" on opening weekend. So, like tens of thousands of others, Ms. Taber turned to an online personals site that caters to a specific political point of view. Now, after trading messages at loveinwar.com for a...

Last July, Christine Stelmack moved to Seattle after hearing it has the nation's highest concentration of men who are millionaires. She wasn't out to land one — at least not for herself. Instead, her one-woman operation, MultiMillionaire MatchMaking Club (4M Club), aims to match men with a net worth of at least $1 million with women — for a long-term relationship and possibly marriage. She chooses men who have earned their millions on their own, not by inheritance. "These aren't trust-fund babies," said Stelmack, who recruited most of her clients by sending letters to the men on the List of...