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There could be an unlikely contributor to the decline of marriage in this country. And it's free pornography on the Internet. A team of researchers, who published their findings in The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany, determined that the rise of free Internet pornography is not only correlated with a pronounced decline in percentage of young adult males who are married, but might actually be contributing to the trend. "The results in this paper suggest that such an association exists, and that it is potentially quite large," the study notes. The researchers used data from the...

The anecdotal evidence that Americans are remaining single longer into their lives has more and more data backing it up. No longer is it merely the musings of worried relatives hoping to see that young man or woman in their life find a spouse. According to a recent story over at Bloomberg—Is Everybody Single?—we’ve reached a statistical, verifiable relationship tipping point as a society; one with far-reaching implications. Single Americans make up more than half of the adult population for the first time since the government began compiling such statistics in 1976.Some 124.6 million Americans were single in August, 50.2...

Traditional catholic speed dating (cartoon on linky)

Dating website OKCupid has revealed that it experimented on its users, including putting the "wrong" people together to see if they would connect. It revealed the tests after the uproar over Facebook manipulating the feeds of its users. "If you use the internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site," it said. "That's how websites work." OKCupid said one revelation was that "people just look at the picture". As well as allowing users to upload pictures and set up dating profiles, OKCupid asks users questions and matches them with potential partners based on...

Chinese writer Yuan Ren lifts the lid on so-called 'yellow fever': a well-peddled myth that Asian women make better sexual lovers than other women, while at the same time, having no meaningful presence in politics and popular culture By Yuan Ren 01 Jul 2014 Ever heard of yellow fever? No, not the disease you can pick up when travelling to certain countries. I'm talking about when Caucasian men develop an acute sexual preference for East Asian women – even becoming a fetish, for some. Naturally, there are dating websites aplenty dedicated to 'serving' those men who have yellow fever, where...

Mensa and Match.com have teamed up to create a new dating site for people whose IQ is in the 98th percentile. On Mensa Match, brainiacs can find people to date with the same intelligence level, according to the Daily Mail. The site was inspired by a survey where 80 percent of American singles said dating people on the same intelligence level was “very important.” 89 percent also said they would like to be with someone “considerably better educated or more intellectual.” “Why do we want a smart partner? Because intelligence is correlated with many benefits, including: higher income; sense of...

He has been broken down! Divorced men understand what it's like to be in a committed relationship within which there are compromises and accommodations. His resistance has already been broken down by another woman so that you don't have to endure the push back yourself. He uses his words. Divorced men tend to be better communicators. There is a decent chance that he went to therapy during his marriage, if not after, and he has become fairly proficient at communicating needs and feelings more clearly. He's been broken in! Another thing about divorced men that you might not want to...

A radio listener recent wrote me about an interview I did on EWTN Radio with Barbara McGuigan. I mentioned that I had been doing a teaching on dating and modesty at a Theology on Tap Session. At that session I charged the men not to leave that night until they had asked a woman out on a date.This intrigued the listener who wanted me to expand on this just a bit and what if anything she could do to get the twenty-somes in her family (both male and female) to start dating again. Here is something of the response I...

Are San Francisco straight men that hard up for a date that they need women to be flown in from elsewhere? Apparently, according to one dating site: the Dating Ring. Currently still in the fundraising stage (Really, we're fundraising for dating sites now?), a post on SFGate notes "Love-lorn young ladies can reserve a spot on the trip by simply anteing up $1,000, which will net them a flight, housing, three dates and two parties." Don't make us gag. Judging from the comments on our recent post disputing NerdWallet's findings that San Francisco is the best place to be a...

SAN JOSE (CBS SF) — A San Jose woman bilked out of $500,000 by a Nigerian scam artist on a dating website luckily recovered $200,000 from a bank in Turkey, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. The case of the 66-year-old woman conned out of her money through a meeting on ChristianMingle.com should serve as a warning about fraud schemes on international dating sites, Deputy District Attorney Cherie Bourland said.

In my last post I explained why it makes logical sense for men to greatly limit the amount of “courtship” they offer women in today’s post sexual revolution sexual and marriage marketplace (SMP & MMP). But this leaves the question of what this means for women, and how they should rationally respond to men’s rational choices.For women who want to meet and marry a suitable man.The key to answering the question involves understanding the woman’s primary objective. If the goal is to maximize the amount of courtship she receives, skip below to the section on courting for sex. If a...

One of the more common refrains in the “Where have all of the good men gone!” lament is men’s increasing unwillingness to court women the way women expect to be courted. This is almost always framed as either a great mystery or a case of weak men screwing up feminism (or both).Examples of this concern abound, from Aunt Haley’s last three posts, to the divorced single mother who found out men weren’t willing to spend very much to court her, to the woman in Vox’s recent post lamenting that her 59 year old friend was only offered half a sandwich...

The Virginia governor’s race was yet another example of the massive voting gap in a huge demographic: single people, particularly single women. According to exit polls, Republican Ken Cuccinelli won handily on the “hard” issues facing Virginia voters, and won most other demographic slices, but Democrat Terry McAuliffe won big with single people, crushing Cuccinelli by nearly fifty points among single women. A similar dynamic could be observed in the 2012 presidential race, where the Obama campaign made a very concerted effort to win over single women – so concerted that it sometimes appeared ludicrously clumsy to critics. Rush Limbaugh...

Long-time BreakPoint listeners know about Japan’s catastrophically-low birthrates: by 2060, Japan’s population is projected to fall by a third, the same percentage killed by the Black Death in 14th-century Europe. Japan’s demographic decline has spawned some creepy adaptations, such as lifelike talking dolls for elderly Japanese without grandchildren, or the borrowing of other people’s grandchildren for a day. Attempts to encourage child-bearing through economic incentives have failed, as they have in other countries with low birth-rates. Younger Japanese aren’t interested in reproducing themselves. And now, according to a recent article in the UK’s Guardian, they’re increasingly uninterested in sex, as...

Facebook has apologised for publishing a dating ad featuring a photo of a 17-year-old who had killed herself after complaining of being cyber-bullied. Canadian Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life in April having been severely bullied after a separate photo, showing her alleged rape by four boys, was circulated online, her mother has said. ... "This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image from the internet and using it in their ad campaign," a spokesman said.

A study from (previously unheard of) dating site AYI.com analyzed nearly 500,000 interactions on their website and found that women from Brooklyn are the least likely to respond to messages from prospective suitors on online dating sites. Men in the tri-state looking for a romantic connection are better off contacting the "less selective" women of Jersey City, as the response rate is much higher. Women in Detroit, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles were also picky, while residents of Miami, St. Louis, Las Vegas, and Portland, Oregon, are basically willing to date anyone, results reveal. While the study makes no claims...

In 1968, just six percent of young people --between 18 and 31 -- lived with platonic roommates, according to Pew Research. The vast majority (85 percent!) of Americans who had moved on from their homes and college dorms shacked up with spouses. ....... Put more quirkily: In 1968, if you wanted to throw a dinner party for all your twentysomething friends who had moved out of their parents' home, and you invited three girls who lived together, you would have to invite fourteen married couples to make the party proportionally representative of your generation's living arrangements (okay, not a priority...

Throughout Europe, births to single mothers more than doubled between 1990 and 2010 (from 17.4 to 38.3 percent, 1). Imagine if it were to increase at the same rate for the next two decades! Such rapid changes are very unusual historically. They cry out for explanation from social scientists. This steep rise in single parenthood is found in most developed countries, including the U.S. Here, single parenthood increased from around 5.3 percent in 1960 to 41 percent in 2009 (2). The surge in single parenthood in Europe Change was even more rapid in some European countries. Births outside marriage increased...

Noting the comeback campaigns of Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner in New York, feminist author Hanna Rosin wonders why “50 years into the sexual revolution” women politicians lag so far behind men in the sex-scandal tally. She notes biological and evolutionary explanations only to reject them in favor of the idea that women are just too unused to power to abuse it in that way. She’s cheered, though, by surveys showing that younger women are cheating on their spouses almost as much as men, and confidently looks forward to the not-too-distant day when we’ll “find ourselves willing to look past...

Single people in Guangdong province reported going 30 months on average without kisses, a survey said on Wednesday. The survey was conducted by baihe.com, a leading matchmaking service provider in China. It also found that young single people in Jiangsu province went an average of 36 months for without being kissed. Meanwhile, 92 percent of single people between the ages of 22 and 35 in Shanghai said they have been kissed within the last week. Some netizens and experts have called for the establishment of Kiss Day in China to build a closer relationship between young people.