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."
Britain is increasingly a singleton society. With our growing affluence and job mobility, and the pressure to work longer hours, we are marrying later, divorcing more readily and feeling less constrained about treating relationships as something to be conveniently arranged online. By 2010, according to government forecasts, 40% of us will live alone, making the single-person home the most common household unit. Nor can the trend be dismissed as a Bridget Jones phenomenon led by newly empowered young women. According to a University of Edinburgh study on "solo living", men between 25 and 44 are currently twice as likely as women to be living alone. For established dating websites — with enough matches to offer most users a satisfactory choice — this signifies a huge commercial opportunity. Globally, according to the internet-tracking firm comScore Networks, online personals are now the single most lucrative category of online content, beating even pornography. The US market, estimated by internet analysts at JupiterResearch to be worth $516m, is now assumed to have peaked. Today the boom is in Europe, where over the next five years it is reckoned that our annual spending will more than double from £115m to £260m.
British singles are leading the way. Around 11% of internet users visit these sites each month, according to Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings. "Which means that 9 out of 10 still aren't using them," Burmaster says, "so there's plenty of opportunity to grow." At the same time, much of the social stigma associated with computer dating appears to have dissipated. "A couple of years ago, people said it was just for geeks and losers," recalls Nate Elliott, an online-dating analyst at JupiterResearch. "Not today. Online dating sites have revolutionised the business of matchmaking, making it more acceptable, offering more detailed options than ever before, and doing so cheaply. In the past, a newspaper ad would give you 30 words and no picture; or you could go to a matchmaker, which was costly and time-intensive. These sites take the best from both and give you control over who you meet."
So easy has it become to "click" discreetly online that relationship counsellors blame internet dating and reunion sites for contributing to last year's rise in divorce to 167,116 in the UK. At 0.2%, the rise might appear hardly worth noting — except that it was the fourth successive annual increase, and took the total number of divorces to the highest since 1996. Relate, the marriage-guidance body, blames the ease of internet-enabled affairs for the breakdown of 1 in 10 of the relationships where it is called in — either because one partner met a new lover online, or because they were able to arrange meetings discreetly through e-mails.
Whatever your proclivities or requirements, somewhere in cyberspace there is a dating site promising to find your soul mate. The UK's most-visited include Match.com, which arrived from the US in 2001 and now claims 1.5m registered members paying up to £26 a month; Udate, which Match bought three years ago for $150m, earning its founder, the entrepreneur Mel Morris, a reported £20m; and Gaydar.co.uk, the gay personals site favoured by Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for Rhondda, who as "Alfa101" was revealed to have posed in his underwear and advertised himself as "very versatile".
Yet there are also specialist sites catering to vegans, bikers, fetishists, herpes carriers and poets. If TallPeople.com stretches your wish list, there is DwarfDate.com; should CelibatePassions.com fail to arouse you, go kvetch with the modern Orthodox Jews at Frumster.com. The Tories may disagree over Europe, but they can find harmony at ConservativeMatch.com. There is even now a dating site for those seeking a sexual affair without the hassle of actually meeting a human being. The HighJoy.com online dating community, run from Los Angeles, allows consenting adults to meet online and "control each other's pleasure" by plugging internet-enabled Doc Johnson sex toys into their computers. "It's the logical next evolution of online interaction," insists the company's CEO, Amir Vatan.
Your husband, their father, left you for another woman. If it hadn't been Rebecca, it would have been somebody else
