Dating Site for Married Couples

NEW YORK — Can two thirtysomething guys who have never been married rescue the institution of marriage?

Well, this is New York, so they might as well try.

Meet Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout, creators of the online dating site HowAboutWe, which until lately targeted an obvious demographic: singles.

Since 2010, the site has invited them to pitch date ideas online and respond to dates they like. Some recent ideas: riding motorcycles around and watching Star Trek (Texas); eating steak and cuddling in the rain (Akwa Ibom, Nigeria); and showing up blindfolded at a cafe and letting “our voices & fantasies decide about a 2nd date” (Bonn, Germany).

The site has been a success, attracting more than 700,000 date ideas. But its founders quickly discovered the commercial paradox of the dating site: The better you are at finding love for a client, the faster she signs off and ceases to pay you.

“If you succeed,” Mr. Schildkrout says, “you lose.”

And so the guys asked themselves: What if a dating site didn’t stop at finding you love? What if it also helped you “date” your life partner, and, through the surprise and renewal of that dating, to stay in love?

Later this year, Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout will release their answer to these questions: a new dating portal focused on committed couples. It will seek to get them out of their routines, off their feet and on the town for frequent dates.

Even for two unlikely businessmen who began their careers as schoolteachers, the business logic is plain: There is money to be made arranging dates for 50 years instead of the six to 12 months that HowAboutWe’s single clients tend to last.

But the two men, who have been best friends since kindergarten, will tell anyone who listens that their mission is deeper. They believe that dates — surprising, sexy, rejuvenating dates — are what marriage needs to survive in an era when it is becoming a choice more than a necessity for so many.

“We want to build a product that helps people find and then sustain love — and I think that the sustaining love part is harder,” Mr. Schechter said over coffee at the W hotel in Times Square.

A singles site, he said, is straightforward enough. He speaks of his new cause in far loftier terms. The goal is “figuring out how to make it so that the divorce rate goes down and that it becomes the norm for people to feel like their relationship actually satisfies their existential hope.”

Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout are hardly the first people concerned about the state of marriage and divorce in the Western world. But that concern tends to be voiced more often by religious leaders and archconservatives than by two never-married men who studied meditation in India and have offices among the artists, writers, D.I.Y. types and organic-wine-swilling hipsters of Brooklyn.

Because neither has ever married, Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout felt they needed to investigate the institution before seeking to reform it. They commissioned a study based on interviews with committed couples about their dating lives.

What they found was that the enthusiasm displayed on their singles site — people boldly proposing taco-hopping dates and prankster dates and blindfolded dates; people grasping constantly for the new — faded swiftly for the committed. Mortgages and children and budgets sapped energy. Couples changed. They began to want what was safe, not fresh.

Some excerpts from their interviews: “Very price conscious and needs to feel like she’s getting a deal.” “Is not a romantic and doesn’t plan much in advance.” “Novelty wears off.” “You’re more used to each other and are trying less.” “The usual issues with babysitters.” One subject’s last memorable date involved “going out to special German restaurant around a specific errand they had planned at Ikea.”

Outside the start-up galaxy, people might hear these interviews and say, “Well, that’s life. People age. Things change.” But if digital people have a defining conceit, it is that humans are plastic, and that there is a hack for just about everything.

Each blockage HowAboutWe found among the committed couples they studied has a corresponding feature on the new site. To overcome the inertia it detected, the site will offer fully packaged date ideas. To address logistical woes, HowAboutWe is working to make the packages available with a single click that will book your taxi, theater tickets and corner table at the Italian trattoria.

For Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout, each idea leads to another. They could arrange babysitters for couples. They could help slouchy husbands send, with one click, fancy date invitations that suggest a labor of many clicks. They could allow couples to follow the dates of other couples they admire — a digital way to keep up with the Joneses.

It is difficult in speaking to Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout to avoid the feeling that there is something personal in this quest. They built their singles site back when they were single and seeking dates. They have since each found a steady romantic partnership, and perhaps they want to improve marriage before taking its solemn vows for themselves.

“There is inertia that makes love hard to sustain, just like there is inertia that makes health hard to sustain over time,” Mr. Schildkrout said. “But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a truly noble goal — and something people want and will pay for — to try to fight that inertia, to create an upward love curve. We want an exponential love curve when we measure love against time.”

Dating Other Couples May Improve Your Romantic Relationship

Want to put the spark back in your romantic relationship? Start dating other couples, suggests a new study.

Romantic relationships often start out as enjoyable or even exciting, but sometimes may become routine and boring. A Wayne State University study has revealed that dating couples who integrate other couples into their social lives are more likely to have happy and satisfying romantic relationships.

Richard B. Slatcher, assistant professor of psychology in WSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a resident of Birmingham, Mich., specializes in social and health psychology.

His recent research suggested that spending quality time with other couples might be an important way to improve long-term dating relationships.

His study investigated 60 dating couples in a controlled laboratory setting. The object was to better understand how friendships between couples are formed, and to learn how these friendships affected each couple’s romantic relationship.

Each couple was paired with another couple and given a set of questions to discuss as a group. Half of the groups were given high-disclosure questions intended to spark intense discussion, while the other half were given small-talk questions that focused on everyday, unemotional activities.

“In this study, we discovered that those couples who were placed in the “fast friends” group felt closer to the couples they interacted with, and were more likely actually to meet up with them again during the following month,” said Slatcher. “We also learned that these same couples felt that this friendship put a spark in their own relationships, and they felt much closer to their romantic partners.”

The couples in the high-disclosure group reported greater increases in positive feelings after the intense interaction. They also felt the interaction was more novel and that they learned new things about their romantic partner compared to couples in the small-talk group. In addition, one-third of the couples in the high-disclosure group contacted the other couple they met in the study, while none of the couples in the small-talk group initiated contact with the couple they had met.

“This study suggests that if your romantic relationship has a case of the doldrums, having fun with another couple may help make your own relationship more satisfying,” said Slatcher.

The study recently appeared in Personal Relationships.

Les 10 commandements de Rencontres

In The Dating Game, Speaking Styles Count

American researchers have found a new way to predict the success of a relationship -- compare the speaking style of a couple.

In a study of college students they found that couples whose language was in sync were almost four times more likely to want to see each other again than those who did not use similar language.

“We are able to predict this at higher rates than the people themselves,” said Professor James Pennebaker, of the University of Texas, who headed the research team.

The researchers, who reported their findings in the journal Psychological Science, focused on function words -- which are not nouns or verbs but the words that show how those words relate. For example: a, be, anything, that, will, him.

“Function words are highly social and they require social skills to use,” Pennebaker explained. “For example, if I’m talking about the article that’s coming out, and in a few minutes I make some reference to ’the article’, you and I both know what that article means.”

As part of the experiment, about 40 pairs of college students participated in four-minute speed dates and had their conversations recorded.

“We found that function words are a powerful reflection of somebody’s psychological state,” Pennebaker said. “You can tell when people are in the same state or are on the same page.”

A second part of the study examined the everyday instant message conversations between already dating couples over a 10-day period. The conversations were analyzed by a computer for words and conversational patterns.

Pennebaker said that researchers were once again able to fairly accurately predict which couples would continue dating.

They found that the speaking and writing styles couples use during interactions are a good indicator of whether or not a relationship will be successful.

“The higher their style matching scores, the more likely they were to still be dating later on,” Pennebaker said.

About 80 percent of the couples whose conversational styles were similar were still dating three months after the experiment, compared with just 54 percent of couples whose styles were markedly different.

Pennebaker said that the results were notable because they occur during everyday conversations, even though most people don’t notice.

“None of us pay attention to these words,” Pennebaker said. “What’s wonderful about this is we don’t really make that decision; it just comes out of our mouths.”

(Reporting by Bernd Debusmann Jr., editing by Patricia Reaney)

Why Do The Fireworks Fade?

Why do some couples keep on having sex, but stop kissing and canoodling? It’s a funny phenomenon, the disappearing kiss, but not uncommon. Kissing shouldn’t be underestimated. Next to the genitalia, it has more nerve endings than any other part of the body. It is incredibly sensitive to touch and that is part of the appeal of kissing, along with all the passionate connotations we have with it. There are many different types of kisses, from the ‘nana-peck’ to nibbles to French to flirty. There are even books devoted to the art of kissing and the different kinds of kisses we can engage in. So with all that variety and pleasure, it’s rather sad when the kiss fades out of a relationship. It doesn’t always happen – many couples who have been together for decades upon decades still kiss as a symbol and experience of affection, as well as an initiation for sex, and a part of foreplay. But still many others lose kissing as part of their sexual encounters together and as a result, lose a lot of the passion they once shared together.

The kind of mechanical sex like “scratching an itch” that often befalls many couples over time, is essentially what I describe as maintenance sex” in a relationship. Long term relationships often survive with a heavy dose of maintenance sex and a lesser amount of “mind-blowing sex”, which is more often reserved for special occasions, or when you both have time to indulge in more passionate, time consuming, ‘gourmet of delights’ sex … and between work, stresses, and children, it’s not realistic for most couples to be running through the Kama Sutra every month. Maintenance sex doesn’t have to be all mechanical and no passion, however. It can feel very nice, orgasmic, pleasurable, be fun and romantic, certainly connect the two of you, but probably not knock your socks off. Birds probably won’t sing and the earth won’t move. But still, very pleasurable and certainly does the job.

However, once you have years of only maintenance sex without ever indulging in at least some mind-blowing special sex, then yes, the chances are high that your quality of even your maintenance sex will go down. And that’s when you find yourselves in a relationship that’s loving, but not hot. And in which really the only kissing you share is outside of a sexual or romantic context, such as saying goodbye at the front door, or at an airport. And soon enough, you’re scratching your head about how to re-introduce the passionate kiss with the one you love.

If this is you, don’t feel badly – it’s not that uncommon. And in fact there is often a lot of pressure, more so even, on couples who have been together the longest, because the assumption is you’ve been together so long that intimacy should be your second language between you, and you should be so fluent that you don’t have to, or need to, talk about, bedroom problems and you certainly shouldn’t feel shy about kissing – after so many years together! But it’s precisely this pressure which makes that gulf wider between you, and the attempt to initiate something which has disappeared from your relationship so long ago, that much more awkward and difficult.

Re-introduce the passionate kiss as you would share a first kiss with someone new, or when you were with your partner for the first time. Slowly. Romance together first. Prioritise the relationship between you and decide you’re going to spend time together as a couple. Work on touching more, cuddling, being affectionate, increase the number of little pecks you give each other, or at least you give her. Work your way up to kissing again and the next time you have sex together that isn’t rushed because one of you has to leave for work, or you’re tired and want to sleep, or you’re trying to squeeze a quickie in before the kids wake up and might hear, lay a deep kiss on your lovee! And keep on smooching, and tell them how much you love it. Positive praise will be met with more positive reception and soon enough kissing will be in your love life again – this time to stay.

Marriage-Minded Do Better Online Than At Bars

In the marketplace for romance, megapixels are now officially more effective than bar-side flirtations.

More than twice as many couples who married last year met through online dating services than at a club or social event, according to a new survey commissioned by Match.com.

The survey found that 17 percent of those who married in the past three years met online, making it the third-most-frequent method of introduction, behind meeting through a mutual acquaintance or at work or school.

“Online dating is by now a preferred way for singles to find dates,” says Joe Tracy, publisher of Online Dating Magazine. “I think the stigma that has been attached to online dating -- and there’s still some of that today -- has greatly decreased. Everybody knows someone who has done online dating, so people are less fearful to talk about it.”

The study, conducted by the research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, shows how quickly online dating -- in existence for less than two decades -- has revolutionized the way people find and pursue potential mates.

“It does seem to have displaced all other forms of dating,” says Susan Frohlick, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Manitoba who has studied online dating. “I would say that it’s been in the last five years that it’s become hyper-mainstream.”

The survey also found that one out of five singles has dated someone they met through an online dating site and that one out of every five new relationships owes its origins to the Internet. It also claims that among recently married couples who met online, 30 percent initially made contact through Match.com. The site has about 3 million active users at any given time, according to the company.

Online dating statistics have always been hazy and are frequently contradictory. The Match.com-sponsored survey, for instance, found that 17 percent of couples who married in 2007 met through online dating sites, but a Harris Interactive poll sponsored by eHarmony found that only 9 percent of couples married that year were introduced through such services. (The Harris study claims that 2 percent of recently married American couples met through eHarmony.)

Regardless of discrepancies, the findings point to the increasingly prominent role the Web is playing in helping singles find someone with whom they want to walk down the aisle. Online Dating Magazine estimates that 120,000 U.S. couples who marry each year met online.

“It’s pretty seismic, if you think about it,” says Greg Blatt, chief executive of Dallas-based Match.com. “You’ve got this new thing out of nowhere that has really jumped in and taken on a significant piece of this basic human interaction, which is meeting people.”

Blatt attributes the industry’s growth to the rise of technology and changes in society that have made it more difficult to meet people through traditional methods. People marry later, work longer hours and live farther from family members who might introduce them to a neighbor’s handsome, eligible nephew. Laptops and modems stepped in to fill the void.

“This is just meeting,” Blatt says. “It’s no different meeting on Match than it is meeting at a party, or at a restaurant or on a subway. . . . Once you’ve met, it’s real life; you either fall for each other or you don’t. You either have a great romance or you don’t.

“It’s not like computers are taking the place of romance,” he says. “It’s just another way to put yourself in a position to meet somebody that then gives you a chance for romance.”

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