With Mother’s Day looming it conjures up images of happy families off for a leisurely Sunday lunch to toast the lady of the day. Mam and Dad sit side by side while their cheery children lavish affection and praise on the wonderful woman that raised them. While this may be the case for some, it certainly has become more the ideal, than the norm in recent years.
Before we started Intro matchmaking we assumed most of our clientele would be singletons looking to start a romantic adventure and although up to half of our members have never been married, I have been overwhelmed by the volume of separated and divorced women that pick the phone up to us. Although they range from 30 to 74, most tell a similar story of the devastating, and often surprise breakdown of their marriage.
The census in 2011 shows that divorce rates had increased by a whopping 150% since 2002. And while there were 88,918 separated or divorced men in 2011, there were 115,046 women. Overall, men are more likely to re-marry than women with 39% of ever-divorced men re-married compared with only 28% of women. This shows that divorced men are often marrying single women.
The numbers paint a pretty grim picture for women looking for love the 2nd time around and in the face of an uphill struggle to meet an eligible man, what hills can be climbed? Thankfully we are not at the mercy of the dancehalls any longer, there are alternatives. In a survey we conducted before we launched Intro we discovered that 30% of those looking for a relationship join clubs and take up hobbies in the hopes of meeting someone there. While speed-dating seems to be a fad of the past generating very little success generally, 80% of our respondents found Pubs and Clubs to be intimidating venues to meet a match.
Online dating has taken the world by storm with “online” being quoted as the standard place to have met a partner in London for instance. The variety of online dating sites that are available to choose from is staggering. Even though the practice of putting up a photo and completing a tell all profile which is available (theoretically) to all and sundry, can be daunting for those that are concerned with privacy, online dating certainly has its’ merits, generating anecdotal success amongst most Irish people in their 20’s and 30’s.
But what if you have good reason not to stand in an online shop window, what if you can’t run the risk of your clients, colleagues, ex-husband or children stumbling across your online ad for romance then there are just a couple of plausible options to choose form.
Of the attached people we surveyed, half said they had been introduced to their partner so with that substantial proof of success, pumping the friends for potential introductions is the way to go. Once those options have been exhausted there’s dating agencies like Intro matchmaking. Whether you are dating in Dublin or any other County, Matchmaking agencies specialise in arranging introductions, taking all the hard work out of the process of meeting someone. Completely private and confidential, with no profile information made available online to the public, even phone numbers are not passed on.
Separations and divorces are difficult to recover from but when the time comes that you feel you, or your Mother is ready to move on and meet someone else, all is not lost, there are plenty of options and far better to be available in this day and age than decades ago when a marriage breakdown largely meant a long and lonely existence thereafter.