both of my male cats cant stop staring at you!!!

It seems to me that i may be one of the youngest people at mingle... only people in their 30s 40s and 50s look at my profile, and in the forums.. i dont wanna step on anyone's toes by saying this but it seems i'm always the kid of the bunch....whats going on here?? where are all the other kiddies??

I have a totally baseless theory about this....

There are tons of younger local people on this site. I see new ones running through "People You Might Be Interested In" every day. They never post in the forums, they don't answer e-mails (in my experience) and it doesn't seem that they participate in the site at all.

My hunch is that they're not here because they're seriously looking for anything. They're here because they ran across a link, or a friend mentioned the site to them, so they thought they'd check it out, post a 7-word profile and a pic of them with 3 other people, and wander off into the sunset without ever giving it another thought.

My theory is that people don't consider on-line dating an option until they've been burned and trampled on enough times in real life, to the point that "alternatives" start to look better.

I mean, when I was younger, I had lots of single friends who had lots of single friends. If I wanted to meet someone new, which I frequently did, all I had to do was call Annette or Deanna or Cathie or Lisa and tell them "Hey, I think it's time for a new girlfriend" and someone new would be calling the next day. It was quick, easy, and had the built-in advantage that my friends weren't going to hook me up with an arsonist or a phony bank teller or a fake kidnap victim -- all of which I have encountered on dating sites.

You get older, all of the formerly-single friends are now married with 2.4 kids, and all of their formerly-single friends are married (or divorced or separated or living with a cult in Montana) with 2.4 kids. The options have dried up.

So you try to come up with other ways to meet people.

On-line is easy, you don't have to leave the house, there are millions of free sites now, and somebody who lives 12,000 miles away isn't likely to show up drunk at your door at 3:30 in the morning.

I don't have any demographics to back it up, but I think if you could break down dating site membership by age, the vast majority of the women would be in the 25-50 group -- old enough to have become disenchanted with real life disappointments, and ready to try something new, and, hopefully, better.

Younger than that, they still have some sort of viable social network, through people they've known from school, with enough still unattached to create a "pool" of prospects.

But once people get older, get settled, get married, have a few kids, and THEN it all falls apart -- well, it's much harder to get back into the whole dating thing.

And I think THAT'S when they start looking seriously at dating sites.

Oddly enough, the lurkers who look at my profile are almost inevitably either under 22 or over 50. I don't know what to make of that. But they never say anything, anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter....!

wow thanx for bothering with such an in depth analysis of my predicament what you're saying does make sense, us kiddies just chat up the people in our classes at university or at parties if we wanna meet someone... not much use for a dating website yet i guess, but i keep coming back because you people are so genuinely nice its almost scary