Are you by any chance a swinging gay Russian Christian? If so, your chances of finding love online look pretty good.
If you're a pet-loving transgendered widow, don't hold your breath.
Here's what we're talking about: we scanned all Lycos user searches in April for the words personals, singles, dating, and matchmaking. Then we looked for descriptive terms users had paired with those words: gay personals or Christian matchmaking, for instance. Then we tallied that pool of adjectives to see which were most requested by users.
Here are the results, along with the percentage of people who requested each:
18.3% Gay
15.4% Christian
8.9% Interracial
8.0% Jewish
5.6% Russian
5.5% Swingers
5.4% boards
5.3% BBW
5.1% LDS
3.4% Black
3.4% Foreign Woman
2.9% Catholic
1.9% Nude
1.9% Lesbian
1.7% Spanking
1.5% International
1.3% Transsexual
1.3% Gay Teen
1.1% Widowed
1.1% Pet Lovers
1.0% Transgender
A few explanations: BBW stands for "big beautiful women," an online term which sometimes carries a naughty leer and which sometimes is perfectly wholesome. LDS is "Latter-Day Saints," the formal name of the Mormon Church. That's an impressive showing for Mormon singles, relatively speaking; Infoplease says the church has about 5 million U.S. members compared to the Catholic church's 61 million.
The heavy Russian connection is probably due to the popularity of sites offering Russian brides, in which most of the ladies seem to be models named Tatiana who say they want a man they can cook and clean for.
It hadn't occurred to us that animal lovers would constitute a dating subset all their own, but when you think about it, it makes sense. And perhaps their interest in rolled-up newspapers is shared by the folks requesting spanking personals.
For more on the fascinating topic of romance, may we recommend a visit to the Lycos Romance Community? You won't regret it.
