Mothers outnumber fathers 4:1 on dating site
Founder blames confidence issues among older men
A new online dating brand is facing an unlikely predicament: It’s entirely too popular with women.
MyLovelyParent, a site on which adult children help their single parents find companionship, launched in October to such positive reviews that it led to a flurry of registrations worldwide. While that would normally be good news for a fledgling business, the ratio of women to men is about 4:1 — a problematic phenomenon for a matchmaking site.
Although demographics might divine this dating dilemma — in Canada, for instance, seven in 10 male seniors live as part of a couple, compared to just four in 10 female seniors — site founder Matt Connolly believes life expectancy isn’t the whole story.
“I think it has much more to do with confidence,” says Connolly. “The older we get as chaps, the less confident we become in meeting people. As a result, the fear of failure builds up and we eventually stop trying.”
Enter Older Gent Academy, an initiative launching in January that aims to awaken male seniors’ inner Clark Gable. The first 1,000 dads registered get free membership on MyLovelyParent — for as long as it takes to find someone special — and four times a year, one of them will receive complementary coaching and a tailored suit.
Connolly, a 35-year-old entrepreneur from the U.K., confesses his reason for wanting more men on the site is somewhat self-serving.
“It sounds like a PR cliché, but my mum literally said to me, ‘Can you help me find my knight in shining armour?’” he recalls. “It was the light bulb moment that made me realize there was probably a whole stack of other people who’d love for their single parent to have companionship.”
Connolly’s first order of business in creating MyLovelyParent was simplicity, as he’d found competitor sites to be either too complex or too ethically murky.
A single parent must be signed-up by their adult child, who initiates the process by writing their mom or dad’s profile.
The parent is then invited to finish that profile and peruse the site, with potential love connections flagged to them by their child (the amount of control the child has over the process from that point is determined by the parent).
Despite limited marketing outside the U.K., MyLovelyParent has seen roughly 800 profiles created in seven countries, including Canada.