14 DAY TRIAL // A recent study conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, revealed that the Internet is quite a simple way to meet someone to marry, since lots of respondents admitted they having found their sweetheart online. According to the findings of the research, six percent of the married Internet users who participated to the survey said they had met their partner online, 34 percent of them on an online dating website, 19 percent in a chatroom and 18 percent through an instant messaging webpage.
The research included no less than 2401 individuals and 929 couples, all of them living in the United Kingdom.
Getting back to the results, the Internet users who went out with somebody they had met online, scheduled meetings in bars (25 percent), at work (quite curious I would say - 19 percent) or were introduced by their friends (14 percent), according to the findings published by Oxford.
And now, the juicy part: 20 percent of the married Internet users admitted they spy their partner every once in a while by reading their emails or the instant messaging archive. Moreover, 13 percent of them said they had checked the browser history which had let them view the websites their partners had visited.
And more interesting, 97 percent of the respondents said that they would feel "unhappy" in case their partners fell in love online, while 94 percent pointed to cyber sex. 92 percent of the respondents considered disclosing intimate details a potential problem of the relationship while 85 percent would prefer their partner to avoid flirting online.
With a continuously growing popularity of the online social networking websites, including here MySpace and Facebook, the number of people who get married after meeting somebody online will surely rise in the near future.