This period of courtship is sometimes seen as a precursor to engagement or marriage.

Dating as an institution is a relatively recent phenomenon which has mainly emerged in the last few centuries.

From the standpoint of anthropology and sociology, dating is linked with other institutions such as marriage and the family which have also been changing rapidly and which have been subject to many forces, including advances in technology and medicine.

In the quest to find romance, more of us have turned to online dating.

I receive close to 10 contacts per day across all my accounts from ladies I've never contacted. I may have to abandon giving a personal response to each one...

"We thought dating would be the obvious choice."The idea was for single people to make videos introducing themselves and saying what they were looking for, said Chen.

Once stigmatized as a venue for the desperate, online dating has become a normal part of the mating game.

A recent survey of 19,000 people who married between 20 found that 35 percent of these new couples met online, with about half of those meeting through an online dating site (Cacioppo et al., 2013).

I liked my completed profile a lot catchy, easy to read, and somewhat poetic.

I definitely received a few comments on how well my profile was written and then met a really great guy about 3 months after posting my new profile. I'm drowning in emails and winks from people reading the new profile!