Hot or Not. Whether you are sincerely seeking a significant other or just want someone to warm your heart or your bed for the night, dating apps seem like a practical solution. I hate dating apps. My personal favorite?

Used Book in Good Condition Daphne Ballinger has learned to accept her deceased, eccentric aunt’s strange request that she marry in order to inherit her.

Many, many people spend thousands of hours of their lives in pursuit of that special someone. Because we’re all after “the one,” aren’t we? Which is why making a business out of romance has been an age-old pursuit: florists for courtship; jewelers for marriage. It’s only sensible, then, that with the scalable economics of the internet, industrial-scale matchmakers would come along. But, while most of these businesses want to cater to happy relationships, a successful matchmaker needs some couples to flourish, for the testimonials, but it also, and more importantly, needs a ready supply of unhappy singles .

How do they do it? Online dating arrived with the web — in the early nineties — and was an evolution of the commercial matchmaking services of that time: lonely hearts ads, video-dating, and so on. But, unlike its predecessors, which were seen mostly as a service for undesirables, online dating quickly rose out of infamy and into the mainstream. Not quite to the standards of real-life dating , mind you: surveys still report that people who’ve never visited an online dating site have a mostly negative view of the whole thing.