The days are long gone when unmarried men were known as bachelors and unmarried women as spinsters, and when it was generally presumed that marriage was the object of both groups. There is no precise demarcation separating those days from the first stirrings of the singleton; but much evidence points to 1970 as the beginning of the steady rise of singleness as a valid mainstream lifestyle. In Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of “the Single,” Zoe Strimpel identifies the period 1970–2000 as a time of momentous changes in the perception of the unmarried. She analyzes the sexual and social upheaval that led to their changed status, and she describes the proliferation of commercial services that burgeoned through catering for the new breed of singles.

Strimpel is both a journalist (with a regular column in the Daily Telegraph), and an academic (a research fellow at the University of Sussex). The specialist language and references in Seeking Love in Modern Britain make the book a wonderfully rich resource for academics, and it is also of great interest to the informed general reader.

Chapter 1, “‘Live Alone and Like It?’ Singleness in Late Twentieth-Century Britain,” examines the emergence of a developing cohort of singles: people neither married, divorced, nor widowed expanded from 21 percent of the population of England and Wales in 1970 to 30 percent in 2000. The reasons for this change include the 1967 Abortion Act and 1969 Divorce Reform Act; the Equal Pay Act; the launch of the Women's Liberation movement; legislation and reform that improved family planning services (such as the 1973 NHS Reorganisation Act); and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. New attitudes, products, and lifestyles abounded: individualism, “permissiveness” (sexual and otherwise), “the pill,” feminism, cohabitation, self-realization, all took off as the media latched on. Singleness featured prominently in books, academic reports, the rapidly growing medium of television, newspapers, and magazines. Magazines boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, noticeably women's magazines, whose agony aunts, such as Marje Proops and Irma Kurtz, responded to cries for help, frequently from single women floundering in the bewildering new order, seeking solutions to anxiety about their role, lack of confidence, and the prevalent scourge of loneliness. They wanted a partner, soulmate, companion, spouse, or friend, long-term or short. Both men and women turned to the veritable army of organizations that rose to meet their needs—chiefly introduction and dating agencies and personal advertisements.

Chapter 2, “The Matchmaking Industry, 1970–2000,” charts the steep rise in the number of services offering introductions between unmarried and like-intentioned people. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, advertisements for a spouse were carried by specialist publications, and the first enduring marriage bureau was established in 1939, introducing people seeking matrimonial partners. In 1970, personal advertising was increasing, boosted by acceptance in Singles magazine and Time Out, while in 1966 both the intentions and the methods of marriage bureaus were changed dramatically by Dateline, whose computer shelled out introductions based on its clients’ multifarious requirements. Lonely hearts became big business: in 1970, the Daily Mail estimated that there were four hundred dating agencies in Britain.

However, the legacy of suspicion, even criminality, that had always dogged commercial spouse-seeking still tainted personal advertisements, clubs for singles, and introduction and dating agencies. Looser sexual mores led to dates with strangers, mediated by paid agencies, being associated with dubious escort services, even prostitution. Dating and introduction agencies were unregulated and often perceived as fraudulent and potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, entrepreneurs leaped on to the new and lucrative bandwagon of arranging introductions for needy clients, who were unlikely to complain effectively as using an agency carried a stigma: agencies were for unattractive losers.

Chapter 3, “Representations of the Mediated Dating Industry,” pinpoints the role of the media, especially newspapers, in building up the image and consequently the use of “lonely hearts” and matchmaking services. Journalists, editors, and television producers relished the abundant supply of features and stories, from financial articles about agencies as businesses to analyses of the changing role and expectations of successful young career women and dramatic tales of narrow escapes from a violent stranger who on paper was a potential trusted lover or friend.

As consumerism and a preoccupation with “lifestyle” grew over the period, so agencies focused their marketing strategies. They portrayed agencies as a modern, pragmatic, respectable answer to the modern problems of attractive, busy, financially strong, clever, independent people who lacked time rather than friends or social contacts. But the media persisted in highlighting any connection between crime and dating agencies. In the 1980s, four out of forty-eight Times articles about lonely hearts had a criminal hook, but in the 1990s the proportion rose to twenty-three out of 109.

In chapter 3, Strimpel also examines in detail all aspects of mediated dating, such as class, sex, economics, objectives, romance, feminism, fear, rejection, needs, expectations, fraud, disappointment—all in the context of the increasing commercialization of the search for “The One.”

Chapter 4, “Mediated Daters and the Experience of Matchmaking,” presents first-person accounts of agency-mediated dates. These accounts encompass a variety of approaches to this highly personal experience, some clients turning to an agency in desperation, others in a considered manner, hopeful but not despairing. Interviewed by Strimpel, clients describe their decision to try and to choose an agency, the registration process, the meetings—variously ghastly, funny, happy, scary, depressing—subsequent communication with the agency, and the end results.

These personal stories frequently end in disappointment. Strimpel's exhaustive study, including face-to-face interviews, leads her to the conclusion that “As the thickening tide of dating manuals in the late 1980s and 1990s made clear, agencies and personal ads could make it possible for singles to search, but it was up to them how successfully they did so. But however much they decided to work to bring it about, and however ‘modern’ this effort seemed to be, the sense that a more effortless romantic fate was out there somewhere hovered over the process. The mystery of the balance between pragmatism and destiny in contemporary approaches to love has remained unresolved” (154–55).