Swedes flirt by SMS and date online the most in Nordic region

One out of two Swedes has flirted with someone by sending an SMS or MMS message, and one out of five has tried online dating on the Internet. Swedes also use new technology for dating and flirt more often than the Danes and Finns. These are some of the findings of a recent Nordic survey on communication habits that was commissioned by TeliaSonera.

People living in the Nordic region share a similar attitude toward modern communication channels in many ways, but there are differences between the countries when it comes to flirting and dating. About half of the Swedes (50 percent) and the Norwegians (47 percent) use SMS, MMS and the Internet for flirting and dating, while the comparative percentages are lower for the Danes (35 percent) and the Finns (33 percent). Eight out of ten people residing in the Nordic countries have a mobile phone, seven out of ten regularly send SMS messages and the majority have access to the Internet. Perhaps the most surprising finding in the survey was that people in Finland use SMS and the Internet less for flirting and dating. It is surprising because the Finns, in many respects, are very mature users of information technology and use mobile phones and SMS for other purposes to a greater extent than other Nordic residents. In other survey findings, an almost equal percentage of women (41 percent) and men (42 percent) have flirted by sending SMS or MMS messages. However, more men than women use online dating services – 24 percent of the men in the survey have tried online dating, as against 13 percent of the women. In addition, men are more frequent users of online dating – 7 percent in the survey stated that they date often, or rather often, through the Internet, compared with 4 percent of the women respondents. About the survey: 2,063 people between the age of 16 and 64 in Sweden, Denmark, Norge and Finland answered questions in an e-mail survey. The respondents were randomly selected and are representative of the percentage of the population with access to the Internet. The survey was commissioned by TeliaSonera and conducted by the Cint research company.