Maria (34) is single and lives in the west of Ireland. She works in senior management and has found that men are too scared by her success to get serious, or else want something casual and uncommitted.

"I tend to go round with a group of friends of both sexes, but that's off-putting for an outsider," she says. "If you're in a big group, you don't get approached very often. I stopped saying what I did for a living when I met people, because I found they made assumptions or felt threatened. I wanted to meet someone who could accept me as I am."

Luke (40) is also single and returned from England to set up a business in the west of Ireland last year. "I found that most of my friends here were married and there are very few people to meet in this rural area," he says. "I began to wonder about coming home. I thought I would give it a year, and felt I would be heading back."

Last autumn, Luke and Maria heard about unattached.com and joined at about the same time. They discovered each other's profiles, and liked what they read (Maria made contact first, but, for weeks, Luke thought he had). They talked online once a week, then more frequently, before Luke asked for Maria's email address. After a month, they met in her home town, a two-hour drive from his.

"I was in the hotel first, very nervous," he says. "I knew we could be friends, that we could sit down and talk for hours. I worried that I wouldn't fancy her, and some women came in that had me worried! But when I saw Maria - tall, dark, attractive - I knew it would be okay."

"I was sick with nerves," Maria says. "And I was worried too that there would be no chemistry. But I needn't have worried. At the end of the evening, I talked about the next weekend, something I would never do in a million years, but that kind of ease felt okay for both of us."

Luke and Maria are now a couple; they talk each day and get together every weekend. "We both liked the site when we logged on," says Luke. "Some of those kind of sites are very tacky, and for me it was a bit like an old-fashioned courtship where you could get to know someone and take your time."

"I had been thinking of some of those dating agencies, but they are quite expensive and you don't really have the control about who they find for you," Maria says.