Who'd Be A www.wife?

One of the internet's biggest perks is that, with a potential audience numbering into their millions, you can be guaranteed to find a few fans – just look at how quickly Sandi Thom's career took off when she abandoned Scotland for cyberspace. In fact, as Ebay has taught us, advertise your tat to enough people and before you know it, you have a bidding war on your hands.

A 29-year-old single man appears to have extended this principle to his love life with the blog Are You My Wife? Allan Wills, originally from Canada but now settled in north east London, has set up a website inviting women from across the world to date him, with the long-term aim of finding a wife.

What makes Wills' blog different from a standard dating website, albeit with the gender ratio skewed heavily in his favour, is he has pledged to write about the process for the entertainment of his growing army of internet fans.

Wills denies that his site is a gimmick, billing it instead as a way to "through himself open" to the full potential out there. So far he has certainly been successful, attracting women from countries as diverse as the US, Hungary and Vietnam – not bad considering I can't remember the last time I went out with someone from south of Elephant and Castle.

Despite the rather upfront title of the blog, Wills also stresses he is not in any rush to get married, warning chapel operators in Vegas not to hold their breath. A bloke after my own heart, he proclaims that he would rather be happily single than unhappily married – much to the disappointment of the alarming number of mail order brides that contacted him through the site.

Call me a bitter feminist, but I think Wills has an advantage in being a man. For many women, a man openly looking for a wife holds a certain appeal, whereas I'm sure that a woman making a similar internet appeal would be met with much more scorn.

It's one of those frustrating inequalities: men get sent to prison for murder and receive a bizarre number of marriage proposals from random women while women spend several Christmases pretending they like a boyfriend's mother and still can't get a life-long commitment out of him.

As effective a gimmick as this may be, is Wills actually going to have much success with this site? Given the number of dates he's set to go on, the odds seem stacked in his favour that he'll meet someone he clicks with, while at the same time the sheer volume of offers is likely to lead him always holding out for someone that little bit better. And with the quirkiness of love being such as it is I have a suspicion he'll meet his future wife at the bus stop or the cereal aisle at Sainsbury's instead.

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