This site means to replace the maiden aunts of yore, who sat on their front porches gossiping about the good, the bad and the ugly in their neighborhoods. When I checked out the Web site (someone has to do the research), the first profile I encountered was an "eligible" bachelor who was a stunt man in Hollywood. Prospective dates should check out his medical insurance along with his moonlight stunts.

Reading "how to" books and cruising the Internet, however, takes hours out of a day, and many single women are turning their backs on the dating industry and reverting to the old-fashioned method of leaving love to chance.

"I realized I could be starting my own business in the time I was spending looking at these ads and crafting these responses," Sara Cambridge, a typical Internet cruiser, tells the New York Times. She turned off her computer and took a class in business administration.

When Rachel Greenwald discovered there were 28 million single women in America glutting the market for the 17 million men over 35, she decided a woman should regard herself as the valuable "commodity" she used to be. Women have shattered the glass ceiling and broke their glass slippers in the process. She calls them the "Lost Cinderella Generation."

In a book called "Find A Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School," Greenwald urges the single woman to see herself as a "product," and advertise and market a brand image. To protect the brand, for example, she should always wear a push-up bra to fight off the accelerating effects of gravity. And never wear the pants: "Men are usually more attracted to women in skirts than in pants ... literally as well as figuratively."

Sleeping beauty has become working beauty, who wakes up to the world of romance with cellulite and an extra chin, so "don't be so picky about your prince."

Bette Davis said all this six decades ago, and with more style:

I'm either their first breath of spring,
Or else, I'm their last little fling.
I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup,
I either have to hold him off,
Or have to hold him up.
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold,
They're either too young or too old.