The Serendipity system, designed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stores personal profiles of its members on a computer, along with information about what they desire in a perfect date.

In a crowded room you don’t even have to bother working out who takes your fancy. The phone does all that. If it spots another phone with a good match — male or female — the two handsets beep and exchange information using Bluetooth radio technology. The rest is up to you.

“The MIT team hopes to make technology-assisted dating more spontaneous and closer to the way people meet socially,” says New Scientist magazine, which reports the development in its latest issue. “It means throwing people in at the deep end, but in the dating industry this is considered a good thing.”

Technology is changing the way we date. For the shy and single, it has been the biggest aid to romance since the creation of the red rose. Chatrooms and online dating have removed the need for those tongue-tied early encounters. No more clumsy small talk. No more fumbling presentations of chocolates or flowers.

“Research shows that the absence of things like eye contact actually liberates a person,” said Corinne Usher, a clinical psychologist who practises in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.

“Instead of inhibiting communication, it actually increases intimacy. The net also attracts a lot of people who are not outgoing — they might be shy or they might avoid social situations. Some people will go on the internet to have relationships that they can’t have in real life.”

Advertising a little of what you fancy is big business: one American website, www.craigslist.com, claims that it has 650m page visits every month. One of the great British internet success stories has been Friends Reunited, which began as a forum for getting back in touch with school friends but has led to many old flames being reignited.

And here’s the rub. Text messaging, e-mail and mobile phones make it much easier to conduct an illicit affair — did we really fumble for coins in a phone box? — but the technology is so sophisticated that it is also much easier to be caught out.

“More and more cases that I deal with, in which infidelity is the key issue, now contain an element of mobile phone and internet use,” said Sandra Davis, head of family law at the solicitor Mishcon de Reya. “New forms of communication have been instrumental in the initial conception of infidelity.”

The extent of “electronic infidelity” has surprised her: “I didn’t think there would be the frequency of people using the internet, e-mail and chatrooms to initiate and nurture a relationship.

“I have had a number of clients who have reconnected with their first girlfriend. I have had people who were bored at home so started flirting in a chatroom and it became something more significant. Also, people who had relationship difficulties with their partners and found solace in another relationship which started out as innocent but then became a threat to their marriage.

“I have had clients whose partners became obsessively connected to the internet in an unreasonable behaviour situation where they would not have direct communications as their attentions were continuously directed at the screen.

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