I hate to bargain. Even mention of word brings me out in a cold sweat. Of course, it’s not my fault, it’s my mother who is to blame – she made me this way.

My mother, Nancy is a part-time property developer, art dealer and car buyer - and a full time bargain hunter and dealmaker. She’ll go to any lengths to get a bargain and she’s very good at it.

The only problem is that during our childhood, she always insisted on taking me, my brother and my sister along, either to applaud her latest deal or to learn from her expertise – I’m not sure which.

But what I am sure of is that my childhood memories are dominated by long boring trips from neighborhood to neighborhood, frustrating waits in stuffy offices while my mother argued with one realtor after another, and then meticulous room-by-room examinations once a property had tweaked her interest.

These marathon sessions were followed by long discourses to us kids on journey home, and then still more discussions with my father once we reached there. And our home life was a bit nomadic - a change and a jump to next rung of property ladder came around every two years or so.

My mother is a truly remarkable woman. Now in her seventies, she has lost none of her zest for buying, developing and then moving on – she’s doing it again as I write.

One of big changes that we see is in dating. In dating now, women feel freer to be aggressor. We can ask men out on dates. We can initiate intimate contact. We can even pay for date (if we want too). We also have biggest selection of online singles.

In online dating industry it is statistically true that most services have a higher number of male members then women. That gives us advantage. We have a larger scope to choose from, and our personal ads get exposed to more men. We can easily initiate first contact or sit back and watch flood of emails that come in from our personal ad. Then, we can play it out on our terms. Women get to finally start relationships on emotional levels instead of sexual levels (again…if you so choose).