By Andrea Orr

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - The culture is known to favor head scarves, modesty and marriages forged within close family and social circles. But even in Iran, single woman have begun taken a much more assertive approach to dating. They are posting their photos -- with makeup and without head scarves -- on the Internet.

Parvaneh, a 32-year-old teacher living in Tehran recently put up a profile on the popular American dating site, Match.com, advertising herself to an entire world of men as a "lovely girl" who was interested in painting, sports and shopping, and valued beauty "both in the appearance and in the mind."

She is just one of a growing number of men and women hailing from some of the world's most traditional societies who are breaking with tradition and turning to Internet sites like Match.com to find dates.

Match.com, the Dallas, Texas, company that is jointly owned by Ticketmaster Inc and USA Interactive , has for years enjoyed strong growth in the United States and much of Western Europe. Its paid subscriber base surged to 527,662 at the end of the first quarter this year, from 182,332 the same time a year earlier.

Still, some thought the company was being a little too optimistic when it set up a truly international site enabling members to search the world over, and even narrow their quest to such far flung places as Albania, Botswana, Estonia, Greenland and Uzbekistan.

Now, however, singles from many of those places are giving it a whirl. And some unlikely countries like Iran have produced hundreds of Match.com members. Language barriers on the English-language Match.com rarely present a problem, since many of the site's overseas member say they are most interested in meeting someone in the United States.

WEST MOVES EAST

"Our international business has been growing incredibly rapidly," Joe Cohen, general manager of Match.com's international division, said in a recent interview. "It has been a surprise, especially in some of the places where we didn't expect to see strong growth, like Latin America and Italy and Spain.

The company has swiftly responded to the burst in overseas demand with plans to launch new country specific sites later this year in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Peru, Portugal, Denmark, Austria, Columbia, Brazil, Korea, China, India, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.

Match.com, which signs up more than 160,000 new members in a typical week, estimates that 25 percent of its members come from outside the United States. It says that that group more than doubled during the first six months of this year.

If those figures reveal the continued potential of a business that has already grown explosively in the United States, the anecdotal stories from some of the most closed societies, suggest even the most optimistic forecasts may not fully capture the future expansion of these online dating services.

While Match.com says it has not targeted most predominately Muslim and Arab countries, the word has gotten out. Younger generations say they are not necessarily rebelling against their parents ways, but believe that the Internet may be as good a way as any to lead them to a nice traditional marriage.

"My parents cannot accept this kind of meeting," Parvaneh explained over e-mail recently as she described a date in a local park she arranged over the Internet with a man who identified himself only by the color and license number of his car.

She did, however, tell her sister, her friends, and even her niece. It was her niece who introduced her to Match.com in the first place, one day when she was nursing a broken heart over a past relationship.

LONELY ARABIAN NIGHTS

It was hardly a novel concept. Although Parvaneh says her friends go online -- usually in public Internet cafes -- for a number of reasons like serious research, she finds that "most of the young people use it as a means to find new friends in other countries.

"It was very common in Iran that they should marry a person in their own family, like their cousins, and if one of them wanted to marry some one out of their family, his or her family would break up relations," she explained over e-mail.

Now, however, her peers are going online to socialize far beyond tight family circles. One friend began corresponding with a man in Texas, eventually traveled to Turkey to meet him, and is now trying to move to the United States.

Although the women in Saudi Arabia have not yet turned to Match.com, it is becoming popular with the country's men, such as Majed, a 24-year-old engineer in Jeddah, who says he is interested in meeting any woman, of any religion, any age between 18 and 40 who lives within 500 miles of his hometown.

UDate, another popular dating service, is seeing similar success abroad, and is planning a push later this year into overseas markets, where it hopes to compete with some of the local dating services that are rapidly appearing.

One large market UDate has identified is India, which has become its second-largest business outside the United States after Britain.

"The overseas market represents a massive opportunity," said Martin Clifford, chief operating officer of UDate.

Perhaps. Yet some customers who eagerly signed up for these services are still waiting for the goods, and say their experiences online have taught them that not even the Internet can solve some of the problems inherent in dating.

"We met each other once more," Parvaneh said of her recent encounter in the park. "I wrote to him to thank him for his hospitality and haven't heard from him anymore."

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