Today, banks credit check you before lending, and we check out the credentials of a house before buying it, or a business before investing. Increasingly, (mostly) women will also check that their new partner is all he claims to be. A private detective agency can run background checks to find out if your potential partner has a violent history, can be trusted to look after your children, has no dubious financial record, or, remotely, has a secret second life elsewhere. 

While it is possible to get hints at someone's past by checking on social media, talking to friends and so on, it is increasingly hard to find out about their deeper background. You should leave that to the professionals to ensure that a dream partner doesn't have a nightmare past. 

While these dilemmas appear on TV and in movies, they happen increasingly in the real world. Checking out someone's background is more important as our more mobile population mixes, with people knowing less and less about the history of their neighbours and friends, lovers and business partners.

A detective agency will work quietly in the background checking a variety of public sources and other records to find out the validity of a potential partner's claims. These can be things such as court reports, international watch lists, business directorships, or a person's deeper personal history. They can turn up issues that can either be dealt with by the couple, or see one party safely withdraw before any damage is done. 

While it might sound a touch extreme, if you wouldn't buy a house without checking every detail, then why would you get into a relationship without doing the same? They create shared personal, financial and child commitments that you need to be 100% confident about. Before you start off down that path, and for a reasonable fee, you can find out that your potential perfect partner is, indeed, all they claim to be. 

Since we can't all be dating our childhood sweetheart any more, it makes sense to be sure in a society where people drop into our lives from all sorts of different social, economic and personal backgrounds.