Looking
For Love: Finding Romance On The Internet
With
the popularity of online dating growing by leaps and bounds, more
and more people are trying to find love in cyberspace.
J.M. Buck
The
practice of Internet dating, which was stigmatized until recently,
has become fairly commonplace in our society. A huge number of
websites have sprung up, almost overnight, catering to people
seeking romance, friendship, and even casual sex.
Almost everybody knows someone who has met their significant other
through online dating. As success stories mount, so do the number
of subscribers to the Internet dating revolution, creating what
has become a multi-million dollar industry with revenues topping
$214 million in the first half of 2003 (Source: Forbes).
For someone new to the online dating scene, statistics like those
found on eHarmony.com, a popular online dating service that boasts
over 10,000 marriages to its credit, can give one a false sense
of security about Internet dating. There is no doubt that it is
possible to find “the one” through online dating,
however, it is also quite easy for the uninitiated, men and women
alike, to be taken in by “players” and people who
misrepresent themselves.
Teri Lawrence, a Maui radio show host and vacation rental business
owner, met her husband online. An entrepreneur at heart, Lawrence
and her business partner were living in Colorado when they decided
to start an online dating service. Lawrence was featured on the
front page of the site.
Lawrence’s husband-to-be was a subscriber to the service.
“He would constantly write me, and I would tell him I wasn’t
interested,” she recalled. “I had put in my profile
what I was interested in, and it wasn’t him.”
At the time, Lawrence, 43, was a single mother and in dire straits
financially. After a couple of months of persistent e-mails from
Scott, the man she would eventually marry, she gave in and decided
to meet him.
“He became like a guardian angel,” said Lawrence.
“He was bombarding us with presents, he sounded so genuinely
innocent. Me and my daughter bought into it.”
The couple came to Maui, and Lawrence ended up staying on the
island. Scott went back to the Mainland, and subsequently relocated
to Maui.
 |
| Teri
Lawrence, 43, radio personality. She found
love online, but it didn't go quite the way she thought
it would. |
Things
were not rosy, though. Lawrence discovered that Scott had been
seeing other women on the Mainland. He promised to be devoted
to her if she would marry him.
She did. Not long after their nuptials, Lawrence found out that
Scott, a traveling salesman, was not the financially independent
person that she had been led to believe he was. In reality, her
new husband was totally broke and had been living off of credit
cards for quite some time.
“I was a total idiot,” admits Lawrence. “I was
very, very gullible.”
The marriage ended in divorce two years later.
Many people involved in the Internet dating scene stick it out
through dating disasters, keeping their profiles updated in hopes
of finding that one special person to share their lives.
Mike O’Reilly, a freelance Maui artist, starting dating
online in 2000. After giving up on the Maui dating scene, O’Reilly
he felt that the online dating world was a good place to look,
as one is not limited to any particular geographical area in their
search for love.
Before long, O’Reilly, a 46-year-old single father, was
in a new relationship at the start of a shining new millennium.
His new romantic interest, Karen, lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“I told her right away that I was not looking for cyber-sex,”
said O’Reilly. “I wanted a real relationship.”
After e-mailing photos to each other and speaking every day on
the phone for five months, Mike and Karen were sure that they
were in love. It was time to meet face to face.
Their meeting was a revelation. “Something was missing,”
recalled O’Reilly. “Bluntly put, two and two should
equal four. But that’s not always the case,” he said
with a good-natured laugh.
O’Reilly and Karen tried to make the relationship work anyway.
She moved to Maui, but after about a year, both realized that
the “spark” just wasn’t there. They mutually
decided to end their relationship, and remained friends.
“People struggle to make their relationships ‘real,’”
reflected O’Reilly. He feels that one of the problems with
online dating is the tendency to “fall in love” with
the cyber-version of the person you are interested in.
“Women have on their best makeup and a nice, fancy dress
in their pictures,” he elaborated. “You talk, you
like their personality. Then you get them to send you another
couple pictures and they turn out to be 300 pounds with pimples.
It’s like, holy moly! I guess that’s you, but it don’t
look like your picture.” O’Reilly feels there a lot
of misrepresentation going in the Internet dating scene, with
men as well as women.
Lawrence says she’s never had any trouble with someone giving
her a false picture. “I’ve heard nightmare stories
about who you’re meeting, but I’ve never had that
problem – meeting weird people,” she said. “But
of course, my ex was weird,” Lawrence added.
 |
| Mike
O'Reilly, 46, freelance artist. After dating online
for five years, he is still keeping the faith. |
“The
biggest complaint I hear is that people lie,” said Eve Hogan,
author of Virtual Foreplay: Making Your Online Relationship a
Real-Life Success and relationship advisor for DreamMates.com
and Jdate.com. “There’s a certain number of people
who lie, but there’s also a certain number of people who
are using [online dating] as an opportunity to be more honest
than they’ve ever been in their lives.”
Hogan relays that people need to be more conscious when dating
online, as there are elements at play you wouldn’t find
in traditional dating, such as anonymity.
Anonymity creates a shield of safety. It can allow people to be
more brave and forthcoming than they would normally be, but it
also allows for people to disguise their intentions, if they so
desire. But this shouldn’t deter someone from trying their
luck online.
“If you meet someone creepy on the Internet, everybody blames
the Internet,” said Hogan. “But if you met that same
person at church, school or work, nobody would be blaming church,
school or work.”
Lack of self-awareness while creating a dating profile can be
another stumbling block in Internet romance sucess. With a large
amount of multiple-choice answers that one can check off when
creating an online profile, misrepresentation can occur accidentally.
“I could check off backpacking as one of my interests, and
a fellow sees that and says, ‘There she is! The woman that
will go backpacking every weekend with me,’” Hogan
exemplified. “What’s not in there is that I haven’t
backpacked for twenty years.”
With a staggering number of Internet dating services available,
it can be hard to know where to start. Match.com is by far the
largest site, with more than 30 dating sites in 18 different languages
spanning six continents. Micro-sites like Asianfriendfinder.com
or Jewishfriendfinder.com allow you to customize your search for
love in a certain venue. There’s even a dating site just
for horse lovers – EquestrianSingles.com.
According to Hogan, it’s best to use a paid service as opposed
to a free one. There’s a paper trail, as you need to pay
by credit card, so married people who are cheating are less likely
to use a paid site.
“I’ve found the sleaze-level on free sites like Yahoo
Singles and AOL to be much higher than paid sites,” said
Hogan.
 |
| Eve
Hogan, author and relationship advisor. "One
of the reasons people people don't find their match is lack
of self-awareness." |
She
suggests going to a site that you think may interest you and do
a search to see who’s eligible in your area. If there’s
nobody that meets your criteria, move on.
Creating criteria that severely constrains your search for the
“perfect person” is an easily overlooked barrier to
success. Hogan says that if you’ve been dating online with
no luck, try broadening your search criteria.
“There was a couple who had been on the same site for a
year before finding each other. It turned out she was looking
for someone an inch taller and he was looking for someone a year
younger,” Hogan recalled.
What’s interesting to note is with the growing popularity
of online dating, singles in their forties, fifties, and up have
discovered that there can be romance later in life. The popular
conception of “I’m too old to date,” and “At
my age, all the good ones are taken,” has been effectively
quashed.
Hogan shared an encouraging success story. She attended a female
friend’s fiftieth birthday party along with ten other women,
all age 50-something. Seven out of the ten women had met their
partners online.
Generally when men reach their fifties and sixties, they start
looking for women who are slightly younger, thinking that a woman
their age may not be “as fun” or have enough stamina.
“I tell men to stop looking for age and start looking for
qualities,” advised Hogan. “Put it in your profile,
what qualities you are looking for – ‘I’m looking
for an active woman who’s this and that who likes to do
this and that.’ Stop worrying about age. You can find an
inactive thirty-year-old who doesn’t like what you like.”
Though Lawrence is not dating online right now, she says she likes
the idea of Internet dating and would try it again. She still
keeps in touch with several people she met on the Internet. “I’m
just hoping to find a nice guy that does not cheat,” she
said wistfully.
O’Reilly says he too has made a lot of female friends online.
“But I’m searching for that gold ring,” he said.
“I’m just kind of putting it out there, throwing it
to the wind, and see where God lands it.”
One thing is absolutely certain about Internet dating though:
it’s here to stay.
