NY times article You've got romance

August 26, 1999

NYTimes Online: Technology/Circuits

You've Got Romance! Seeking Love Online Net-Based Services Change the Landscape, If Not the Odds, of Finding the Perfect Mate

By BONNIE ROTHMAN MORRIS

Tom Buckley didn't have much use for a dating service, or so he thought. "I didn't need to pay a company to help set me up to get a date, a girlfriend, a fiancée, a wife," said Buckley, 30, a steel broker in Portland, Ore., who plays rugby in his spare time. But after a lonely Thanksgiving dinner where he was the only single adult at the family dinner table, Buckley signed up for a free week on Match.com. What ensued on the matchmaking service was an e-mail romance with Terri Muir, a schoolteacher on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

"Anybody who knew us would never have thought we would have gone down that road," Buckley said in a telephone interview. "My rugby mates would roll in their graves."

Reflecting on the couple's instant attraction, he said, "e-mail made it easier to communicate because neither one of us was the type to walk up to someone in the gym or a bar and say, 'You're the fuel to my fire.'" Buckley said e-mail had enabled him to be more honest because he knew that if he wasn't, he would eventually get caught.

Thirteen months after their first feverish exchanges, Buckley and Ms. Muir lied to their family and friends and sneaked away to Vancouver to meet for the first time. At their wedding one year later, at a winery in Oregon, they finally told the tale of how they had met to their 100 guests. More and more single people, used to finding everything else on the Internet, are using it to search for love. More than 2,500 Web sites for adults are now devoted to matchmaking, said Daniel Bender, founder of Cupid's Network (www.cupidnet.com), an Internet portal for personals sites that went online in 1995 listing only a handful.

At a time when many people are staying single longer, busy professionals barely have time to squeeze in workouts and rules about sexual misconduct pose barriers to romance in the workplace, the Internet can be a fast and efficient way for single people to find each other, the creators of these services say. Many singles say they post their ads on a lark, expecting little. They take advantage of free trial memberships, yet concede that despite their doubts, they wonder "what if."

Will Knedlik, a lawyer in Kirkland, Wash., who specializes in suing traditional dating services for fraud, is optimistic about the potential for the Internet to accomplish successful matchmaking. "The Internet is changing the landscape and process of the personals," Knedlik said. The print personals don't work very well and the expense is very high, he added. "With the Internet, the cost is so much less and the transaction time is shorter."

One thing the Web has to distinguish it from more traditional personal advertisements is the size of the dating pool. John Spottiswoode, president of Match.com (who, incidentally, met his wife in junior high school), said his company registered its two-millionth subscriber in August.

This year, the company was acquired for about $50 million by Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch, which also purchased the Internet's other largest personals matchmaking service, One and Only (www.oneandonly.com). The two companies will eventually be merged to chase after the 66 million single people in the country today who are not only looking for love, but tickets to concerts, said Charles Conn, chief executive of Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch.

Another of the Internet's large dating services, American Singles, (www.as.org), is a not-yet-for-profit-but-soon-to-be-acquired company that has been online since Valentine's Day 1994. It says it has 125,000 active members.

All these sites and more are also linked through Cupid Network, which Bender, 38, started in 1995. (He met his wife through a personals page on Prodigy nine years ago, and he also runs American Singles.)

At first, Bender said, Cupid Network listed only a handful of sites. Today, the 2,500 linked sites are broken down by region, religion, race, sexual preferences and even values, as evidenced by a site called Singles With Scruples (www.singleswithscruples.com), a free service that says it caters to singles with "character, integrity and service to others."

"Single people tell us that their No. 1 challenge is access to finding other single people," said Trish McDermott, the Online Dating Coach for Match.com. She said she spent most days counseling the company's clients through e-mail. With many services, users fill out questionnaires that combine fill-in-the-blank descriptions with short essays. Mate-seekers not only describe themselves in exacting detail, but also choose -- frequently down to hair color -- what features they most desire in a soul mate. Many sites encourage users to submit photographs, and some offer audio samplings.

The services use software to sort and match preferences of the sort commonly expressed in personal ads: for nonsmokers, blonds, lovers of cabernet, for example, or for bald but vigorous men who like parasailing, Wagner and long walks in the country. Those seeking a mate submit their forms with their preferences, then receive a list of matches, which includes brief profiles and anonymous e-mail addresses set up and run through the online dating service.

After a free weeklong trial, many services charge $10 to $20 monthly. Some services are always free. On Match.com, users can hide their profiles while doing their searching or hang out their personal shingles to attract potential dates. After scanning the list of matches, a date-seeker sends an e-mail message to someone the sender thinks might be a dream date and hopes that the message will be answered with alacrity.

"There's a full world of people on the Internet instead of the few faces you see at work," said Julie Warren, 25, a consultant in Falls Church, Va., who met her fiancé, Scott Mastbrook, on American Singles, after he posted an ad looking for someone to show him around Phoenix when he was traveling there on business. Ms. Warren was working in Phoenix at the time and had met other men through the service. Ms. Warren said she had felt unencumbered by the usual stigma associated with searching for love in the personals. "I've met a lot of neat people just talking in chat rooms," she said, adding that using the service to find dates seemed natural to her.

Relationships that begin online may have a better chance of succeeding because they start from the inside, from communication, and work their way out, said Dr. Andrea Baker, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio University-Lancaster who studies successful online romances. "For many people, this does seem to work well in the sense of focusing more on the thought processes and common interests before they have appearance to distract them from how they feel about the person," Dr. Baker said.

But a romance cannot continue solely on line forever. And, if a suitor has built an e-mail house of cards, it will tumble. That's what Dr. Maryanne Shiozawa, 26, a chiropractor in Manhattan, discovered when she finally dated a man she had met through an online dating service, one of two services that she had signed up with. "This person lied straight out, he wasn't as tall as he described, he wasn't in as good shape as he claimed to be, he was just painting a picture to impress me," she said. After their date, Dr. Shiozawa sent her date a Dear John e-mail. Still, she continues to meet men from from personals online, she said, because she hates the bar scene and feels safe meeting men in cyberspace.

For Robert Spradling, the house of cards fell apart later than the first face-to-face meeting, and at great personal cost. He had struck up an online romance with a Ukrainian woman whom he had met on American Singles. The woman immediately asked him for money to pay the agency she was using to translate and send her romantic e-mails back to him. There are many such agencies in the former Soviet Union, Spradling said. Next she told Spradling she wanted to start her own matchmaking agency. Spradling, 42, an employee in the development office at Morehead State University in Kentucky, footed the bill for that, too.

After sending her about $8,000, Spradling asked her to marry him, via e-mail. She said yes and invited him to Kiev. "When you meet somebody and you think you're in love, you never see any faults," said Spradling, who said the couple had made wedding plans when he was visiting. After his return to the United States, Spradling never heard from her again.

He's sworn off finding love through the Internet for now. "If I paid twice as much, it would still be worth what I learned," Spradling said. "I caution a lot of guys to be careful and keep their head and learn a lot about who they're dating online."

Still, the Web can work like a fairy tale for some people. When Diana Hathaway first spotted Greg Timmons, he was playing guitar in a swing band at an outdoor concert in San Luis Obispo, Calif. She called her sister by cell phone from the concert to tell her about the cute guitarist. They planned to see the band play again at a local club the following week so Ms. Hathaway, 39 and recently divorced, could meet him. But she never put her plan into action. A month later, Ms. Hathaway posted a personal ad on Match.com, saying she was thinking of moving to a new town for a fresh start. One e-mail response she received read, "Before you go, there's a gentleman you might want to meet." Eight quick e-mail notes later, the gentleman invited her to a local club to see his swing band.

Ms. Hathaway went, and there was that cute guitarist, Timmons. Less than nine months later, they were married. For Christmas, Ms. Hathaway filled a binder with the 339 e-mail messages the couple exchanged while they were courting and labeled it "We've Got Mail."

Related Sites

These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

Match.com

Cupidnet

www.oneandonly.com

American Singles

Singles With Scruples