June 29, 2003, Sunday
NATIONAL DESK
Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com
By AMY HARMON (NYT) 2051 words
Of the 120 men she traded messages with
online in her first four months of Internet dating,
Kristen Costello, 33, talked to 20 on the telephone at
least once and met 11 in person. Of those, Ms. Costello
dated four several times before realizing she had not
found ''the one.''
It is one of the first lessons learned by
many in the swelling ranks of subscribers to Internet
dating sites: soul mates are harder to come by than dinner
and a movie. But like a growing number of single adults,
Ms. Costello, a fourth-grade teacher in Florham Park,
N.J., remains convinced that the chances of finding her
life partner are better online than off.
''The difference is there's a huge number
of people to draw from,'' said Ms. Costello, who is
getting divorced and tried Kiss.com on the advice of a
friend who met her current boyfriend through the site. ''I
just haven't found the right one.''
Online dating, once viewed as a refuge for
the socially inept and as a faintly disrespectable way to
meet other people, is rapidly becoming a fixture of single
life for adults of all ages, backgrounds and interests.
More than 45 million Americans visited online dating sites
last month, up from about 35 million at the end of 2002,
according to comScore Media Metrix, a Web tracking
service. Spending by subscribers on Web dating sites has
soared, rising to a projected $100 million or more a
quarter this year from under $10 million a quarter at the
beginning of 2001, according to the Online Publishers
Association.
And despite the Web's reputation as a
meeting ground for casual sex, a majority of the leading
sites' paying subscribers now say that what they are
looking for is a relationship.
Stories of deception persist. Many online
daters turn out to be married, and it is taken for granted
that everybody lies a little. But they are more often
trumped by a pervasive dissatisfaction with singles bars,
dates set up by friends and other accepted ways of meeting
prospective mates.
''My brother told me to join a canoeing
club or something stupid like that,'' said Dan Eddy, 28,
who met his fiancée, Sherry Sivik, 27, of North
Ridgeville, Ohio, on Match.com.
Ms. Sivik sent an e-mail message to Mr.
Eddy when she saw a picture of him with a shaved head. She
refused to meet him for weeks, afraid he would be ''some
kind of lunatic.'' But after hearing that Mr. Eddy drove a
Jeep, Ms. Sivik's friends, who had a long-running joke
about trying to find her a bald guy with a Jeep, knew it
was all over.
As word spreads of successful matches, the
stigma of advertising for a romantic partner online rather
than waiting for friends and fate to conjure one is
fading. ''I really don't think there's anyone under 35 who
would think twice about it,'' said Sascha Segan, 29, who
has persuaded several friends to try online dating since
meeting his fiancée, Leontine Greenberg, on Nerve.com.
Not prepared to cede the potential of a
better love life to youth, older singles are also logging
on to dating sites in growing numbers.
''We're at a time of life where nothing's
structured where you can mingle,'' said Judith Carrington,
a public relations executive who lists herself on
Match.com as in her late-50's. ''And as you get older it's
hard to find a deep bond with people because you've had
rich lives and you haven't lived them together.''
After a few unremarkable dates, Ms.
Carrington, whose husband died several years ago, said she
recently had dinner with an
investment
adviser she met through the service and felt drawn to him
because of a shared experience with a family member's
mental illness.
''Just to have someone in the running is
nice,'' she said.
As it did for book buying and auctioning
used toys, the Internet reduces the transaction costs of
meeting romantic prospects. With pictures, long essays,
sometimes even videos -- and a cut-to-the-chase etiquette
that encourages pointed questions in e-mail messages --
singles say they can learn far more about potential
partners online than they can by sizing them up across a
crowded room or wringing information from a friend.
''The traditional institutionalized means
for getting people together are not working as well as
they did previously,'' said Norval Glenn, a sociology
professor at the University of Texas. ''There's a need for
something new and the Internet is filling that need.''
Two or three decades ago, most American
couples met in high school or college, Professor Glenn
said. But as more people choose to marry later in life,
few social institutions have arisen to replace the role
that local communities, families and schools once played.
Internet dating may finally be stepping
into that breach.
''The Internet gives the impression, and it
may or may not be truthful, that you can find someone who
is more specifically tailored to your desires,'' said
David M. Buss, author of ''The Evolution of Desire:
Strategies of Human Mating'' (Revised edition, Basic
Books, 2003). ''So perhaps the sense that you don't have
to settle as much will bear out in more solid bonds.''
Along with large dating sites like
Match.com, which boasts nearly 800,000 subscribers who pay
$24.95 a month each, and 8 million separate profiles,
numerous dating sites now exist for every imaginable group
of people. Generally, there is no charge for posting a
profile on a Web dating site, but to contact a prospective
date, most sites require users to pay a subscription fee.
Lativish Gardner, 24, a Web designer in
Valdosta, Ga., switched from Yahoo Personals to
BlackPlanetLove.com last month, for instance, to better
focus his search.
''I'm a black man and I'm using Black
Planet to find a black
queen,'' said Mr. Gardner, who flew to Houston recently to
meet a woman he found on the new site.
Web sites like TONY.com (Time Out New
York), Nerve.com and Boston.com offer online dating
services by pooling a collection of profiles submitted by
their younger, more urban subscribers, through a template
provided by their New York-based company, Spring Street
Networks. In addition to the fundamentals, subscribers are
asked to complete sentences like, ''In my bedroom you'll
find,'' and to cite their most humbling moment.
Greg Bush, 34, an emergency room doctor in
Huntington Beach, Calif., swears by Eharmony, one of
several sites that profess to take a more scientific
approach to the matchmaking process. Prospective
subscribers to Eharmony, founded by a psychologist, fill
out a long questionnaire, and the service says they are
rejected if it appears a match for them cannot be found.
''She's gorgeous,'' said Mr. Bush of the
woman the service set him up with, a pharmaceutical
representative he said he planned to propose to soon.
''She's the kind of girl I'd look at all night but never
go up and talk to because I'd be too intimidated.''
The first trick to online dating is to
narrow the search without inadvertently ruling out a
perfect match. Helen Gaitanis, 35, of Los Angeles searches
only for white men aged 33 to 43 who are at least
5-foot-9. She refrains from filtering out brown eyes,
despite her strong preference for blue. Typically 600
profiles of men within 25 miles of her zip code show up in
her Match results, Ms. Gaitanis said.
''You can kind of get a feel: Are they
dorky, are they going to be a slick cheeseball party
guy?'' Ms. Gaitanis said. ''I look at my profile and I
think sometimes it's more intense than others. It's not as
flirty or playful. But it says who I am.''
Indeed, for women, who have long been
taught to search for a mate while scrupulously pretending
not to, social historians say online dating may be making
it more acceptable to openly signal what they are looking
for.
But gender rules still apply. Men say women
rarely send the first e-mail note. And like many women,
Ms. Gaitanis found that when she did send an e-mail
message to a man, he almost never responded. Instead, she
is concentrating on refining her profile and updating it
often enough that it does not get lost in search results,
as profiles are generally ranked in order of the latest
updated. She has also seized on Match's new ''wink''
feature, which allows subscribers to indicate interest in
someone's profile simply by clicking a button, which sends
them a prewritten message.
''It's like saying, 'Hey, look at me, what
do you think?' '' said Ms. Gaitanis, who received 6 winks
back out of the first 10 she sent. ''They can respond or
not and at least you didn't spend any time writing an
e-mail.''
There are still plenty of holdouts. Ms.
Gaitanis's brother, John, 28, told her that online dating
was ''strictly for losers.''
And even those who embrace online dating
acknowledge a major flaw: the frequent disconnect between
who people say they are online and what they are really
like. In one recent example, the Army said it was
investigating accusations that a colonel, who is already
married, duped dozens of women on tallpersonals.com into
believing that he would be marrying them.
Most online dating deception is of the
run-of-the-mill variety.
''It's amazing how all women say they're
slender when a lot of them are overweight,'' said one
79-year-old Manhattan man who lists himself as 69 on his
Match.com profile.
A Culver City, Calif., woman who lists the
adjacent, more upscale Santa Monica as her residence,
said, ''I swear every time they put 5-10 you have to
deduct 3 inches.''
But what is most persistently frustrating,
veteran online daters say, is not so much the obvious lies
as the difficulty in judging physical chemistry through
virtual communication.
''Certain things look really good on
paper,'' said Rebecca Hammond, a computer consultant in
Manhattan who has met several boyfriends through Nerve.com.
''Then in real life it's a completely different story.''
After enough of such encounters, many
online daters burn out.
Those who do find partners say they are
often plagued by the insidious sense that they might find
someone better -- if only they paged through a few hundred
more profiles.
''If you get unsolicited e-mails coming in
it's hard not to look,'' said David Kleinbard, a
researcher for a credit ratings agency in New York who has
dated several women from JDate, a Jewish online dating
service. ''And if the person's cute it's hard not to give
it some thought.''
But for Jonathan Gerstel, 40, a university
fund-raiser who was looking for a Jewish woman in Durham,
N.C., with a kind disposition and at least shoulder-length
hair, JDate proved the perfect tool.
Amid the 20 matches he found Marta King,
38, an actress and teacher looking for a Jewish man who
knew what he wanted in life, made at least as much money
as she did, and liked to dance, or was at least willing to
try. If the process lacked a certain romantic sweep that
Ms. King once imagined, she said she had come to prefer
reality.
''I just don't think it matters how you
meet,'' Ms. King said.
Just this month, the two reached an online
dating milestone: They removed their profiles from the
JDate site.
Correction: July 1, 2003, Tuesday Because
of an editing error, a front-page article on Sunday about
the increased popularity of online dating misstated the
Web address for Time Out New York, which offers such a
service. It is Timeoutny.com, not TONY.com.
Copyright 2002 The New York
Times Company
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