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Surfing for love
More and more people are turning to the Internet
to find a perfect match
By j.d. VENTURA - Advocate staff writer
In the past week, at least 87 men in Baton Rouge
signed onto the Internet looking for love, hoping
that Cupid shot an arrow into their in-boxes.
At least 37 women did the same.
And that's just singles between the ages of 25 and
45 on Yahoo! Personals who live right in the city
limits. In reality, the number of active online
romantics in the area is certainly higher,
especially given just how many online dating
services there are.
Last year Americans spent $473 million on online
personals. Jupiter Research predicts that figure
will jump to $623 million by 2009. Industry watchers
say the increasing popularity of Internet dating is
a boon for those willing to try it. The logic is
easy: more people creating online personals results
in far more selection, and, presumably, increases
the likelihood of finding that special someone.
Of course, there's a Catch 22 to that.
Finding that perfect match among the millions of
singles who have posted their profiles online is a
bit like finding a diamond in a field of broken
glass. Everybody likes long walks on the beach.
Everybody is looking for someone with a sense of
humor. Nobody likes the disingenuous. Or the
untrustworthy.
So many online dating services -- like Yahoo!
Personals, perfectmatch.com, eHarmony and True.com,
to name a few -- have begun offering premium
(meaning more expensive) matching services instead
of just allowing their users to go it alone. Rather
than merely sorting through profiles, site members
take compatibility and personality tests aimed at
helping them determine who among the digital masses
would be the best fit.
To appreciate just how difficult manually sorting
through so many singles ads can be requires only a
quick search of Yahoo's online Baton Rouge profiles.
In short order, a love seeker is flooded with
personal factoids -- some interesting, some cryptic,
some crazy.
For example, there's the 36-year-old Christian man
who "smokes occasionally," has attended "some
college" and is looking for a woman who's "not sure"
if she wants kids. He loves "keriokie" (a singer,
maybe, but not a speller). "I am looking for a woman
whose eyes will mesmerize my brain, whose smile will
captivate my heart and whose heart will steal my
soul," writes the social drinker who warns
interested women that he doesn't bite -- or at least
not "often."
Who's to say what that might mean to the
perky-looking 43-year-old Capricorn who has "middle
of the road political views" and enjoys the
occasional chocolate croissant in the French Quarter
when she's not playing
with her new poodle, "whipping up some gourmet
munchies," or rocking out on her guitar in the
courtyard of her Baton Rouge apartment building.
"Some say I am a raucous intersection of Gidget
meets Audrey Hepburn," she writes. "…With so much
talent and spunk, nothing is unobtainable."
But for many, that elusive click, that perfect
chemistry, is unobtainable. Internet dating horror
stories abound, both in the media and through word
of mouth. It's not hard to find someone who knows
someone who met someone else on the Internet, with
less than optimal results. Dates show up looking
nothing like their photos. Or seem nothing like
their profile. Or, perhaps too predictably, Mr.
Karaoke clears the bar, and acoustic night at Ms.
Hepburn's apartment complex results in the police
breaking up the date.
"I cannot predict chemistry, but I can predict
compatibility," said Pepper Schwartz, a University
of Washington sociologist who has been hired by
perfectmatch.com to design and implement the dating
service's relationship test. "Most of the other
sites are just piling up similarity
characteristics."
Schwartz's test, which the company calls "Duet,"
must be taken before new members can even search
perfectmatch.com's databases (some other sites allow
users to initially search their personals with more
casual "visitor" access). This difference is
important, Schwartz insists, because
perfectmatch.com is geared for singles who are
serious about finding a relationship. Those
interested in casual dating need not sign-up. Those
that are ready to find their soul mate are tested,
assigned a series of letters (known as personality
"values") and are then told which letters they
should look for in the profiles of others (The idea
is similar to the less scientific premise of
astrology signs. A Leo makes a great mate with one
sign, but not with another).
Perfectmatch's CEO, Dwayne Dahl, says his company
has benefited from a target market fed up with
Internet serial daters. "More and more people have
become frustrated with the casual relationship of
online dating," said Dahl, who added that the sheer
size of some competitors' databases is overwhelming
to more and more online singles who just want to
meet Mr. or Ms. Right. (Match.com, for example, has
an estimated 25 million members.) "You have millions
of people going to sites and thinking they will find
a real relationship, and instead they find millions
of people looking for casual encounters."
As the singles director for a church in Lafayette,
Kim Fuchs (pronounced "Fooks") was herself single,
and skeptical of online dating. Still, after 20
years without a serious relationship, the
45-year-old was ready to try something new. After
taking eHarmony.com's compatibility test, the
service sent her the profiles of more than 100 men
they felt might be romantic matches. But e-mails,
chat sessions and a few in-person dates resulted in
no love connection.
She turned to True.com, initially drawn to the
service by its seemingly exhaustive personality
test. At first, no luck. None of the men she matched
with seemed right. Compatibility is measured by a
number on True.com. (128.5 is a perfect match). On
the night she was going to cancel the service, she
was paired with a 104 from Indiana. She e-mailed
him.
"We e-mailed on Thursday, and by Thursday night he
asked if we could talk on the cell phone,"
remembered Fuchs. "We spoke for four hours and from
that point on we talked every single night."
The romance continued for two and a half months
until the man from Indiana boarded a plane and flew
into Lafayette regional airport. Fuchs, her nerves
wracked with excitement and apprehension, met him at
the gate. "He was exactly like his pics," she said.
"By that time I felt as if I knew him."
A long weekend in Lafayette turned into a week away
visiting him, which led to an (accepted) proposal
after eight and a half months of dating. Steve,
Fuchs' husband, relocated to Louisiana.
"In the beginning you have the highest hopes that
you'll ever meet someone," Fuchs said. "But when you
get to be my age, you start wondering if this is
ever going to happen."
"People are tired of superficial interactions," said
Ken Houran, the chief psychologist at True.com, who
claims other sites' personality tests do not do a
good job of understanding the psychological context
behind every question and answer. "(With our test)
it takes five minutes to get the information it
would have taken 50 dates to get before."
Go on those 50 dates, says New Yorker Ilana Eberson.
She washed her hands of Internet dating completely
and now runs a Web site for Big Apple singles fed up
with compatibility tests and misleading profiles.
After the "date from hell," which entailed her
suitor showing up drunk at a sushi joint, where he
proceeded to spill sake all over her before asking,
"How am I doing?", Eberson decided to stop
downloading her social life.
She launched RealLivePeopleParty.com, a Web site
through which she meets available singles, then
invites them to real parties she hosts. At these
gatherings, that have been well-attended, she
actually introduces people to each other, based on
what she knows about them. It's matchmaking the
old-fashioned way. And it works, she insists.
Next she plans to coach people on how to go on
actual dates by going with them on trial runs. "Some
people don't know how to behave on a real date," she
said. "They have been on the Internet for so long,
they forget how to interact one on one."
But make no mistake, there is no mass exodus from
cyberspace underway. Online dating is alive and
well. In November Yahoo! Personals launched its
"premier" service, where members pay a monthly,
quarterly or yearly membership fee to take
compatibility tests and enjoy enhanced searching and
communication methods not available to nonpaying
members.
"Personals and online dating have grown so much,
it's gone mainstream and we have so many more people
on the site," said Sandra Cordova Micek, Yahoo's
director of marketing. "We needed a way to let
people scale down their choices and give them more
focus."
Not a bad idea given that there are more than 2,000
singles looking for love (or a reasonable facsimile
thereof) within 50 miles of Baton Rouge on Yahoo!
right now. Even Cupid would need a computer to sort
that out.
Story originally published at:
http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/021405/peo_surflove001.shtml |
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