Grumble - There Are Dating Options?

- by Sassafras

"So, don't tell anybody this, but I started buying hand guns as a direct result of those computer games that they have where you shoot people. Those interactive ones? I love them! I play them all the time. Usually all night on the weekends and until I fall asleep most night during the week. I just can't get over that feeling of power I get from that gun!" said my date, Ross¹, as he swung his feet back and forth in the bar chair, not quite touching the ground.
This was the second official date I had been on in two years, and the way it was going, it seemed it might be another two before I ventured out again. It doesn't feel good to put a timeframe on it like that, but it had been two years. Two years of dry spell can be the kiss of death for some, I think. The event that sent me into this Sahara of dating was an evening with a former co-worker named Rob and his buddy Tom. Rob and I went on a double date with Tom and his new girlfriend (the girlfriend that broke up Tom's marriage).
I was lured to Tom's apartment with the understanding that we would all go to dinner and then to see the movie Dogma afterwards. Sounded okay to me. Tom was still officially married, but we weren't talking about that. In fact, we weren't talking about anything except Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Tom and Rob were discussing their plans to go a buy a denim couch for Rob's new apartment the next day and iron Superman patches onto it. It would then match the Superman coffee table that Rob had recently purchased. Rob had the Warner Brothers Store in his cell phone and his speed dial at work, and the guy who did shipping and receiving there called him whenever anything "cool" came in.
Both these men, clad in Superman golf shirts of different colors and X-Men socks, were gleeful at the possibility of having a Superman couch. I anxiously sipped my beer out of the Green Lantern glass in Tom's half empty condo and listened to the three of them try out lyrics for their new song. Rob, Tom, and the girlfriend were in a band together, and the song was called "The Green Lantern". I chugged the rest of my beer and suggested we head to the restaurant. By the blank looks I received, I ascertained that plans for the evening were negotiable. So I left the trio to their work and went home. Three hours I can never get back.
It might be unfair to judge all dates by this one extraordinarily uncomfortable evening. In fact, I am sure it is unfair, but over the next two years I watched my roommate get set up with a former high school narc, a current NRA member who extolled the virtues of keeping women barefoot and pregnant. Another friend got abandoned in a restaurant on her first date with a man because she made it clear that she was not going to sleep with him. Foolishly, I had believed that these things only happened in movies. I was shocked and not a little disheartened.
I didn't want to give up on the whole thing, though. I am a young woman, too young to be bitter and cynical. (That is so unattractive anyway.) Why was it so hard to find people when it seemed like there were so many who were looking for the same thing? I know plenty of nice guys, guys who are currently making one of my friends a wonderful husband or boyfriend. They were all single once, I reasoned. I was willing to dive in and give dating another shot. Knowing that in the technology age there are new twists on the old territory of dating services, I decided to conduct a few experiments. I would find out what was out there and what worked.

There is a certain stigma to dating services in general and Internet dating services in particular; a patina of desperation that clings to the whole enterprise. I was hesitant at first, worried that someone would tell my grandma what I was doing, or my first boyfriend from 8th grade would see my picture and know how far I had fallen. I know that others share this fear (which turned out to be somewhat founded when my childhood friend Matt wrote me a particularly strange email on an online service I was trying. Of course that was his fall, not mine) but that does not seem to keep people away from these services. In 1996, LoveAOL, America Online's forum for Internet dating, had more than 130,000 singles searching for love.² In 2000, the United States was home to 50 million single people between 20 to 55, and 61 percent of them used an online dating service.³
There are lots of lonely and searching people out there, and they are going to the Internet in droves to find love. In response, the options have increased, and so have the number of people venturing into this realm. A dizzying array of choices awaits the lovelorn and searching: Yahoo! Personals, LoveChaser.com, LuvLink.com, Match.com, singlesonline.com, as.com (American Singles), and every major metropolitan area has its own online service. It fell to me, and a few recruited "subjects", to pick some of these options and see what was out there.
We first employed a non-internet but non-traditional method. Subject A and I signed up for a social club called Highlife Adventures which we heard about through a welcome-wagon flyer. They specialize in expanding a straight single person's overall social life. They push for the newly-moved-to-town, the extremely shy, and those people tired of the bar scene. For a substantial yearly fee and monthly dues, a member gets a calendar of events from which to choose and attend. The events are located all over the metropolitan area and suburbs, and are a good mix of different interests: sporting events, art shows, concerts, and overnight and weekend trips for camping and other activities. The idea being that people would sign up for events that interested them and automatically meet people who have similar interests. Each event has a host or event leader, whose job is to make sure everyone is introduced when they come in and is having a good time during the event. They are invariably perky 21-year-old women who are working this as a second job to pay for school. About halfway through an event, they usually disappear to allow the members to intermingle unaided. This organization boasts a few sister branches in other cities like Phoenix and San Francisco, but only the Chicago events are shown on their website.
Subject A and myself found the events to be rather poorly organized. We did meet people, as they promised, but there was a strange tension during the events; people worked the room like they were on a mission. The entire event was taken up with small talk of the "What do you do?" and "Where are you from?" variety as people came around like clockwork and introduced themselves. There were also invariably more women then men at these events, though the organization claimed a one-to-one man-to-woman ratio of members. It reminded me, more than anything, of a college freshman mixer: everyone trying to start fresh in a new place and put their best foot forward. This bred a positive outlook but a forced and overly jovial atmosphere, and there quickly emerged cliques of people. The cool people. The nice people. The old timers. The annoying people who got steered into the nice people group because no one else knew what to do with them. The group was nervous and trying to have a good time and not succeeding terribly well.
During our fourth month of membership we attended a particularly dismal pub crawl/scavenger hunt where the leaders were acting like lords of their little fiefdom and we gave up the ghost. After attending about 20 events and having a good time at four, we decided we could be bored and uncomfortable with the people we already knew and liked, if we really wanted to be bored and uncomfortable -- which of course we didn't. I was tired of explaining what I did for a living and how long I had lived in Chicago fifteen times a night, and Subject A had been mildly harassed by a member when she refused to dance with him. We were done with this face-to-face thing. It was time to try the Internet.

The first online experiment was an Internet dating hybrid. Subject B tried a service called Great Expectations. We learned about this service from a mailer addressed to "The Single at:". Great Expectations has 45 dating centers nationwide and they are focused on straight people who are marriage-minded. This is not a service for people to make friends. This is for people who want to meet that "special someone". Their website shows no prices but, comparatively, they are very pricey. Subject B said they ask some questions about what you are looking for and your likes and dislikes and then, if you are well-met and reasonably articulate, they try to sell you a package of service.
After paying them a larger than expected sum, give or take what can be negotiated, they took a professional portrait. They then posted the picture on their website with a personal bio, and the opposite sex then peruses these pictures and bios. When someone wants to meet someone else, the site sends an anonymous postcard, letting the receiver know that someone is interested in meeting. The postcard only has a bio number on it, so the receiver of the card can check out the bio on the website and see if he/she is interested. It is completely up to the participant whether to respond to the postcards. The first introduction is always over the phone, which is touted as the security of this method of meeting potential partners. (They also touted the screening process as a security measure.)
Subject B only used this service a few times even though serious about finding someone, and had invested quite a bit of money on this venture. The last request she answered turned out to be a man who, when they made the initial meeting over the phone, only talked to and about his dog. After that she got back together with her ex and happily got engaged a few months later.
I ventured into true online dating along with my subjects C and D. We signed up for and submitted profiles and photos on Match.com. This time one of my subjects was male and the experience was very different for him than it was for my other subject and myself. Match.com seems to be almost all men. At least they are the aggressors, which speaks socio-economic volumes, I suppose. If you pay Match.com $20, you can submit your profile and have the ability to contact other members through a double-blind email system which works quite well. If reluctant to invest $20, you can still post a profile but without the luxury of contacting others; you must wait for them to come to you. If you are female, you will not be waiting long.
The first day after my female subject and I posted our pictures with profiles, we both received around 40 emails from potential love interests. My male subject received none. He did not receive an email for three months. When he did, the women who wrote him were professionals posing as Match.com members, trying to stir up a little business in the phone sex trade or other similar line of work. I am convinced this had nothing to do with his person, his figure or his profile. This one was all about supply and demand.
The best part of this form of meeting people is that you can talk to them over email, Instant Messenger, and the phone before you actually meet. You can talk for months keeping them at a distance until you feel comfortable meeting. Or not talk to them, never acknowledge they wrote you, ignore all of the emails until it suits you, and never ever meet them. There are obvious dangers, of course; for every story that ends well, there seem to be four stalker stories. I was fortunate that the two men that I agreed to meet weren't scary. They just weren't right for me, nor I for them. The previously-mentioned handgun aficionado was one of them. The other was a man who has a conspiracy theory about how chili peppers are trying to take over mankind. I think he was kidding. My female subject had a happier ending to her tale; she found love and is still basking in its glow. He lives in Texas and she is in Iowa, and they have talked on the phone every night for 6 months and met several times in Colorado, neutral ground. My male subject never paid his $20 and never made more than cursory contact with anyone from this site.
Subject E tried another online dating service, Yahoo Personals. He was a man looking for a man and met with wild success. He has made several and one or two interesting romance prospects. The whole experience seems to have been much different and less stressful for him then it was for myself or the two other heterosexual subjects who joined Match.com with me. Yahoo personals works much the same way Match.com does, so the only difference was that he was a man looking for a man.
Of the four dating services reviewed here, the most cost-effective was the online service Match.com or its virtual twin Yahoo Personals. They are very typical of dating services online. Most that I have investigated have a set up similar to theirs, always pushing safety first and always touting their many success stories. It is up to the discretion of the member, as in all of the services, how much to open themselves up to the experience. Match.com and Yahoo produced more results, good or bad, than the others.
Though I did not find true love on my dating service quest, I am now the expert among my friends on the many dating service options. I get phone calls from friends who have friends who want to try one of the options out there, and they want my educated opinion. I always tell them what the choices are and that they should check one out, because it is like anything else in life: you never know until you try. The perfect person for you could be just around the corner or in the new profile posted online. If you are looking for love and want to try something new, I highly recommend testing one of these options. There is a whole new world of people out there to meet, and this might be the first step.

1. All names have been changed.
2. "They've Got Love." (1999) People Weekly 51, no.6: 46-51.
3. "New Dating Service Provider Touts Exponential Results" (4/25/00) CNN.com