In this article: Wedding bells for online daters Meet (and date?) our real Bridget Jones

Shall we meet "f2f"?

That's face to face, in Web speak. Using computers is second nature to 20-somethings, but finding true love, no matter how high-tech the matchmaking, remains as challenging as ever.

By Rula Razek

Join our real Bridget Jones on her dating adventure

Think you've got problems finding a date? Meet Andi. At first glance, this attractive, spunky 25-year-old wouldn't seem to need much help in the dating department. But as it turns out, she logs some serious hours at work -- up to 90 a week -- at a New York investment bank. When Andi moved to the city in 1998, she did the rounds of parties with friends, hit a handful of cramped Greenwich Village bars on Saturday nights, and passed her phone number to the few guys she found interesting. Emphasis on "few."

"I wasn't meeting intelligent people at bars," Andi kvetches. "When people found out I was an investment banker, it was a big turnoff. These guys wanted the aerobics instructor/kindergarten teacher type, not someone working 90 hours a week to make more money than they did."

So when her mother suggested trying an online dating service, Andi figured she'd give it a try.

"My first date was awful," recalls Andi, who, like several other online daters interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used. "The guy didn't look like his picture, stared at my body and made me feel distinctly uncomfortable." Another date, with a bombastic Ivy League graduate, lasted no longer than the first few sips of chardonnay. So why does Andi -- and millions of other women and men across America -- stick with online dating?

Call it Bridget Jones Syndrome: Come dastardly dates, bad-hair days, hell or high water, Mr. or Ms. Right (or at least Mr. or Ms. Right Now) is out there somewhere. And increasingly, savvy singletons are going online to find him or her.

For a generation weaned on e-mail, mating and relating online has become as familiar as the old-time smooch at the drive-in. According to Jupiter Media Metrix, 5 million U.S. singles -- lonely, curious, marriage-minded or just out for a hopping Saturday night -- have embraced online matchmaking as an alternative to set-ups and singles bars. At Match.com, the biggest online dating site, a whopping 42% of members are under 30.

Still cyber-dating "I've gotten together with five to 10 people." online, says Geoff Pacana, 25, of suburban Chicago. "None turned into a longer relationship, but some of the people I've become friends with."

But while trolling for dates via modem might still seem kooky to the 35-and-up set, e-dating has moved into the mainstream for a growing group of young, predominantly urban singles.

Peruse the profiles on Match.com for a major city like New York or Boston and you'll find a lot of them: hypereducated, overworked professionals who advertise themselves under headlines like "Reformed Workaholic Seeks Balanced, Brainy Gentleman" or "Socially Conscious Ex-Web Guru Happily Changing Priorities." Says Leslie Karsner, a romance expert at Udate.com, "Online dating is becoming the norm because people can fit it into their schedule so easily." For a generation increasingly accustomed to browsing job listings online and tossing "merch" into virtual shopping carts, it's an attractive, and rather obvious, proposition. (Scan the available dates, pop them an e-mail and boom -- you've got male.)

For 25-year-old Geoff Pacana, a Web developer from Naperville, Ill., meeting women online was a natural extension of his teenage experiences chatting on old-school computer bulletin boards. "I've been on the Internet in some form or another ever since I was in high school," he says. "When the Internet as it exists now came to be, I found a little online chat-room world that had several get-togethers, so I got to meet a lot of the people I'd been chatting with. The online personals was just another avenue for meeting new people."

Some, like Dawn Theirl, 28, a transplant from Minneapolis to Mountain View, Calif., sign up when a job takes them to a new city. For others, it's a post-college reality check. Take Jennifer Moody, a 29-year-old Dallas native and seasoned online dater: "Back in college, being in a sorority and being involved, it was so easy to meet people. My friends and I would have contests to see who could gather the most phone numbers in a night. But a few years out of college, the landscape completely changed." Moody, a self-described free-spirited career girl who runs a health-care consulting firm, estimates she has been on about 100 online dates in the past three years, including a few "bizarre" ones. "But mostly it's a cross-section of the typical yuppie professional," she says. "They're consultants, they're too busy to hang out in bars, they need someone in their life who understands the demands that a career places on you."

To sign on, prospectors answer a battery of questions (ranging from their taste in eyewear to their spiritual leanings) and ante up the membership fee, usually around $25 per month. Literally within hours (even sooner if they have posted a picture), potential paramours are jostling for space in their "in" box. With online hookup hubs to tingle any romantic predilection, including special sites for single nudists (nudist.matchmaker.com), lonely New Agers (astralsingles.com) and dateless Ivy League grads (goodgenes.com), finding a community of like-minded folks is relatively simple.

Finding a date who's serious enough to be serious about, however, can be a challenge. (Though Web sites promise a clean, safe environment void of horror stories, I heard enough tragic tales to fill a clean, well-lit café.) For Michelle Rennert, 32, an Internet professional from Portland, Ore., who eventually met her fiancé online, "you realize at first that you're the new kid on the block. You're going to get picked on; you're going to end up on a creepy date. It's almost like a ritual." Her first-date disaster? An apparently articulate guy who, it turned out, had a Cyrano de Bergerac complex: A friend wrote all of his correspondence. "We went out on our first date and he was tongue-tied the entire time," she remembers. "He just kind of stared at me. And I thought, 'What happened to this articulate man?' " Another guy actually corresponded with her under two separate identities, to figure out which personality she liked better.

Of course, deception -- and those little white lies people tell to impress a would-be boy- or girlfriend -- are a major source of frustration and failed relationships in the world of online dating. "People really tend to exaggerate," says Christopher, 27, who works as a temp in San Francisco. "But the bottom line is, you're going to be a little disappointed, no matter what."

The problem, oft repeated by online daters, is that there is a real romantic charge to the initial fast-and-furious exchange of e-mails. These pre-first-date communications serve as a sort of cyber-foreplay -- with both parties blindfolded. The tangle of pixels and electronic pulses heightens intimacy while making almost anybody seem charming and well-spoken.

"With e-mail, you develop a fantasy about what the person is like when you have no clue who they actually are," Christopher says. "Usually they turned out to be nothing like I thought they were." It's that fantasy -- the "You've Got Mail" scenario where the man on the other end turns out to be Tom Hanks -- that causes the disappointment so many experience when they finally lay eyes on their epistolary crush.

Getting married When Christine Willis, 29, met Eric Puente, 34, online, "it was indescribable," she says. "I was trembling." The New Yorkers will marry next month. Though both are musicians, they're not destined to make beautiful music together: He plays drums in punk band; she is a classical flutist.

Remedy? Keep the initial date short and sweet. Says Moody, the veteran e-dater from Dallas: "Once you've been doing it for a while, you know to keep it to a coffee date. People who are new to online dating e-mail back and forth forever, talk on the phone for months, and build up a person in their head who is beyond their wildest expectations. Then they meet, and 30 minutes into it they hate the person."

But while nearly everyone I spoke with had a disaster or two, there were enough positive stories -- and, yes, some wedding bells -- to make it seem worthwhile. With perseverance, savvy and a little luck, more than a few have managed to snag a serious heartthrob or a good friend, or at least reinvigorate their flatlined social lives.

It's tough to tell how often the love-at-first-flirt stories -- the ones that land on the home pages of all the online singles hubs -- actually happen. Eric Puente, 34, and Christine Willis, 29, had a made-for-TV courtship that began with a mutual, if contrasting, love of music (she's a classical flutist; he's a drummer in a punk band called Squirrels From Hell). "When we met, it was indescribable," Willis gushes. "I was trembling." When she got home, she phoned her mother and announced she'd met her husband that night. (Guess who's getting married in August.)

Another to-be-married couple, Devin Campbell, 26, and Gisel Ramirez, 20, of Oceanside, Calif., met via Matchmaker.com and swapped e-mails for four months before their picture-perfect first date. "We went to the beach to watch the sunset and sat in complete silence for an hour and a half. It felt so natural, like I knew him already," says the delighted Ramirez. For Michelle Rennert and her fiancé, John Warther, a coffee date led to a whirlwind romance and an engagement. "We even got a joint cat," she says.

But the majority of success stories don't lead to the end of the aisle. (match.com reports a relatively slim 1,100 marriages from its huge service of more than 5 million members.) For Jennifer Moody, that's not necessarily the goal, anyway. "I'm busy, and I travel a lot for work," she says. "I'm not looking for a husband. I'm looking for a dinner companion, and I'm very happy with my life and being single."

And what of Andi, our 20-something investment banker from New York? Happy news: She's embroiled with a high school technology teacher. "This guy I'm dating now is great," she effuses. "I surprised him with ice cream the other day." Proof positive that their five-months-and-counting relationship has potential: "I canceled Match.com a while ago."

Join our Bridget Jones* (yes, that's her real name) on her dating adventure

*DISCLAIMER: Bridget M. Jones is a 26 year old resident of Philadelphia, PA. Bridget M. Jones and USA WEEKEND's publication of Bridget's online journal are not affiliated with the book "Bridget Jones' Diary" by Helen Fielding or the related movie. Go to top

Photographs by Brad Trent for USA WEEKEND (Jones) ;
Todd Plitt for USA WEEKEND (Puente & Williams);
James Goodman for USA WEEKEND  (Pacana)

-- Contributing Editor Rula Razek writes USA WEEKEND's weekly "Where on the Web" column.