Caught in the web
Some people collect postcards, others stamps. My mother, on the other hand, collects Jdate.com success stories.
“Becky,” she said when she called the other day. “Do you remember Annie’s aunt’s daughter Tracy?” (Note: names have been changed.)
“Well,” she said. “She met a boy through Jdate.com last year — and guess what? They’re getting married now. Isn’t that great? Isn’t it?”
Subtlety is not my mother’s best trait.
My mother aside, though, there is no denying that online dating has become a popular pastime for college-aged students — even here. Recently, a friend of mine decided to join in the trend. A senior, it was getting to the point where walking into The 1800 Club was a little like walking onto the set of Cheers: everyone already knew her name.
“I’ve been here for four years,” she said. “I have the same group of friends and I never meet new people,” she said. “I needed a new outlet.”
This friend has been on one date thus far and has another one pending.
The first date didn’t work out so much because the guy, though nice, “had boobs bigger than mine,” she said. To his credit, the guy had warned my friend ahead of time that he was a bit stocky — but “when he said stocky, I thought he meant muscular,” my friend said with a sigh.
She swears she’s taking her name off the server when she moves next year.
Experiences like these don’t stop others from perusing the sites. A common activity among my friends is to hop onto one of these matchmaking sites and seek out prospective dates. A friend who is moving back east next year frequently goes on to preview the pickings there. She’s pleased with what she’s seen so far.
“The guys are better looking in Boston,” she said.
Other friends use these sites as a sort of catch up experience. An early high school reunion, you might say. “I couldn’t believe how many people from high school were on — or how bad they looked,” one girl said gleefully.
This is not to say that everyone goes online for the same reasons. I have another friend who joined an online service in the fall because of a bet. She put her profile online as a sort of joke and was overwhelmed at the number of responses she got back.
She went on a few dates and had a pleasant enough time, but perusing the e-mails and applicants, she felt a bit like a human resources consultant. She found herself writing response letters that sounded a lot like the standard form rejection letters. “Dear so and so,” she would write. “Thanks for contacting me, but I’m not interested in you at this time.”
Of course, there are the many internet success stories. One girl, for instance, told me that her aunt had met “two or three” husbands online. Hmm.
Joking aside, the premise of online dating services are rather sound.
When you meet someone at a bar, for instance, you don’t really know what their interests are or what there background is until much later on. With online dating, you do. It does however put a stilt on the normal introductory conversations when you already know these details ahead of time.
But online dating services, no matter how successful, still have a bit of a stigma attached to them. “There’s something a little shameful about it,” said one guy who was very concerned about being named. Another couple that met online are still in the closet about it — and they’ve been married for more than a year. When asked, they’ll claim to have met at an airport.
Other people waver on the subject. “If I’m not dating in two years, then I’ll go on,” they say. But, as my mother informed me, that’s what her good friend’s daughter used to say, too — and now she’s engaged.
