I Sing the Body Electric

Ah, the wacky world of online love. The pitter-patter of hearts, the clitter-clatter of the keyboard. Where else—save Hollywood or, say, professional sports—can you find such a rich mix of deception, disappointment, and sheer unadulterated fun? If it weren’t for all those testimonials floating around out there (who doesn’t have a friend or co-worker who found their fiancée on “eBoy”?), Internet dating might have become just another bad fad, the wired equivalent of purse dogs or waterbeds or Sea-Monkeys. Instead, it’s become a gigantic moneymaking empire and remains one of the top three ways for singles to find a date. (The other two contenders: meeting someone at work or through friends and social networks, according to a British dating survey.)

• Love online dating? Hate it? Never tried it? Discuss the pros and cons.
• Tell a story about one of your online dating experiences.
  

For the three people who haven’t tried online dating (estimates say 35 million have), it goes something like this. You register with a service, which generally either charges a monthly fee or operates on a chit basis (each chit is good for a certain amount of time or a certain number of messages). Then you post your profile, which consists of a picture or two (tip: use one that doesn’t include the disembodied fingers of an ex curled around your arm) and a bit of crucial info about who you are and what it is you’re looking for.

Naturally, people are looking for all kinds of things—dinner and a movie, marriage and children, bondage and discipline—and there are Web sites that cater to all of those things and more. Niche sites, in fact, are one of the hottest new things in Internet dating, with specialty sites geared toward pet lovers, bookworms, farmers, vegetarians, rednecks, golfers, seniors, people with hepatitis C, and singles specifically searching for those who are educated, beautiful, active, religious, and/or sexually voracious.

While baffling to many beginners, meeting people through the Internet is actually quite easy, as well as inexpensive, widely accepted, and about as efficient as you can get short of ordering somebody out of the Sears catalog (some might argue it actually is ordering somebody out of the Sears catalog). The Internet is also about as democratic as you can get—young, old, gay, straight, fat, thin, red, blue—everybody’s out there.

But there’s an art to it. First, you have to figure out which site will best help you find the type of person you want to meet (dating sites have personalities, just like people). You have to learn the lingo and package yourself appropriately (toward this end, there are a handful of companies that help singles create spiffy profiles and fabulous photos). You have to learn how to quickly and efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff, and from all reports there’s a lot of chaff out there—none of whom can spell.

See also:

Dating Profiles

Dating Acronyms
Online Dating Services Roundup
Internet Dating Rules
Share a Story!
Liar, Liar
The 50 Best Online Dating Sites