Everybody has a hungry heart; everybody needs a hand to hold onto. The Boss knew it, and Johnny Cougar knew it, too. But, as Tom Petty reminded us, good love is hard to find. Especially if you are a single Gen-Xer.
In 1956, the median age for tying the knot was 22.5 for men and 20.1 for women. In 2003, those numbers were 27.1 and 25.3, respectively. Factor in today's significantly higher divorce rate, and you end up with a lot of single Gen-Xers who no longer enjoy the large social circles they were a part of in high school and college. And we are often restricted -- if not by rules, then by common sense and good taste -- from dating our co-workers.
Consequently, we look for love in all the wrong places. We date co-workers despite our better judgment. We go to clubs, where, after sufficiently clouding our judgment, we take part in ill-advised, superficial flings.
Or, if the increasingly large advertising budgets of Match.com and eHarmony are any indication, we reach across wires and cables in search of a warm, comforting embrace.
Wookin' pah nub
I'll be the first to admit I was desperate.
I was nearly a year removed from a soul-rocking breakup, and was ready to put myself back on the market. I began a campaign of self-improvement. I took up jogging. I started using moisturizer. I got myself one of those intentionally messy haircuts.
But I lived in Muncie at the time, where single, reasonably attractive and well-educated 20-something women were in shorter supply than decent record stores. I had solved the record store problem by shopping online. I reasoned that the same solution should work for my woman dilemma.
In those days, like every irony-loving wannabe writer, I read The Onion every week. I had recently noticed a new feature on the site called the "Personal of the Day." It invariably featured an aggressively hip-looking, attractive 20-something, whose picture was always accompanied with a snarky, suggestive personal quote.
So one day, despite reservations about endangering my street cred, I clicked on the link.
I quickly learned that the Onion Personals were actually owned by Spring Street Networks, and were also accessible from Nerve.com, Salon.com and a number of other Web sites widely read by the college-educated 18-35 demographic.
The site allows users to create a personal profile and browse profiles of others for free. But to initiate contact, one must buy "points."
After purchasing my points, I developed a four-point criteria my prospects had to meet before I would spend my points on them:
1. Must post a picture.
2. Must exhibit reasonably good grammar skills.
3. Must live no farther than 150 miles from me.
4. Must be between the ages of 22 and 33.
I depleted my points quickly, sending what I imagined to be cleverly self-aware e-flirtations to seven or eight women. I anxiously awaited responses. I checked my profile page obsessively. I soon struck up correspondences with three women kind enough to share their personal e-mail addresses. There was one in Cincinnati; two in Indianapolis.
A few weeks later, one of the Indianapolis prospects suggested I call her. I rushed home after work and nervously dialed her number.
Forty-eight hours later, we were eating dinner together at Mikado. Fifty hours later, we were drinking cheap wine and listening to Jim O'Rourke in her Irvington apartment. Sixty hours later, I was waking up on her living room floor after having fallen asleep watching Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Red."
The relationship lasted only two months, but it confirmed, for me, that the Internet is a viable venue for courtship.
The winds of change
When I introduced my "Internet girlfriend" to my mom, I told her we met "through a friend." I didn't think she could handle the truth. That was in 2002. But in 2006, more and more people view online courtship as a perfectly acceptable way of meeting potential mates.
"In my brief career, I have seen many changes, and that is one of the things I have seen change," said Susan Herring, a scholar of computer-mediated communication at Indiana University.
"Even among the older generation, there are a number of people who are doing it. Yeah, they're a little bit embarrassed by it, but it is going to be a continuing trend."
Indianapolis postal worker Jonathan Harp is an example of the trend. When his divorce was finalized in 2004, Harp, then 35, was ready to test the waters of the singles world. But he found scant options in his real-life social circle.
"In the group I was in, I just wasn't meeting anybody," Harp said. "Either I could drastically change my life, which wasn't realistic, or I could change my method."
Harp decided to try several different online dating sites, including eHarmony, Match. com and ChristianMingle.
"It was a little odd, to be honest," he said. "At my age, it kind of felt a little desperate to be doing that, which really isn't the case."
Harp's online excursions led to dating stints with four different women.
"When somebody would ask where I met the person I was going out with, I would sometimes say through a friend. Sometimes, I would get teased about it."
But Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University who recently co-authored a study of a popular online dating site, said Harp had nothing to be ashamed of.
"Internet dating sites provide you with access to a whole new pool of people," she said. "With individuals who have exhausted their circle of friends, it's a lifesaver."
When asked if his journey into the online dating world was a success, Harp was ambivalent.
"It depends on how you view success," he said. "It's a shaky thing. I'm not convinced it's the best way to meet people. I think it's easy to misrepresent yourself, or fudge the facts, and that makes it difficult to find the right person."
In her study of online dating, Ellison found that people do tend to misrepresent themselves on the Internet. But she said the same thing happens in real life, too.
"We all have a tendency to present ourselves as positively as possible," she said. "This is fairly universal in a face-to-face setting as well. That's why we aren't all walking around in our jammies all day, even though it would be more comfortable. Of course, in computer-mediated communication, there are more opportunities for selective self-presentation."
Harp experienced this "selective self-presentation" firsthand.
"I had a date with one person where the picture she used was not a particularly recent one," he said. "And she was significantly different in person than what she had put online. But she had had a child in between the time, so to some extent I understand, but at the same time you're thinking 'This isn't exactly what I bargained for.' "
Herring said that Harp's experience is typical of online dating participants.
"People who use (online dating sites) often feel like they have to lie a little bit, because if they didn't, they wouldn't be competitive," she said.
As a result, many savvy users have learned to adjust their expectations.
"If someone says he's 44, other users might assume he's 48 or 50," she said. "It's a kind of adjustment for inflation. A lot of research has found that it's OK ethically to exaggerate a little bit, but if you stray too far from the truth, it becomes problematic."
And despite the occasional embellishment, Ellison said it's inaccurate to regard online prospects as more dishonest than real life ones.
"My sense is that we have these tendencies, and they play out differently online," she said. "But I think if we were to look at face-to-face settings, we'd see a lot of the same tendencies. For example, when you are filling out a résumé, you might think, 'I don't know this software package, but if I get this job I have two weeks to learn it, so I'll put it down.' "
Handcuffed by love
Annie Hood, 21, of Indianapolis, has tried online dating at both Match.com and Yahoo Personals. She isn't afraid to admit that she fudged the truth a bit to get results.
"I think everybody lies a little bit," she said. "Even I lie a little bit. It is kind of like your résumé for dating. You want to make yourself look as good as possible to potential daters."
Like Jonathan Harp, Hood didn't find a good match through the services.
"Nobody was really freaky," she said. "I had good experiences with them. It just didn't work out. Most of them lived so far away."
Still, it was the Internet that brought Hood together with her current boyfriend, Scott Proctor, 31, in 2003.
"I'd been kicking around the music scene for quite awhile and I started to get interested in doing more with the scene than just attending shows," she said. "A friend of mine had pointed out the Indianapolis music.net message board to me, so I got on and started posting regularly."
It was at a barbecue held by another Indianapolis music.net message board user where Hood met Proctor, who she said "had sort of stuck out to me on the message board.
"But I wasn't going to the barbecue specifically to meet him," she said.
Romance didn't spark immediately. But the two continued to communicate over the Internet over the following weeks, mostly through Yahoo Instant Messenger.
"We kept talking back and forth over the Internet, and then I saw him on Halloween at Punk Rock Night at the Melody Inn," she said. "He handcuffed me, and I've been stuck with him ever since."
Hood, unlike yours truly, had the guts to tell her mom how she met Proctor.
"She flipped out a little bit. She was like, 'You had no idea what he was going to be like -- he could have been a rapist!' "
But Hood believes that the Internet is a perfectly safe venue to get to know someone if you're smart about it.
"I think honestly, it's almost better than real life because you learn to love someone, or like someone, for who they really are instead of just what they look like," she said. "It is a little geeky. But that's OK. I am a geek."
Luck o' the Irish
It's unlikely that Sean O'Neil ever imagined that nearly 15 years after he graduated college, he would stumble upon a computer-mediated conversation between two women discussing a concert he hosted in his basement while a student at Ball State University.
But he did. Such are the wonders of MySpace, the rapidly growing social networking Web site where a personal Web page is as easy as filling out an online form, and making new "friends" is just a matter of a couple of mouse clicks. O'Neil signed up for the site shortly after he and his wife separated last year.
"I didn't have any intention of finding women or anything like that," O'Neil said." I just wanted to connect with different people, some of whom I knew were on MySpace."
One evening, while reading another MySpace user's profile, O'Neil came upon a comment that referred to a concert in his Muncie basement in 1992. He decided to use MySpace's internal messaging system to send the woman who had made the comment a message.
"Normally I would never contact a stranger," O'Neil said. "Had it been anything less immediately connected to me, I wouldn't have done it. But I sent her a message saying 'Hey, that was the house I lived in.' Next thing you know, we started talking about all of these people that we knew in common, who were at all these shows and parties when I was at Ball State."
The chance online encounter culminated in a face-to-face meeting with Liz Burnes, now a happily married consultant in DeKalb, Ill.
"Liz called after a couple of months saying she was going to be in Indiana, and she gave me her number and told me to call her," O'Neil said. "We made plans to meet, and she also asked if I minded if she brought a friend along."
When O'Neil and Burnes met for the first time a couple of weeks later, O'Neil said it "was like we were old friends."
And while meeting Burnes was immediately comfortable for O'Neil, meeting her friend, Kara Rager of Clarksville, Ind., was immediately something else entirely.
"It's hard to explain," O'Neil said. "It's like I didn't know exactly what, but I knew something good was going to come out of meeting her. I'm not saying it was love at first sight. But I know I never felt that way about anyone right away before."
Within weeks, O'Neil and Rager were taking turns making the 110-mile drive to see one another on a weekly basis.
Friends were able to keep up with their relationship by viewing the comments section of their MySpace pages, where the two often exchanged affectionate words.
"It's a kind of fun, slightly exhibitionist way to indirectly let people know how things are going," O'Neil said. "You kind of know people are looking."
While the Internet facilitated Rager and O'Neil's meeting, it wasn't the setting for the relationship's genesis. Herring suggested that this could work out to their advantage, because they were able to see the whole person, warts and all, immediately.
"A colleague of mine a few years ago had an online romance where she eventually met the person and they had a relationship offline," Herring said. "Her take was interesting. She said that when you meet somebody online, you feel like you know them.
"But really, they are just representing a narrow spectrum of what they are," she said. "When you meet them, you see that yes, they are that person, but they are also many other things. If you are looking to date someone, your imagination fills in the gaps and paints a rosy picture."
But, Herring noted, history has proven love to work in mysterious ways.
"We know that long-distance relationships were popular in the Victorian era, and those were very passionate," she said. "And during wartime, after all of the letters, people would finally come home and get married, and it would work out just fine. So I think the written word can be extremely powerful."
So while the Internet is better than ever at providing us with options, it ultimately won't help us seal the deal. You can e-mail that cute girl in Cleveland until your fingers bleed, but if you can't craft a good sentence, it most likely won't do any good.
Take our advice and read some Shakespearian sonnets before you log onto Match.com. Because there hasn't been a technology developed that will turn an unimaginative hack into a poetic genius -- yet.
http://www.intakeweekly.com/articles/8/023969-8568-160.html
