Dates That Click

Anyone who doesn’t have a date for Valentine’s Day just isn’t plugged in. Literally. With more than 1,200 dating sites operating on the World Wide Web, someone to toast the most romantic of holidays with could be just a few mouse clicks away.

Dating sites, which are more precise, interactive versions of personal ads, are the fastest-growing way for single people to meet other eligible adults. They have made such an impact in the singles market that more traditional competitors like the video dating service Great Expectations are giving members an online option.

Trolling the Web for new romantic candidates is becoming so common that it is fast losing its image as the last resort of leftovers and weirdos. And love on the Web is becoming highly focused, with special-interest sites competing for screen time with mass people marketers.

Late one Friday, Laura, a 42-year-old widow from Westwood, booted up her laptop to check her e-mail. Her picture had been posted that afternoon on Match.com, one of the largest and best-organized dating sites, along with a paragraph she wrote about herself. A tall, all-American blond with an acerbic sense of humor, she would be a man magnet in any venue. So her anonymous screen handle, Goddess123, is well chosen. And within hours, she had mail--seven messages from men, including Libra 385, LADad, Happyboy and Beachlover2000.

Her experience is replicated millions of times, every day, on computers throughout the country. Like everything else on the Internet, online dating is exploding.

Match.com has grown from 300,000 registered members in 1997 to 2.5 million. Online dating services have been used by 7% of the estimated 50 million to 60 million adults who go online.

Match.com was sold last year for $50 million, an indication of the financial potential of such sites. The earnings of online dating services are not published, but they are high-volume businesses with the ability to earn more money by selling ads and marketing information about their members. Most sites charge a flat monthly fee of about $12, small change compared with the $1,000 that introduction services such as It’s Just Lunch charge for a limited number of carefully screened introductions.

Every weekend, more than 1 million people browse the free Love@AOL personals. When Blacksingles.com debuted in 1998, 3,000 people checked in its first month. Now, the site averages 5 million hits a month. If you haven’t been to the wedding of a couple who met online yet, you might get an invitation soon: Every site boasts ring-bearing success stories.

It’s impossible to tell how many people who used to cruise the personals, go to singles dances or practice pickup lines in bars and Laundromats have defected to the Internet, but the 40,000 singles who sign up each month for People2People.com and the 38,000 who join Match.com are among those who have discovered how efficient a matchmaker the computer can be.

“With the personals, all you get is someone’s short blurb. Then when you call the 900 number, you hear their voice and learn a little more,” said Jerry, a 37-year-old actor who’s been trying to meet women since he moved to Los Angeles three months ago. “The questionnaires on Matchmaker.com are so long and detailed that if you put in the time to really read them, you get a good sense of who someone is. Sometimes you learn more about them than you would on two dates.”

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It could be her picture, with its sly, Mona Lisa smile, or a profile that radiates optimism and self-confidence, but by the end of her first weekend online, Laura had received 75 more e-mails from prospective suitors.

“I don’t really like to spend that much time sitting at the computer,” she said, “but just sifting through the messages, then parsing the profiles looking for signs of intelligent life, responding politely to the ones I wasn’t interested in, not to mention writing longer responses to the ones that seemed promising, took hours. I can see where being courted on the computer could make someone think they have a life.”

Our sense of community didn’t used to be virtual. Yet as the average age for marriage increases, people are more likely to move away from home towns and college, places where meeting people their age was easy. Enter the Internet, which provides a borderless network of communities formed around interests and values. Matchmaker.com even calls its subgroups communities: 68 are organized by location, 17 by lifestyle choices, such as religious affiliation, sexual orientation or interests in swinging or nudity.

Samantha Scott, who works for Matchmaker.com and met her boyfriend five months ago through the service, said, “He’s great, but he doesn’t enjoy the opera, as I do. So I’ve found an opera buddy online. People look for friends to go sailing with, or for a workout partner. As long as you’re clear about your intentions, you can use the site in a number of different ways.”

One of the most common fears people have about the strangers they might meet online is that a person protected by an anonymous handle may be pretending to be someone they’re not.

“I knew at least five of the ladies on the site because of some reason or another, like one lived in the same apartment building as me. Her age was wrong, she smokes and said she was a nonsmoker, she never graduated college and said she had and she’s a drunk, although she said she didn’t drink,” said John, 46, of Marina del Rey, whose wife of 22 years left him two years ago, prompting him to search 150 profiles on Match.com.

“I was so disgusted by the lack of integrity I saw that I decided to stick to my old-fashioned ways of meeting new companions.”

Liars and phonies were fixtures in the dating scene long before computers. Jim Welch, Matchmaker.com’s online dating expert, said, “A woman could meet a man in a bar who’d conveniently misplaced his wedding ring. You have to do the same sort of due diligence online that you do offline. If a guy won’t give you his home phone number, and he’s busy on Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas, chances are he’s either seeing someone else or he’s married.”

Cyber-dating veterans say that in some ways seeking romance online isn’t that different from regular dating.

“People who’ll do well online would probably be popular in any setting,” Welch said. “The exception would be male computer nerds, who are sometimes very shy but feel comfortable talking through a computer. They tend to do better by revealing themselves in e-mails before meeting someone. But intelligence, humor, charm all come through online. So does obnoxiousness.”

Online, people commonly exaggerate how attractive they are, how physically fit, and their level of financial success. Trish McDermott, Match.com’s vice president of romance, said, “The anonymity is a tool, but you have to use it well. It gives people an opportunity to experiment in a way that they wouldn’t in the offline world. They can pursue numerous romantic opportunities at the same time. When you go to buy a pair of jeans, you usually try on a few before you buy one. In dating, you meet one person and you sometimes spend months finding out that they don’t really fit. Online, you can pursue 10 or 15 people, so it gives you the opportunity to shop around. I call it falling in love from the inside out.”

Lying about age, especially among those older than 30, is so common that experienced online daters expect it.

“If I want to meet a woman under 45,” a 48-year-old engineer from Northridge said, “I’ll set the search criteria for 32 to 40. That way, I know the profiles of all the 45-year-old women who’ve shaved five years off their age will show up anyway.”

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But pictures don’t lie. Or do they? Both men and women report face-to-face meetings with people whose online photographs were as much as 20 years, or many pounds, out of date.

Dating Web sites report that a profile with a photograph will get three to five times the number of responses as one without. Yet some sites are designed to make pictures less important. Rightstuffdating.com is limited to graduates of the Ivy League and a few other highly selective universities. If a prospective member claims to be a Princeton grad, a diploma or transcript must be produced.

“We’re offering a certain type of network, and it’s important that it be what we represent it to be,” said Dawn Touchings, the Right Stuff founder (and a Cornell alumna). After reading a short profile, a member can order a longer bio. Only then can he or she ask to see a photograph. “There are professors in this group, professionals and people in the public eye,” Touchings said. “They need another level of privacy that other online services don’t offer.”

If a site open to a caste of college graduates seems narrow, consider the “living and raw foods singles” site for vegetarians and vegans who eat 50% or more raw food. There’s Meet-an-Inmate.com for jailed women wanting pen pals, and Generous.net, the largest fat-pride matchmaking site on the Web.

There are interracial, Asian and Latino sites, sites for people with disabilities and those who want to meet them, Jewish, Catholic and Buddhist sites. Singles With Scruples.com bills itself as “a nondenominational site designed to attract people of sound character and high ethics. There are plenty of sites out there that talk about ‘quality’ people, but when you look a little closer, it turns out they use the word ‘quality’ as code for wealthy or good looking,” the site states. “We have nothing against money or beauty, but they’re poor indicators of a person’s ability to be in a loving, trusting, lasting relationship.”

On every type of dating site, women are more likely to make the first move than they would offline. Laura was initially passive, waiting to see who would respond to her profile. “Then one night I spent about an hour browsing the men’s profiles,” she said. “I sent out four e-mails saying, ‘Liked your profile. Take a look at mine.’ That’s the equivalent to calling a guy first, and I’d never do that. So, in a way, these sites give women a chance to be more proactive.”

After the initial rush, Laura continued to receive a steady stream of e-mails for the two months she stayed on the site.

“The beauty of online communication is it highlights which people have something to say and in whose brains a thought would die of loneliness,” she said.

The process was capricious: She’d delete someone’s e-mail on a day when she was feeling impatient or had received too many other messages. Other days, on a whim, she’d write a long response to a man she doubted she’d ever want to meet. Friday afternoons her mailbox was always crowded. “That’s when I would hear from 25-year-olds looking for their older-woman experience. It was so obvious, and kind of funny.”

She corresponded with a number of men, then selected some to talk with on the phone. From those, she agreed to meet a dozen.

“I had a drink with one, but with the rest, it was lunch or dinner,” she said. “I’m not in college. I don’t do coffee. If someone would keep me on the phone for 45 minutes and then suggest coffee, it was obvious he was just cheap.”

Her experiences led to other conclusions about online dating that the experts echo. The more serious, more motivated people wanted to get offline, talk and meet.

“The longer someone wants to stay online, the stranger they are,” Laura said. “Or it can be an indication that they have something to hide.”

Of the 12 men she met, the champion lasted four dates.

“I kept telling myself, ‘Trust your gut. Trust your gut.’ If I wasn’t blown away at the beginning, I just didn’t see the point to letting it drag on.”

As Valentine’s Day approached, Laura was preparing to retire her profile.

“I can’t stand to listen to one more guy’s story of why he got divorced,” she said. “It was an interesting experiment. It got me through the holidays, and I have to admit that all the attention was pretty good for my ego. But the volume of e-mails was a little unnerving. It’s possible that I didn’t take any one person too seriously because I was always looking over my shoulder to see who else was on my screen.

“If the town matchmaker had put me together with some guy, we’d try to make it work. I sometimes wonder if too many choices--in fact, an endless supply--are actually detrimental to the process. Meeting so many people at once makes the competition tough. In a crowded field, the weaker players quickly fall to the sidelines. When someone didn’t contact me for a few days, I’d feel like telling him, (in a nice way), ‘You snooze, you lose.’ Four new men had rushed into the vacuum his absence created. Ultimately, the numbers don’t mean anything. As my mother used to say, ‘All you need is one. The right one.’ ”

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Profiles: The Simple Truth

Online, initial attraction can depend on a paragraph you write about yourself. Here’s how to make that profile effective:

* Grammar, punctuation and spelling should be flawless. Sloppiness is a turn-off.

* Try to avoid cliches. Everyone likes cuddling and walks on the beach. Try to make your profile unique.

* Try to show, as opposed to tell, what your personality is. If you have a great sense of humor, display it.

* Be brief but thorough. Don’t assume anyone wants to read the story of your life.

* Be positive. Would you want to get to know someone who is always negative?

* Felicia Ross Adler, author of “Master Dating--How to Meet and Attract Quality Men” (Blue Sky Marketing, 1999) and founder of MasterDating.com, said, “Don’t waste your time explaining that you are not desperate or a social outcast. Anyone who is at a dating Web site has already gotten over that prejudice.”

* “Women should avoid the temptation to think about what all men want, and then describe in what way you are that. Because then you’ll get a thousand responses from men who are looking for the perfect woman, instead of the woman you are,” Adler said.

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Mimi Avins can be reached at mimi.avins@latimes.com.