The Martlet

“I need a boy,” wailed my roommate.

Sophia had been single for all of one month and, with her aversion to one-night stands, she was getting a little lusty. Unfortunately, UVic’s population offers one boy for every three girls. Not to mention the complications that come with her ideal man having long hair, a slender body, a pretty face, a good singing voice and an intelligent and talkative nature. Basically, she was screwed.

“Why don’t you try an online dating site,” I suggested.

Since neither of us had anything better to do, we sat down and signed up for OKCupid.

Everybody’s doing it

There’s a good chance that more of your friends than you know of have online dating profiles floating around on some website. My friend Jordan, for example, is listed on the free dating site Plenty of Fish (PoF).

“Guess who messaged me on PoF?” she messaged me one night.

“Who?” I said, not wanting to play the guessing game. I couldn’t think of any single guys we both knew.

She sent me a link. I clicked on it, and was brought to the dating profile of our Residence Advisor from first year. Awkward.

I never thought he’d need an online dating site. But it made me curious — who is on these sites? I typed in some quick search parameters: lives in Victoria, age 20-24, attends university.

One of the first search results was my old roommate, then a friend of a friend I recognized from several parties. Then another friend of mine appeared, who was so shy that it shocked me to find her in a dating environment.

On OKCupid I’ve wandered across friends, friends’ girlfriends, coworkers and even ex-roommates — which was slightly disconcerting.

All this has led me to one conclusion: everybody’s doing it. And here I thought I was the only one.

In 2007, Online Dating Magazine estimated that 20 million people visit at least one dating site once a month.

PoF is one of the few free sites to rank up there with the paid sites on a numbers-basis in North America. Markus Frind, the owner, creator, designer and everything-man of PoF, only keeps track of his active users which, in 2006, amounted to between 250,000 and 320,000 user log-ins per day. PoF’s September active-user base in 2006 grew 290 per cent from the previous year.

Since then, these numbers have undoubtably increased over the years.

Yet, some of the stigma surrounding online dating sites still exists. Almost everyone you ask has an excuse for joining: “I lost a bet;” “I signed up because my friend wanted me to;” “I thought it was funny.” Hardly anyone ever just says, “Well, I’m single and it’s hard to meet people.”

Martin Smith, a professor of Evolutionary Psychology at UVic, said he thinks online dating is a good idea.

“It gives another way, another forum, for people to meet people,” he said, adding online dating is on its way from the risque to the mainstream.

“To me, it’s no different than going to a bar or joining a team.”

Smith says people should “look at online dating as just being part of our mating strategy.”

“I’m very much in favour of any kind of technology that gives people a little bit more hope, and more tools,” he said.

However, Smith emphasizes that online dating sites shouldn’t be your only method of meeting people and warns against spending too much time on these sites.

“All the time you’re on the computer you’re not in the real world meeting people,” he said.

Does it work?

“Hi, I’m from the Internet,” Spike called out as he walked in the front door of my house. Spike was a boy Sophia met on OKCupid, nicknamed by my household for his resemblance to the Buffy character. After sending several essays back and forth, they met up. And while their rendez-vouses didn’t flourish into a budding romance, they have become friends. It’s a success of sorts.

Online Dating Magazine would have you think everyone’s meeting their life partner online these days. It boasted that more than 120,000 marriages a year result from matches made on online dating sites. However, that’s less than one per cent of its estimated 20 million daters.

Some users aren’t that serious, and don’t even make it to the first date. My friend Mark signed up for OKCupid after he saw me browsing my matches one night. He messaged back and forth with a few girls, but that’s about as far as it went. A month or so later he deleted his profile.

“Nobody really clicked,” he said. “I tried it, and I really had no luck with it.”

However, some users are more serious. PoF estimates that its users will go on more than 18 million dates with other users this year. With nearly one million users, that’s roughly 18 dates a year per user.

But is 18 dates really a success? If that’s 18 first dates, I’d say no. And many online daters I know haven’t gotten a lot further than the first date.

Jordan recently went on a first date with a boy she met on PoF.

“We’d been talking over the website mail for over a week and we seem fairly compatible so I figured, why not?” she told me. “We could talk about whatever, our daily lives, things we liked, like falling asleep to the sound of rain and waking up to sunshine.”

They decided to meet one Friday night at Peacocks Billiards downtown.

“I wanted a place with lots of people in case he had intentions to kidnap me,” Jordan said. “I wasn’t really sure what to expect.”

When they started talking, Jordan realized the chemistry she had felt on the Internet just didn’t exist in person.

“I think it was, at least for me, that I could formulate my responses before I hit send,” she said. “It was also weird having him refer to things I had said online in our real-life conversation.”

Jordan didn’t get kidnapped, but there isn’t a second date on the horizon either.

“He suggested we go to an East Indian restaurant for a second date. It sounded nice, but I think I’m going to have to say no,” she said. “Even though he was a nice enough guy, paid for everything and even drove me home, he didn’t leave a lasting memory.”

What about Jordan’s future on PoF?

“I think I’m going to live in the real world for now and only use PoF for entertainment reasons as I set out,” she said.

Smith said research suggests many people don’t get past the first date due to Negative Cascading Effect.

“When you meet the person right off the bat you have this excited expectation,” said Smith.

He said people often pick partners who have similar interests to them, and that one variance can be very disconcerting.

“It could have an immediate off-putting effect,” said Smith. “As soon as you find the one thing that doesn’t match you’re hyperalert for the next thing. This is essentially irrational.”

Success is possible

However, not everyone’s fish flops after the first date. Steven and Mia met online in late August 2008 when she found his profile on PoF.

“I’ve never actually gotten along with anybody I’ve messaged on PoF,” said Steven, “but I get along great with all the girls who make first contact with me.”

Mia messaged Steven because he had a Doctor Who reference. They started talking on MSN nearly every night. Finally, Steven invited Mia to Dairy Queen for cake.

“We both had friends there, which made the whole thing different from the one-on-one online conversations,” said Steven. “Plus I remember I was totally intimidated by her pop culture references that were totally over my head, which isn’t a problem online because of, well... Wikipedia.”

Steven was the first person Mia had ever met from an online dating site. She said she went mainly out of curiosity, and that after browsing his Facebook had decided that he seemed legit. However, their first meeting didn’t create an insta-romance.

“He invited me to a cluster party next, I think ... I was fairly sure I’d scared him off, so I had mostly given up on the flirting and figured I’d have some fun anyway, because he seemed to be fun,” Mia said. “He kept inviting me places without making much of a move romantically.”

Steven says it was at the party when things started to progress and he started considering Mia to be an “offline” person. Eventually, he said, things grew more and more romantic, but there was no one starting point of their relationship.

However, Mia tells a slightly different story.

“We’d been drinking at a residence party and he mentioned coming back home with me to watch Sweeney Todd, and believe it or not we actually watched it — drunk off our nuts — and at the end of it I kissed him,” she said.

While they may seem like any other happy couple now, their beginning sometimes comes back to haunt them.

“Anyone who might ever possibly meet my parents in the near future is told that we met ‘through friends’ because my parents would absolutely kill me,” said Mia.

The sites

There are two main free dating sites which are used by many of the student dating population: OKCupid (okcupid.com), and PoF (plentyoffish.com). I currently have profiles on both.

While the PoF website is kind of ugly, it gets the job done. You can search users by parameters such as age, location, body type, education level, hair colour, ethnicity, or even income. Results can be displayed with a picture and a little “About Me” blurb, or by photo gallery style.

User profiles have up to eight images, an “About Me” box, the basic “What are you looking for?,” “Do you smoke?” sort of questions, and an optional box for describing your ideal first date.

The pros? It’s simple. It’s free. It has a large, active user base and an instant-messaging program. It’s also the site most people I know are familiar with.

“PoF has more people, but I like the format of OKCupid better,” said Mia.

The cons? While you can select female-looking-for-female, or male-looking-for-male (unlike on some paid sites like eHarmony), there is no bisexual option. You also only get to select one choice from the “looking for” field, so too bad if you want to find new friends, potential romances and fuck buddies.

OKCupid has a little more to offer than PoF. It’s visually more appealing, encourages users to create fuller profiles, and offers more choices when filling in personal details. It even has an “available” option in addition to the traditional “single,” for users who are in open or polyamorous relationships. The site is definitely a little quirkier than your average dating site, and many of its users follow suit.

The pros? It has a homescreen look similar to Facebook (before it went the way of Twitter) that shows recent activity. It also has thousands of quizzes, and your results show on your profile — or you can hide them.

The cons? You have to answer a lot of match questions to get good results.

Both sites allow you to send messages to other users, see who has viewed your profile and chat in forums.

If you’re really serious, you can also sign up for a paid site, like eHarmony and Lavalife. These sites usually offer useless free trials, where you can’t do much other than create a profile.

Smith said literature in the psychological field has placed dating sites into four stages of evolution.

The first, called “Long Bar,” are large sites with many users. They have no matching program and are often free to browse profiles but charge users to communicate with other members. Yahoo Personals falls under this category.

The second are “Long Test” sites, which include eHarmony and Perfect Match. They include a matching test and users are less free to roam at will.

Thirdly are “Community Model” sites, which are the most commonly used today. They are often free and encourage cross-talk between members. OKCupid and PoF both fit this model.

The fourth category, “Virtual Encounters,” contains the future of online dating. Particpants can create an avatar and go on virtual dates before deciding if they want to meet in person.

The Conclusion

For many, the world of online dating offers nothing more than an amusing way to pass the time. However, there are those select few that first meet their soul mates by clicking a mouse.

Either way, it makes for an interesting journey, and you might even make a few friends along the way.

As for Sophia? She’s already talking to a new boy.