Love thrives online, along with headaches
Looking for your soul mate? You may not have to look any further than the Internet. But beware. Not everyone finds love on the first try.
According to JupiterResearch, a division of JupiterMedia Corp., the online dating industry has grown from a small market fighting a big stigma into a $313 million industry that’s expected to more than double by 2008.
This growth is due, in part, to the 29 million Americans (or two out of five singles), who have been looking for love by using online dating services this past year. An estimated 61 percent of all Internet users have created an online personal ad.
With this many people online, finding a mate shouldn’t be that hard. And, according to Thomas Pampinella, it wasn’t.
Pampinella, a 29-year-old information technology systems engineer for the City and County of San Francisco, found his fiancee on sparkmatch.com, a now-defunct Web site.
He said he surfed the Web for entertainment while sitting at home after the startup he had worked for tanked. Then in May 2001, he visited sparkmatch.com and decided to take the site’s personality quiz.
Although he didn’t really want to meet anyone, he thought he could “browse the other profiles and check out all the crazy people out there,” Pampinella said.
Meanwhile, Danielle Morrison, 27, of Cedar City, Utah, was checking her e-mail between classes. The computer she was using had sparkmatch.com’s personality quiz page up, so being inquisitive, she took the quiz. Pampinella was listed as a 100 percent match. They began corresponding.
He says, “The anonymity of the site and process let me feel really comfortable about just chatting away.” After nearly five months of online chatting, Pampinella and Morrison decided to meet on neutral ground — Las Vegas. They became formally engaged this spring.
He admits, however, that there may be a “stigma of meeting people online” and that his friends believe it has “a dubious feel to it.” Still, he has no doubt he has met his soul mate. He says, “I’m never going to have to look for anyone else.”
Like Pampinella, Alex Gousak, 25, of St. Petersburg, Russia, met his wife in a chat room that no longer exists. Says Gousak, “I started the conversation. It began as a regular ‘asl’ (age, sex, location) chat.”
His wife, Katie Stewart, 24, of Spokane, says that she and Gousak had been regulars of Maxichat for over a year before they began talking to each other. Neither intended to meet someone online. Says Stewart, “I think online romances are kind of strange, actually.”
Nonetheless, they found each other and began corresponding. After chatting “basically every day, two or more hours a day” for four months, “it hit me that this wasn’t just an online fling,” she says.
Another year and “a hundred pictures” later, Stewart traveled to St. Petersburg to meet Gousak in person. Three weeks later they were married. He has since moved to Spokane and become a Web-site programmer and developer.
Stewart adds, “We would absolutely, positively had never have met without the Internet. We met online in 1999, and even five or ten years before that our relationship wouldn’t have been possible.”
Although finding true love on the Internet is indeed possible, it’s not typical.
The general complaints are that there are more men online than women and that there is a lack of protection against sexual predators or cheating lovers. It’s even been said that men lie about their availability and women lie about their appearance.
Many online dating services try to curb these complaints by promoting free scanning support and providing online dating tips. But what it comes down to is this: be smart. Trust your instincts. Use common sense.
And before you create your personal ad, be sure to review which site will best fit your needs. Go to Dating Site Reviews ( http://www.datingsitesreviews.com/), DateSeeker.net ( http://www.dateseeker.net/) or Dating Reviews Online (http://datingreviewsonline.com/) to find the best and safest places to meet your soul mate.