Internet romances are slowly becoming mainstream for the middle-aged

Jeff Standal, a 52-year-old area businessman, once scoffed at the idea of online dating.

“I think two or three years ago, and this is just my perception, it still had a tacky kind of quality about it,” he said. “It was just kind of an instinctive thing.”

Now, after a number of “positive experiences” – which included meeting the woman he would eventually marry – Standal has a different opinion.

“In hindsight, and given my experience, I wouldn’t even consider anything else,” he said.

Standal isn’t alone either in his initial distrust of the online-dating experience or his eventual change of mind.

For one thing, he was 50 when he first logged on to one of the industry’s biggest names, eHarmony.com (according to the Washington Post, the Pasadena, Calif.-based eHarmony has had some 13 million users since it began in 2000).

In this era of online communication, it’s easy to forget that many of us didn’t grow up as part of an online community. Not everyone, after all, has a MySpace page.

As a result, despite television commercials that hail the success of online dating, some singles, particularly those who are in middle-age, are no more prepared to look for a date online than they would be, say, to launch a blog.

That’s where psychologist James Houran comes in. Known as “Dr. Jim” at Online Dating Magazine, where he works as a spokesman and columnist, Houran says that online dating is a big improvement over traditional offline methods of meeting.

“Traditionally, we tend to meet our mates one of three ways,” Houran said in a recent phone interview. “We either met them accidentally, we were introduced through family or friends, we met them at work. In other words, they were people who tended to be in close proximity to us.”

The electronic veil

Seeking out someone online not only widens the net, Houran says, but it’s safer.

“You use it at your own pace, in the comfort and security of your own home,” he said. “You do it when you feel motivated. And there is a natural barrier between, one, the people who you are exploring and, two, you’re communicating with.”

Not that online dating is without controversy. Some sites have been accused of faking their data, and Houran himself was involved in a legal spat with True.com. Even eHarmony has been sued for excluding gays, and it’s been the subject of attack ads placed by such rival companies as Chemistry.com for rejecting other potential clients.

(In its defense, eHarmony told the Washington Post that of the “million people” it has rejected, 30 percent were married, 27 percent were younger than the minimum age of 21 and 9 percent gave “inconsistent answers” on its exhaustive application form.)

Online dating services can be broken down into two major categories: those that point users in the direction of a serious relationship and those that keep the mood more casual.

Sites such as eHarmony are examples of the former. In fact, eHarmony claims to be “America’s No. 1 trusted relationship service.” It credits much of its success to the “over 35 years of clinical and empirical research” conducted by company founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren.

Standal’s experience lends credence to the company’s marketing claims. Beginning with eHarmony’s 436-question application form, which claims to probe for “29 key dimensions of compatibility,” he was forced not just to think about what kind of relationship he wanted but also to examine aspects of his own personality.

“It took a couple of hours and a lot of thought and I was just off to the races,” he said.

Over the next year, Standal estimates he talked online with between 40 and 50 women. Of those, he had “serious conversations” with about 20, more serious conversations with “a handful.”

He even met one Seattle woman in person and made tentative plans to meet another woman from France.

Then, after moving on from eHarmony to another site, Match.com, Standal found someone right here in Spokane.

He and Patti Bellamy (now Standal), also 52, ended up getting married a year and a half after they met online.

The difference between Patti and the other women he had contacted, Standal said, reflected “all the reasons why I fell in love with her – her sense of humor, her wit, her sense of irony; she’s articulate, she’s got a wonderfully balanced personality, she’s a reader, she’s a movie-watcher. And all of those qualities came across in our initial communications.”

‘He’s not the one’

Standal, who didn’t start out looking to get married, admits that ultimately he would have. He also said that he enjoyed “communicating with all these different, interesting women all over the world. … I loved their vulnerability and their taking chances in talking to strangers and the humor that they brought to the whole sense of this kind of comedy-drama that we’re all engaged in. It was just a very, very positive experience for me.”

As it was for Patti Standal, too. A native of North Dakota, Standal moved to Spokane four years ago. She quickly grew tired of being set up with men by friends who seemed to have no feel for matching her with the right guy.

“(T)hey had nothing to base a match on other than they liked them and they liked me so they thought, ‘Oh, you guys should get together,’ ” Standal said. “But there was nothing scientific about it at all. So it never worked out.”

After one “date from hell on New Year’s Eve,” Standal turned to Match.com. She studied men’s profiles at first, contacting only those men who interested her. Still, nothing clicked, and she quit her membership.

After about five months, though, she returned – and there was Jeff.

“It’s funny,” she recalled, “my daughter said, ‘No, Mom, he’s not the one. He’s got too many pictures of himself.’ She had this real clear idea that if a man had more than one picture of himself, he was vain. But it didn’t turn out that way.”

They took their time, dating for 18 months, she said, “But we knew after six months. I mean, I think we knew almost immediately.”

Online dating has become popular among her friends, too.

“When I started doing this two and a half years ago, two friends in particular said, ‘Oh, I’ll never do that,’ ” Standal said. “And that last time I talked to them, one had been doing it for a year and the other one had just started six months ago.”

Gary Bruner, a 65-year-old Spokane retiree, began using eHarmony two years ago. Of the 50 or so women he’s had dealings with, he’s had phone conversations with 15 and met 10 in person. Of those, he’s dated two.

Bruner said he resorted to online dating because, “It seemed like an interesting and fun way to meet some new people. It’s hard to meet people when you don’t go to the bars and you work in a job that doesn’t expose you to a lot of professional women – except at work, and you don’t date the women at work.”

Part of the reason why he considered online dating, he said, was his age. Things were easier, he said, 30 years ago.

“There are so many single people when you’re that age that it just seems to be a different situation,” he said. “You do go more places than when you’re 60 years old. You probably have more exposure.”

And while he hasn’t yet found a sustained relationship, Bruner is thankful for the opportunities the process has given him.

“There’s a couple of them that, after you meet them, you realize there isn’t any chemistry there,” he said. “But the process can’t help you there. No process can. But the truth is they were all quality women.”

The long and short of it

Long-term relationships are hardly the only goal of online daters, psychologist Houran says. Some sites, he says, fulfill a much-needed function in the online-dating world.

“I call them the ‘Wal-Mart of dating,’ ” Houran said. “They have a little something for everybody, but by and large they’re for people who could go either way. They’re looking for something in the short term, but maybe they’re open for something in the longer term if they meet the right person.”

Houran cites Match.com, along with Yahoo.com personals, as leading examples of this type. On its site, Match.com claims last year to have helped “more than 400,000 people (find) someone to keep them warm at night.”

Houran believes, in fact, that “the online dating industry has done a disservice to the public” by trying to push marriage as its ultimate goal.

“I think that’s a terrible index of relationship success,” Houran said. “That certainly sells services when you’re talking about ‘We can promise you a soulmate,’ or ‘We can introduce you to The One,’ or ‘We have more marriages than any other site.’ “

But, he added, “I think it sets people up, one, for unrealistic expectations but, two, it also sets up the mind frame that to be happy you have to be in a certain kind of relationship.”

And that mind frame, he said, “Actually pushes people toward premature seriousness.”

Something for everyone

One of the most recent developments in the online-dating world, Houran said, has been the rise of “what we call ‘niche sites’ that cater to a specific kind of interest or activity.”

“I make the joke that you can put together any kind of phrase, for example, ‘short Republicans that are going bald that love bald eagles, too,’ and you will find a dating site that caters specifically to that,” Houran said.

Houran stresses that the range of services available should meet whatever the knowledgeable online dater needs.

“There are a variety of sites that will match basically whatever you’re looking for,” he said. “They’re something that has proven effective for millions of people, and when they stop to think about it, it’s no different than romance when they were young. … So, really, it’s old wine in new bottles.”

Jeff Standal, for one, agrees.

“Of course, we’ve all heard of the negative encounters,” he said. “But I never saw it. I found people to be tenderly courageous in just putting it out there on the line. … I had those initial inhibitions, those stereotypical ideas about it. I was just so wonderfully surprised by how it all worked out.”