Looking for love

By Jay Dixit

Editor's note: Finding love at Yale can be tough. But what about finding love on the Internet? We asked a reporter to investigate the possibilities. Here's what he found.

I've spent the last week investigating love on the web. I've visited commerical web sites boasting personal ads for college kids. I read raunchy sexploits and voted for the one I liked the best. I even went on a date with a woman I met online.

What I have to report is not encouraging. If you're looking for a mail-order bride from Russia, or a 13-year-old girlfriend, you may be able to find your soulmate on the net. But if you're just a normal person looking for a normal date, the Internet can be a pretty lonely place.

The first site I checked out was called Swoon. I had seen it advertised in The New Yorker, so I expected a classy cocktail party of a site; I found a seedy speakeasy. People gossip about celebrities--in particular who's sleeping with whom--and post their own raunchy sexploits. You even get to vote on which one you like best. I decided to skip the personal ads here and zip to a different page.

Where to look These sites feature personals for college students. College Cyberpals College Cyberpals bills itself as "The Best Way to Meet College Students With Similar Interests." Unfortunately, this claim is more hype than substance. Finding love in Connecticut will be difficult through this site: within the last year there have only been five personal ads posted in our state, and only one within the last six months. Campus Singles Campus Singles is "a new way to do it--the only personals network just for college students." This site features an extremely easy-to-use interface that allows the user to describe him/herself as "man looking for women," "woman looking for men," "man looking for men," or "woman looking for women." Unfortunately, in the end, these distinctions don't matter since all searches bring up the same entries. An ad search specific to Connecticut returned only six entries overall, all of which were posted within the last three months. Student.Net "Meet new friends" at Student.Net's personals section. Finding a Connecticut friend here would be a daunting task: searches here cannot be refined to a specific area or state. Plus, many of the ads don't specify the location or school of the love-seeker. -Joseph Law

I turned to web personals sites aimed specifically at college students. From what I could tell, most of the men here were illiterate hornballs; most of the women, pathetic. One guy on Campus Singles wrote, "I am just looking for some sex! I really need a sex partner! Hopefully there is a girl who can keep up with me!!" Hey hornball! That approach works very well. In whorehouses. Some guys just intuitively know how to say exactly what a girl likes to hear, I guess.

It got worse. One girl wrote that she was "a sweet, aggressive and hyperactive female." Those are just the qualities I look for in a pet wolverine. But in a date? One girl wrote, "I'd be willing to get arrested over anything that violates my principles or causes pain to someone I care about." Um... me too. Another wrote, "I'm 5'7" and very ugly." Yet another wanted to be contacted under the handle "Guardian Gargoyle." Yes, right. Please contact Hornball.

Eventually, I found an ad that sounded acceptable. She was a 26-year-old Asian female from Southern Connecticut State University. I responded, told her I was writing an article, and asked her out to dinner. She agreed. Her name was Shane. We arranged to meet at the Cafe Adulis.

I waited in front of the cafe, nervous. I didn't know exactly what I was expecting, but I was suprised by what I saw when she arrived. She was Korean, about five feet tall, and definitely pretty. I guess I'd been expecting a very ugly hyperactive guardian gargoyle.

We ate and I asked her about her experience with her personal ad. She said she got at least five responses a day. That seemed like a lot. What proportion of those did she respond to? Maybe a quarter, she said. And what proportion of those materialize into dates? None, she said.

What? So this was the first Internet-arranged date she'd had? Yup. I wanted to know why. "Well," she said, "the majority of people who e-mail me are. . . how shall I say this? Perverts? Psychos?" She explained that most of the people who responded to her ad were older white men who had a thing for Asian women. And she didn't go out with them? "No," she said. "That really freaks me out."

"Yeah," I said. "There are definitely a lot of weirdos on the Internet." I told her about a personal ad I'd found on Campus Singles from somone who claimed to go to Yale:

"Hi! I am a very romantic, caring, and fun SWM. I'd love to share a fun /faithful relationship with a caring, gentle SWF. I am slim, handsome, with a nice body, and smile. I want to explore the outdoors, and more with someone who is loving and gentle. I want to explore the warmth, and softness of each kiss. Not just a one time experience but a lasting relationship. Nights filled with kissing, caressing, laughter etc. I hope you are like me too. I hope to hear from you soon. My email is warm_smiles@hotmail.com. Please write soon!"

Later that week, I looked in Campus Singles for others who claimed to be attending Ivy League colleges. In Massachussetts, I found another personal ad from Warm Smiles, exactly the same as the first, but here he said he was a student at the University of Massachussetts. I searched New Jersey: he was there, too, as a student at Rutgers. He had an entry in most of the states I checked, each with a different college affiliaton: the University of Vermont, the University of Delaware, the University of Rhode Island, and so forth.

Maybe, I suggested to Shane, the man was a stalker. Maybe he arranged dates with women at each school and then drove there to meet them, posing as a student. That line of conversation seemed to make her a little nervous, so I got the bill and we parted.

Later that night, I lay in bed, unable to sleep. I wondered to myself: if Shane was the only normal person to post a personal on the net, and I was the only one she was willing to go out with, what did that say about dating on the Internet? Maybe in the future, singles bars will be on the web. But for now, I'll stick to the real world.

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