Meeting, Mating, and Cheating: Sex, Love, and the New World of Online Dating (Hardcover)

"This book is a thoroughly engaging examination of our struggle for sex and romance in the age of technology and computer dating. Andrea Orr explores and reveals the realities of the way we live and love in today's world." --Jane Juska, author of A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance Virtually overnight, online dating has gone from a fringe phenomenon to a popular and mainstream way to meet, worldwide. This extraordinary social and business revolution is touching millions of lives--but until now, it's gone largely unreported. Andrea Orr tells the unique story of how online dating evolved from a hideout for fetishists to a mainstream way to meet--and a multi-million-dollar global industry. Orr uncovers the real Internet dating revolution, in all its many forms. M reveals Internet dating at its most intimate, following people who are struggling to find soul mates in a sea of singles. It takes you behind the scenes of the world's largest subscription dating service, illuminating the business of Internet dating.It exposes the hidden underside of Internet dating: the lying and "general weirdness" that are still just a click away, and the massive use of the Web to facilitate cheating. Orr's book also tours the world, showing how Internet dating is connecting people from Belfast to Beijing. You'll watch online dating morph to serve the needs of Mormons and Muslims, elderly widows and Asian wireless users. Orr takes a look at life beyond the laptop to the next dating revolutions--Wireless dating, high-tech psychological profiling and beyond. Experience it all: meet the unlikely entrepreneurs who've built hugely successful dating companies...travel to the "Love Bunker" and get a glimpse of life at Match.com, the world's #1 Internet dating service...discover the happily married couples who met online...catch a right on the great online mating tour: from Iran to Hong Kong, L.A. to Salt Lake City as you uncover devoutly religious Iranian women searching for like-minded husbands...and get the lowdown on "restless marrieds" who say cheating was never this easy. The new romance revolution--get inside the worldwide phenomenon of online dating!WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING "Meeting, Mating, and Cheating carefully chronicles the fascinating history of online dating services and exposes the ethics, economics, and efficacy of matchmaking for every conceivable taste. Andrea Orr personalizes the quest for a partner with compelling individual narratives." --Shirley P. Glass, Ph.D., ABPP, author of NOT "Just Friends": Protect Your Relationship from Infidelity, and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal "Meeting, Mating, and Cheating provides insight into a facet of the Internet phenomenon that is both fascinating and alarming. Orr's discussion of the Internet dating industry, and wide-ranging examples of people who are using new technologies in the most intimate area of their lives, reveals important aspects of technology-mediated relationships. In-depth exploration of this phenomenon in other cultures, especially among Muslims, adds an important global dimension to the book. This book is a 'must read' for anyone interested in Internet technology. It is also a must read for anyone considering using Internet dating services." --Dr. Cynthia J. Smith; Dr.Smith teaches anthropology and business at The Ohio State University ABOUT REUTERS Reuters (www.reuters.com), the global information company, provides indispensable information tailored for professionals in the financial services, media and corporate markets. Reuters information is trusted and drives decision making across the globe, based on the company's reputation for speed, accuracy and independence. Reuters has 16,000 employees in 94 countries, including some 2,400 editorial staff in 197 bureaus serving about 130 countries, making it the world's largest international multimedia news agency.

Introduction

I first became aware of the Internet dating trend back in 1999 when a guy I work with was dumped by his girlfriend. For a couple of weeks he moped around the office, but then, just like that, he was out of the doldrums and back in circulation. Several mornings each week, he'd arrive at work and regale me with some story of an adventure with a new woman he'd met the night before: the eccentric woman, the tall woman, the woman who had just returned from a trip around the world who couldn't stop talking about Nepal. All had come into his life through a personal ad he'd placed online, and he was a very busy man. Even at the office, when he wasn't working at his job, he seemed to be consumed with a second job of maintaining his social life: firing off thoughtful emails to the women he'd seen the past couple of nights, responding to those who had seen his ad, cruising through the list of new personals for that elusive, perfect match. There were always more to choose from.

I'd been dumped by my boyfriend around the same time, but I took more of a passive let-life-come-to-you approach to personal matters. I continued to mope long after my colleague had moved on. He'd type away at the email, periodically laugh uproariously, or naughtily, at a response he received, and then leave promptly at five o'clock for another night on the town. At the desk beside him, I watched with curiosity, and probably a little jealousy. It seemed he had found a shortcut through the dry spells, a kind of high-tech way around the old limits of available people you could meet in the normal course of your life.

I should have spotted a trend back then. Although Internet dating was not nearly as big as it would become, it was already being used by thousands of people. And I was working as a reporter in Silicon Valley at a time that would come to be known as the dotcom boom. The whole point of my job was to write about promising new Internet technologies. I wrote all about the Internet bookstores and Internet furniture stores, and many more obscure things too, such as online bridal registries, and specialized Web sites that sold nothing but ink for your printer, or tube socks. But I failed for a long time to see Internet dating for the phenomenon it would become: one of the most lucrative dot-com business models that would transform the community it served.

Instead, I saw newspaper personal ads transferred online. Newspaper personals had been around for decades. Old service. New format. What was the news in that? Besides, while my colleague was definitely getting a social workout, I could not see what it all amounted to. As he eased out of rebound mode and began searching for something more substantial, he seemed to tire of the easy access to women with whom he may or may not have had anything in common. One especially memorable evening, we spent hours in a bar as he tried to mentally prepare himself for a formal dinner date with a woman he had met the week before. She was cute, she was nice and she was single. Ready, willing and able, so to speak, and according to that optimistic yet slightly fear-inspiring "don't miss out" tone that so many dating companies took, he ought to be jumping at the opportunity to see her again. But he felt nothing. As we finished our second martinis and he debated whether it would be wise to have a third before dinner, I started to think that it wasn't so wrong to let life come to you.

Still, this colleague of mine was a perfectly pleasant, nice-looking, intelligent and normal guy who had a great personality and no glaring social flaws that would have stopped him from meeting someone in the traditional way. I had never known anyone like him to post a personal ad in the back of a newspaper, at least not with such a lack of hesitation or apology. Not only was he using these online personals--something I had just assumed to be the realm of the sleazy or the slightly desperate--but he was openly talking about it. So was a woman down the hall, I learned, when she finally told me why she was always coming into my office with a camera and asking me to take close head shots. From her, I discovered that the guy upstairs was on the Internet too. She knew, because the online dating service she had joined kept sending his picture to her, unsolicited, as one of the eligible singles nearby. Little did they know just how nearby he was.

But it was not just that so many young and attractive people were doing this and often doing it openly. The whole way in which they proceeded seemed different than the way I understood newspaper personals to work. These online daters would sign up and boom, just like that, have what seemed like hundreds of people to choose from. Often they would meet one right after the other, becoming so distracted by the wealth of options that they seemed free of that sense of lonesome longing that is associated with singles events. Even if they found no one who came close to resembling a soul mate, they were meeting people who were nice more often than they were creepy. And a good number of them were finding more than just a friend. Just within my extended circle of acquaintances, I could soon count several marriages that had grown out of online introductions.

There was something else, too, that I discovered after my colleague finally showed me the ad he had written. No typical single white male was he. His ad was nuanced, funny and self-deprecating, poking fun at his height, and even his insecurities, which he explained had all been caused by one defining moment during his childhood when his mother had sent him off to school with a Wonder Woman lunchbox. He wrote that his first name translated to mean "tall dark warrior" and that he supposed his parents had chosen that name to show that they had a sense of humor. That little 400-word piece of prose was witty and intelligent. Was it a stretch to call it literary? If I had thought about it then, I would have realized that online personals were not just newspaper personals transferred online. They were a whole new genre, and they were fun. Some of the dating companies themselves did not know just how entertaining their services had become, but the entertainment value has proven over time to be a factor in attracting people to online dating and getting them to renew their subscriptions, often just for the fun of it. Today, several years after the dot-com craze ended, online dating has proven the exception to the rule: one of the few Internet business models that have endured.

When I began my research in earnest, I found a story that was far more complex than I'd imagined. Internet dating had done more than just make a small fortune for some companies and gotten a lot of single people off their couches. It had started to change the way people socialized in some pretty profound ways. Many singles were conducting prolonged correspondences over email before they ever met. And some of these people said they had become so addicted to the format, and the embellishment it encouraged, that it had become a social crutch. They were more fearful than ever of face-to-face contact. Then there were the restless married people, who often had the opposite response. For them, the Internet had provided a quick, safe and almost foolproof way to have an affair. One man even posted an advertisement stating the route he took on his commute home and the time he left work each night, saying he would love to connect with a woman who lived on the way, any time between 6:30 and 7:30. Infidelity was not new, but surely it had never been this easy.

There were more subtle things too. A phenomenon of hyper-dating that sometimes meant multiple dates with different people in a single week, and other times meant searching on your cell phone for someone near the coffee shop you were in, and hooking up five minutes later for coffee, or something else. This was starting to upset traditional notions of courtship, not to mention playing hard-to-get. I talked to healthy single men who said the Internet had killed their sex drive by providing such an abundance of willing partners and virtually no challenges. And I spoke to women who said they didn't believe that all the men they met online were weird, but they did think that the anonymity and fast pace of the Internet had led good men to behave badly. Men and women alike said they wondered if it was good to have a format where you could list your desires so specifically, and then eliminate anyone who did not match up. The guy who was perfect in every way, except that he was 5'8" tall, could find himself out of the running just because his ideal mate had listed 5'9" as her cutoff height.

And for all the happily married couples who said they never would have found each other had it not been for the Internet, I found many, many other singles who had been trying it for years with no success. Internet dating is often seen in two distinct ways: by the people who are successful, as a way to find your soul mate; or, by the cynics, as a magnet for undesirables. The reality I found was far richer: an array of good, bad, ugly, but mostly just very interesting stories. Stories of the seniors who found romance again for the first time in 50 years. Of women in Iran who went online to test the limits of their country's social constraints. Isolated small-town people used the Internet to find mates in other countries. Bartenders used it because they were tired of the bar scene. There were all sorts of stories, and many of them were pretty entertaining.

My favorite online dating story is one of stunning coincidence, and it comes from the very same colleague who first turned me on to this whole topic. Three years after he became a dating machine with the help of the Internet, he found true love online. And he found it with someone very close to home, an old classmate from grade school, who had either never noticed the Wonder Woman lunch box or had forgiven the infraction. As they toasted each other at their wedding one chilly January evening, they recited the ads that they had written a couple of years before, and they did so with pride. Geography had brought them together as school kids, and it seemed it was fate that had brought them together again years later. Fate, and the Internet.

Acknowledgements

I have many people to thank for helping me write this book and that list needs to begin with all the people, mentioned by real name or pseudonym, who shared some very personal stories. Special thanks to Angelo DiMeglio and Julie Fitzpatrick, who for month after month filled me in on all the ups and downs of their love lives. They helped put a real face on what is too often an anonymous story of looking for love online, and gave this book color and depth.

My editors at Reuters, especially Kevin Krolicki, Arthur Spiegelman, Adam Tanner, Janie Gabbett and Stephen Jukes, were extremely generous in giving me time off to write this book; and many of my overworked colleagues took on an extra workload in my absence. Peter Millership and Giles Elgood offered careful editing and patiently kept track of all my last-minute revisions. Alisa Bowen at Reuters and Jim Boyd at Prentice Hall kept the project on track every step of the way from the initial concept through to the cover design.

Many friends came through in many ways from help with research, last-minute editing and proofreading, hospitality, cheap travel arrangements, and moral support. They include Elinor Mills Abreu, David Brinkerhoff, Anne D'innocenzio, Kim Girard, Paul Lanyi, Lama Mansour, Tony Munroe, Rick Nash, Neil Robinson, Doug Young and Sue Zeidler. Lisa Baertlein was very helpful with research and also bore the brunt of the extra workload at Reuters while I was away. Carolyn Brown was the one who initially encouraged me to write a book on this topic. Sohail Kaleem served as my own personal help desk and helped make the technological challenges of working from a home office a little less daunting. Megan Adams, Elyse Klein and Sally Schillaci were especially helpful with research in the U.S. Jim Shissler was especially helpful with research in Asia.

My sisters MaryAnn Nash and Amanda Orr were a huge source of encouragement and support, as was my mother, Patricia Orr. She went beyond the call of duty, and proved extremely helpful with research, steering me toward a number of real life online dating stories, which made this a much richer story than it would have been without her contribution.

Author's note

When I set out to write a book about how online dating had gone mainstream, I quickly discovered the real story was not so simple. In truth, attitudes are still all over the map and for every person who openly admits to using an Internet dating service, there are others who still log on in secrecy. Some married people boast about having met online, but others find it a source of embarrassment and go to great lengths to concoct stories of how they met offline at a party or through friends.

While I interviewed many people who had no problem seeing their real names in print, others were happy to share their stories, as long as they remained anonymous. As a result, I have had to use a combination of real names and pseudonyms. Whenever possible, I used people's real identities, and their first and last names. For those people who did not wish to be identified, I used a fictitious first name, no last name, and changed some other superficial details, such as their profession or city of residence. The easiest way to tell the difference is that anyone identified by first name only has used a fictitious name.