The Electronic
Matchmaker
Gregory Smith* had yet to kiss Susan Olson* good night or run his fingers through her hair. But he could do something else with his fingers: type to her. Greg was a library and information-management student in Adelaide in South Australia, she worked for a real estate firm in Kansas City, Missouri, and they were carrying on a romance by way of the Internet. “We write letters constantly,” he said, “and exchange our thoughts on newspaper clippings, music, all manner of things. About the only thing we haven’t exchanged are marriage vows.”
The outcome, as I began this chapter, wasn’t clear. If the Smith-Olson affair was like many on the Net, they would pull the plug long before all the typing destroyed their wrists. “For every good story,” Greg said of love on the Internet, “there are at least 100 bad stories—people meeting and realizing there’s a major difference between virtuality and reality.” A few months later, I decided, I would check back in with Greg and Sue and report the results at the end of “The Electronic Matchmaker.”
For the moment I was optimistic. Greg and Sue had been at this for a good two years; they spent several hours a day pouring out their thoughts to each other, Greg at his UNIX workstation, Sue at her lowly Packard Bell computer. He had bought her a diamond ring on a layaway plan; she was giving him a ring. She would fly Down Under at some point, and then the next summer, Greg would to go to Kansas City and meet Sue’s family, including her father, a retired auto worker who, ah, had a few surprises ahead.
I think of good people like Greg and Sue when I read the tacky, hacky stories about unhappy affairs online and Net sex. While many politicians and reporters delve into the sleazier areas of the Internet—and, yes, regions can look like Silicon-era Sodoms—something wonderful is also happening on the Net. It’s connecting lovers with uncannily matched interests and values. Remember, the Internet teems with more than 12,000 newsgroups. If you’re quirky and picky, if you insist on a lover whose hobby is Esperanto, the international language, try soc.culture.esperanto. If you want to find a fellow Peace Corps alumnus, you can choose from among several newsgroups and lists. If you’re a Libertarian stalwart and insist that your girlfriend be nothing but—well, the search may take longer.
Some philosophies just don’t hold out as much appeal to women as do others. But that has not daunted a smart young Libertarian in California, Eric Klien, who started what may have been the Internet’s first matchmaking service, an operation later taken over by Electric Classifieds. Match.Com offers a long questionnaire that should appeal to many of the detail-oriented habitués of the Internet.
Whatever your taste, the Net probably has a dating service if that’s what you want. Operating with a French address on the World Wide Web, Babb’s Personals shows up with a photo of a green-eyed, dark-complected woman, and a number of free, anonymous ads in French and English. Christie’s Internet MatchMaker claims to reach more than 14,000 users in seventeen cities. On the Net, too, you’ll find HIV Positive Dating Services (“Meet other positives, negatives, and neutrals locally, regionally, nationally, and even globally”), Web Personals (“Now over 4,200 different visitors each day!”), and Virtual MeetMarket (“I believe that the people who browse through here, and more importantly the people who bother to publish personals here, are somewhat intelligent and Internet-savvy enough to know the difference between FTP and FTD—you know, the flower delivery guys?”).
I found some of the catchiest ads on Virtual. One showed a beautiful twenty-five-year-old brunette in Los Angeles touching an empty set of casual clothes labeled “Your picture here?” “I’m looking for somebody who’s [sic] personality has a shelf life longer than a month,” she said, and California spelling notwithstanding, she clearly deserved just that sort of person. A graduate student, hungering for a “sweet SWM of my dreams,” inserted a picture of a knight in armor. Seeking “a Scandinavian beauty,” a graphics designer from South Carolina posted an almost magazine-quality layout with photos of himself and his cats and even an aerial shot of Charleston. The prose wasn’t the most imaginative, and his Scandinavian requirement was rather limiting, but in a flash the ad showed women what kind of life he could offer them. Other possibilities exist on the Web. Instead of just saying you like certain musicians or artists, for example, you might write Web links to take people to an area with sound or graphics files.
The best matchmaker is the Internet itself, with all its ways of bringing well-meaning people together. If Greg married Sue, this would hardly be the first Australian-American marriage born on the Net. Australia is the e-mail capital of the universe, or at least the romantic regions thereof. Until surpassed by the United Kingdom and Canada, Australia had more Net connections than any country except for the United States. Recently the Aussies’ telcom people started charging institutions for net connections according to the amount of use, and that just might crimp future Gregs and Sues. But at least in mid-1995, Australia’s e-mail laurels remain unthreatened.