I Love You, Let's Meet: Adventures in Online Dating
By Virginia Vitzthum, Little, Brown and Company, 2007

      I have a confession to make: I met my wife through an online dating service. These days, a revelation like that isn’t the kind of confession it used to be. Back when I was participating in online dating in the late 1990s, if you told someone that you were meeting people through Internet personal ads you’d most likely be perceived as, at best, some sort of socially dysfunctional geek, a naïve sap playing in dangerous territory or, at worst, a demented pervert trolling for sex in cyberspace. Now that the Internet has become the dominating force in our culture, millions of people are using the technology to try to find a mate, and the stigma once attached to online dating has mostly evaporated. As Virginia Vitzthum’s survey of Internet dating at the beginning of the 21st century shows, however, there is still plenty of dysfunction to be found among those who look for love via computer. The real question is – and it’s one that Vitzthum shies away from answering – if the dysfunction is inherent in the culture of online dating or in the psychology of particular online daters.

      Vitzthum, a former sex columnist for Salon.com, knows the online dating world. She’s part of a demographic – urban, in her 40s, never been married or in a serious relationship – that constitutes a significant portion of the Internet dating population. She has dated via the Internet for years, and she continues to do so. To write her book she contributes her own experiences, and she gathers the stories of fellow travellers on the online dating road. She consults friends and acquaintances, and she solicits stories from strangers via, of course, online personal ads. Then she analyzes the stories, looking for themes and explanations.

      Most of the book consists of profiles of daters, but Vitzthum is at her cynical best when she examines the commodification of dating on the Internet. The online dating industry has grown huge (although its growth has slowed greatly in the past couple of years), and the big dating web sites have fought to make it even bigger. It’s a glitzy marketplace full of services, subscriptions, special fees and rampant advertising, all designed to extract as much money as possible from users. Worse, online dating itself has become a marketplace in which daters shop for mates and strategize about the best way to sell themselves.

      But, the marketplace aside, the state of online dating looks bleak, thanks to the individual stories in Vitzthum’s book. Of the nearly two dozen people she profiles only two are in relationships that have lasted longer than about a year. Lila and Scott met in a chat room before the advent of dating sites, and their eight-year marriage is still going strong. Beth and Vivian are lesbians who have successfully blended their pre-relationship families. All the rest are varying degrees of unlucky in love. Even the other success stories – Hans, Talia and Santiago – are in relationships too new to judge, and Rachel, a self-confessed gold-digger who finally managed to land a rich husband, had only been married a month when she talked to Vitzthum.

      The others (including Vitzthum herself) are unqualified train wrecks. There are predators: Trevor, a British player who makes a career of sexual experimentation; Richard, an unashamed philanderer who lies to everyone he meets; Liz, a cynical dominatrix who gets off on manipulating desperate men. There are misguided romantics: Holly, an innocent who fell for a sociopath’s line; Abe, a 70-year-old widower who longs for the old way of dating. There are disgruntled commitment-phobes: Michele and Benton, who say they’re in a relationship even if they don’t act like it; Christopher, a gay man who can’t get past superficial attachments; Alice, a 20-something who only wants a “hot” guy and can’t figure out why she’s unhappy with what she gets.

       And there are the career daters, the category into which Vitzhum fits. She profiles a kindred spirit as well. Michele is in her 40s and is self-consciously “arty” (although what that term means is unclear, given that most people who declare themselves arty don’t actually create art). She wears vinyl miniskirts and T-shirts with ironic slogans on them. She dyes her hair black and wears it in pigtails. She goes to raves, loves David Foster Wallace and drops names of obscure bands in order to test the coolness of people she meets. She lies about her age, and she can’t seem to find the right guy. Eventually she meets Benton, a bisexual arty guy who thinks that sexual fidelity is boring; he and Michele settle into a relationship in which they can discuss obscure bands, feel superior to everyone else and ignore their basic incompatibility. At the time of the book’s writing, they were still together.

      The question is, why can’t any of these people find love? These are not people who take the dating process lightly – they analyze constantly, they have a manifesto of explanations and requirements, rationalizations and position papers – yet they haven’t been able to enter into a sustained relationship. Is the problem with online dating, with its unrealistic promise of personal reinvention and endless variety of potential partners?

      One suspects that the problem is with the people that Vitzthum profiles. She dismisses mainstream sites like Match.com as the refuge of boring people, millions of drones who love walks on the beach and are equally comfortable in jeans or evening wear. The site of choice of Vitzthum and most of her subjects is Nerve.com, a high-brow porn site with an affiliated dating service. Nerve users, apparently, are urban (most of Vitzthum’s subjects live in New York) and are self-described “postmoderns.” That is, they disdain sincerity and intimacy, and their personal ads are ironic IQ tests for potential respondents. (Vitzthum lists the “five items I can’t live without” as “yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, blood, Google.” These (excluding Google) are Hippocrates’ “humors,” and a respondent must show that he gets the joke by making a comment that includes the word “humorous” if he wants Vitzthum to reply.) Many of these people have been dating for decades, but they just can’t seem to get it right. The source of the problem eludes them. Really, it does.

      From the outside, the situation isn’t quite so murky. I’ve always suspected that online dating is perfect for people who, because of shyness or other social shortcomings, are unable to meet people in the traditional ways. My wife and I fit into that category, and our method of meeting worked wonderfully for us. But I’ve also suspected that Internet mate-shopping is no panacea for those who’ve played the dating game without success for years. If you’ve gone on hundreds of dates over the past 20 years and met hundreds of guys without finding anyone with whom you’re compatible, the problem just might not be with your method of meeting people. In fact, the problem might not be any farther away than the mirror. Vitzthum’s insights about Internet dating are sharp and critical, but she understandably avoids concluding that some people are relationship-disabled, and no technology in the world is going to cure them.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.