Hi, my name’s Craig. I’m an English student and I work for a catering company on the side. Ultimately, I’d like to get into book editing, and I’m trying to do anything that I can to get experience, including co-editing the SRJC school newspaper, interning with a book publisher and dabbling in a little web design.

I’m looking for someone intelligent and funny, who doesn’t necessarily take herself too seriously. Points for being a reader. I love talking about books, but don’t often get the chance. Oh, and board games are totally sweet!

As much as I’d like to pretend that my online dating experience began two weeks ago when I took this story assignment, and as much as I’d like to say that the dating profile printed above was slapped together in a matter of minutes rather than tweaked, for better or worse, over the course of many months, I can’t. I’ve been wading through the depths of online dating off and on for about a year, and though the potential for meeting someone online seems great on paper (or more aptly, the screen), my outlook is grim.

I moved back to Petaluma after getting my bachelor’s in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara a few years ago and found almost immediately that meeting people here was much more difficult that it had been in college. My normal avenues—friends, classes, parties—were a thing of the past. Most of my friends still lived down south, and the friends who I reconnected with here slowly started to move out of the area. I was never successful meeting people at bars, and after somewhat recovering from an amazingly bad relationship, I decided to take a risk and see if online dating could work for me.

I signed up with a free dating site called PlentyofFish.com, which I heard about from a friend. The name is based on the saying that “there are plenty of fish in the sea” when it comes to finding a partner, which is a remarkably pessimistic attitude for a dating website, yet probably not far from the mark. The name implies failure and previous, if not current, rejection.

It’s a basic picture-and-a-profile site that is based mostly on looks. PlentyofFish users are bombarded by pictures on every page, and profile information rarely shows up until one clicks on a picture to visit a user page. There’s a cursory attempt at determining personality traits through questionnaires, but the results from profile to profile are barely distinguishable: everyone has high self-confidence, is family oriented and is open-minded to artistic concepts and creative thinking. Bottom line: your profile pic had better be banging, or nobody is going to care.

I knew when I started that online dating had a stigma attached to it. Despite becoming a mega shopping hub and social media destination, the Internet still carries the taint of pedophiles and serial killers when the topic of meeting strangers arises. Chris Hansen and the Dateline crew still make a living exposing the dangers of online predators, and the Craigslist Killer gave a face to fears extending beyond the intimate ads of which he allegedly took advantage. I wasn’t particularly worried about meeting serial killers, but I was aware that the people I wanted to talk to might be less than forthcoming about personal information.

To be honest, PlentyofFish felt a little shady, but I was willing to take the chance that the Internet was not full of creepers looking to prey on the naive, but was instead filled with people like me trying to make a connection. Besides, I knew an online connection was possible because my friend Yvonne Volz met her current boyfriend of over a year through Match.com.

“It was a way to meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise,” Volz said. Although Volz had to deal with a number of unwanted advances in the three months that she was active on the site: “There were lots of old creepy guys. ‘Oh hey, I’m 50. Let’s talk!’ Uh, no.”

Match.com, which began in 1995, boasts “One in five relationships start online,” and that most of them start on Match.com. According to the website, Match.com serves people in 24 countries and territories in 15 languages.

Eventually Karl Thorson sent a message her way. “It was more than just a ‘Hey,'” Volz said. Thorson emphasized their mutual interests, and e-mails led to a face-to-face meeting, which eventually led to moving in together.

However, Thorson is slow to praise the site. “It doesn’t work until it does,” Thorson said. “You meet loser after loser after loser until you meet someone cool. It worked for us. Took me awhile.”

Klint Sheridan also used Match.com, but recently switched to eHarmony. For Sheridan, Match.com was a glorified e-mail client and not very effective. He often felt that his e-mails were lost amidst crammed inboxes.

“You construct an e-mail, and then that rains down as [part of] a deluge of douche, and then there’s you in the middle,” Sheridan said.

However, after using eHarmony for a month and a half, Sheridan feels that he’s found a better fit. eHarmony has 20 million registered users, according to its website, and in a 2009 poll conducted by Harris Interactive for eHarmony, polling showed that on average, 542 marriages per day originated on eHarmony. That’s five percent of new U.S. marriages, according to eHarmony’s website.

Instead of focusing on emails right away, eHarmony sends Sheridan five to 10 matches per day, which he can respond to with a set of pre-selected questions. The exchanges build up to actual conversation so that each has an idea of what the other is looking for.

“By the time you write an email, it doesn’t feel like it’s going off into the abyss,” Sheridan said.

So far he’s been happy with his success. Because of the price and because of the website’s reputation, “people are more inclined to be serious,” Sheridan said. “People at eHarmony are looking for more than [hookups].”

Price was a deal-breaker for my SRJC student budget. Although uploading a profile is free at both Match.com and eHarmony, performing other actions, like messaging the cute brunette who likes my favorite author, requires a subscription that doesn’t come cheap. Match.com charges $34.99 for a one-month membership, $19.99 per month for three months and $16.99 per month for six months. eHarmony charges $59.95 for a one-month membership, $39.95 per month for three months, $29.95 per month for six months and $19.95 per month for a one-year membership, which totals around $340. However, there is a benefit to pay dating sites: I’m fairly certain that the people there are serious, which is a quality severely lacking in the free sites that I tried.

One of the drawbacks of online dating is that the subtext of a conversation is diminished or disappears completely. Users have to go by what is written on the screen and can’t rely on facial expressions or body language to determine meaning. Does “lol” actually mean she liked what I said? Or was it polite online etiquette? Uh oh. Did she get my sarcasm, or did she take what I said literally? I can’t know; I can only guess at whether the person on the other end is engaged or just passing the time.

I’ve had plenty of interesting, silly and personal conversations through PlentyofFish, but the sticking point always comes from the transition to an in-person meeting. The girls I’ve met just won’t do it, and more often than not will completely ignore that I suggested the date at all.
It’s fine if a person doesn’t want to meet in person, but my primary reason for online dating is to go on dates. I get the impression that either people aren’t serious about the experience, or that they are too specific in the qualities they look for. It can take weeks to get a feel for someone online that would take 15 minutes in person. I don’t need perfection in a person to go on a date with her, but eventually, talking about dating should turn into actual dating.

Recently I joined OkCupid.com, another free dating site, to contrast my PlentyofFish experience. The administrators of OkCupid certainly have a better sense of humor than other dating sites, and the site has an addicting question system that contributes to matching singles, but the overall package feels familiar.

For better or worse, potential is at the heart of online dating. There’s always the potential of meeting someone new, and hey, if nothing comes of it, just move on to the next person.

And there’s always another person.

The websites make a business of providing a continuous stream of new names and faces to make users feel like their perfect match is just around the corner. But what dating websites can’t influence is when the possibility of a match ends and reality of attraction begins. Reality is up to us.