Love.com
For better or for worse, the Internet is radically changing the dating scene in America
Stephenie liked what she saw the instant Craig Murphy popped up as a match on her online dating Web site. He was a good-looking 29-year-old golf pro with dark hair and darker eyes. In the year before she met Craig on Matchmaker.com, Stephenie, a 28-year-old teacher in Phoenix, had had both hits and misses courtesy of the dating service, but never a shortage of entertainment. She had groaned with her girlfriends over the dodged first date kiss--"I had to be like, `Ah, which part of body language don't you understand?' "--and hooted over the guys who posted decades-old photos of themselves: "I mean, the picture doesn't have to be last week, but when you meet up and don't even recognize him . . . ."
For his part, Craig didn't have high hopes for a Web wingman. Truth be told, he was a bit suspicious, particularly since the coworker who had persuaded him to try the service was, he says, precisely one of those unabashed frauds with the outdated photo. What's more, Craig was still stinging from a recent failed relationship.
So they were both pleasantly surprised when their initial phone conversation ranged widely and easily and spun on into the afternoon. Craig finally decided to take a leap and asked her to dinner--that night. Then came the shocker. When he gave Stephenie his address, she recalls, "My mouth just dropped." It turned out they lived in the same apartment complex, just across a courtyard from each other--and had for a year and a half. "I know I probably shouldn't tell you this," she told him. "But if you stick your head out your front door, I bet you can see me." Later, they discovered that they went to the same church, too. "How in the world did we never cross paths?" wonders Stephenie, who married Craig last year.
E-change. Craig and Stephenie are not an aberration. Across the country, a record 40 percent of American adults are single, making them one of the fastest-growing segments of U.S. households today. And in the search for love, or at least a decent date, fully half of them-- 40 million Americans--visited an online site last month. It is, researchers say, nothing short of a social revolution. "We're in a period of dramatic change in our mating practices," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, codirector of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University and author of Why There Are No Good Men Left. "I think this is as important as the automobile was in the 1920s and birth control in the 1960s."
And little wonder. Increasingly, busy singles like Craig and Stephenie are turning to the Web to help them in a way that other social institutions don't anymore. Americans are more mobile than they were a generation ago, and they're also waiting longer than ever to marry. This union of social and economic trends means that young adults are no longer relying on traditional dating venues like college to introduce them to their sweethearts. For her part, Stephenie did all of the things a woman is urged to do when looking for Mr. Right: She found a place in a sociable sort of apartment complex, complete with a swimming pool. She went to the young adult meet-and-greets at her church. She put the word out to her friends. But no luck.
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