And You Thought Singles Bars Were Crowded
Boy, am I out of it. I had lunch with my cousin in New York the other day and discovered that she and her sister are both dating people they met on America Online. My city cousin, a busy executive, claims to meet men in droves in AOL’s chat rooms, which she finds highly efficient. My country cousin, a lesbian, is going out with a woman she met via the service’s “Romance Connection” message boards, which function like personal ads. An enemy of lookism, she likes it that you can’t see people online while you’re getting to know them.
As a lookist from way back, it seemed to me high time I investigated this phenomenon. I must confess that until this project I never fully appreciated AOL’s genius for marrying the technology of cyberspace to the needs of regular people. Your elderly correspondent, safely married to his dentist, spends most of his online time prowling the Internet for information about drywall and replacement windows. I don’t remember much about dating beyond hayrides and Charleston contests, but from the evidence of modern family life, a return to arranged marriages might be better for all concerned.
From the evidence of AOL, this is not an opinion that many people share. If you know where to look, the service is a veritable singles bar, or perhaps a collection of singles bars, reaching from coast to coast. I might add that, without too much trouble, you can also find the testimony of people who found husbands and wives online, as well as reports from those who fared less well when their online inamorata turned up in the flesh.
The fastest way to check out the mating-chat phenomenon on AOL is to click the People Connection icon well into some evening. To start in the most straightforward way, choose from among the service’s public “rooms’; the Romance Connection room (not to be confused with the Romance Connection message boards) is a good place to begin. This room is invariably full (23 is the limit in any one room), but AOL will offer to shunt you off into a “similar” room. Say yes and you’ll wind up in something like Romance Connection 33, which is the same sort of experience.
The “discussion” in these rooms consists mostly of greetings and inquiries about people’s age and gender. Little time is wasted; meet someone you like, and you can send that person an Instant Message that allows you to chat privately. Women are evidently bombarded with these, since men remain more numerous and more aggressive in the world of online mating. I quickly received an Instant Message consisting of “age, sex check” from one of AOL’s duller users who was apparently unable to pierce the veil of my subtle screen-name, which is simply DanielAkst.
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As you might expect, AOL’s chat areas are extremely clever in design. In addition to the public rooms, there are zillions of open rooms created by members (for philandering marrieds, atheists and others of a specific bent), and you can even establish a private chat room if you wish. When you enter a room, a list of the occupants appears on screen, and if you double-click one of them, you can send an Instant Message, look up the person’s member profile (if a profile is associated with that particular screen name), or freeze them out by turning on the “ignore” function.
AOL’s message boards (keyword romance) offer another approach to meeting people. These are just like personal ads, except you respond by e-mail, and they appear to be much more active (and much more balanced by gender) than newsgroups like la.personals on the Internet. The latter strike me as places where geeks go to get ignored.
As you might expect, a lot of the people advertising sound just grand; one says he’s a sexy physician who has also had parts in some Woody Allen movies, and another says “i reside on a small island in the gulf of mexico.” On the other hand, you can visit the Romance Forum and benefit from the experience of others who’ve used AOL in pursuit of romance (see especially the folder marked “Beware’). One message complained about how often postings contain lies and euphemisms, and another reported on a much-anticipated meeting with an online friend that proved disastrous. “I am sad and heartbroken, and surprised to say the least!! I am now very gun-shy and skeptical.”
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Still, plenty of dates and even full-blown romances do seem to occur--look at my cousins, after all--and the same Romance Forum is full of reports from the deliriously happy who’ve just married someone they met on AOL. A number of users described traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles for a personal meeting after hitting it off night and day with someone online. “Two months later, we married [in the rain] and have been as happy as clams every day,” says one, adding: “I am convinced that without this online connection, we would never have found what we have.”
It’s noteworthy that AOL lets users adopt a virtually infinite number of screen names, or log-ons, without providing any profile information at all, in which case no one would be able to determine your real identity. The result, my cousin reports, is that people feel much freer than they would in person or on the telephone.
This could cause problems, of course, but one of the virtues of AOL (as opposed to the near-anarchy of the Internet) is that someone is in charge. Users of the Romance Connection message boards are urged to “keep it respectable” and take sex-solicitations elsewhere, and everyone knows that there is always the potential of a bad actor being reported to the AOL authorities by the victim of that user’s harassment.
As for looks, well, just try the keyword Gallery, where users can upload pictures of themselves to a searchable database; you can tell who’s popular because the number of downloads is given for each photo. The people who run the AOL Gallery will even scan a photo for you free of charge, which you may appreciate if you spend a lot of time in AOL’s chat rooms. Last month, my cousin admitted sheepishly that her AOL bill reached $100.
Daniel Akst welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.caprica.com/~akst/
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Advice for Romantics
Obviously, a little caution is in order if you plan to use America Online in pursuit of romance. Be careful what you disclose about yourself, and don’t jump right into a face-to-face meeting. If you do decide to meet in person, the thing these days seems to be coffee, which may account for the success of Starbucks. And make sure you ask what color pocket protector your date will be wearing, so you can pick him or her out of a crowd.
