Is it e-love or is it real?Some relationship seekers try cyberdating, a whole new level of online browsing
By Meghan Ward
Daily Bruin Contributor
"She e-loves me, she e-loves me not. She e-loves me," are the words going through the heads of Internet subscribers as they pluck virtual petals off virtual flowers in the land of cyberlove.
Whether in search of a one-night stand, everlasting love, or simply a friend to talk to, cyberdating via chat rooms, e-mail, instant messages, personal ads, and dating services, is rapidly replacing the nightclub pick-up scene.
Charles Harless, second-year graduate student in computer science at UCLA, met his current partner, John, through America Online back in December of 1996. John, who was living in Virginia at the time, responded to a personal ad Harless had placed.
"We met online, talked for a couple of months, he came to visit me twice,
"Last June, he quit his job and moved out here to the West Coast. He's now a graduate student at UCLA."
At the point when the two were exchanging 4-5 page e-mails per day, Harless felt comfortable giving John his telephone number. He asked John to visit him in Los Angeles, and John accepted.
"It was basically love at first sight", says Harless. John flew out to visit Harless one more time before the two drove cross-country together from Virginia to Los Angeles. Harless and his partner have been happily cohabiting since June and hope to be together forever.
On the other hand, when Neven Jeremic, a fourth-year communications studies student at UCLA, broke up with his boyfriend two years ago, he went through a period of sexual exploration. He frequented AOL chat rooms.
"LAm4m is the most popular. If you get into it, if there's someone there you like, you can IM them" that is, send them an instant message, which will appear instantaneously on their screen, and to which you may respond.
LAm4m stands for Los Angeles Men for Men and is one of the hundreds of chat rooms that AOL members can enter when they are logged onto the service. There is a limit of 20 persons to any particular chat room, and if the room is full, you have the option to either wait in line until a space opens up, or to start another chat room.
Chat rooms are divided into categories, which may range anywhere from Cyber Male Virgin to Bored Housewives of the KKK. Approximately half of AOL's chat rooms are designed for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenderered people.
Jeremic explains that AOL chat rooms are frequently used as a means of finding sex, not love.
"The computer is the medium people used to hook up for a one-night-stand. It may happen over the course of one hour that you meet (online), exchange pictures, and set up a meeting (in person)," says Jeremic.
According to Harless, "In the gay community a lot of people use chat rooms because they are not out in real life, and they can be out online."
Steve Friess of The Advocate, a national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, explains that chat rooms are particularly attractive to marginalized communities.
For "people of color, older people, the disabled, the overweight, people with HIV - the online world provides slightly more equity in the dating games," says Friess.
People tend to be less racist online because they are not judging other people by their looks, but by their words. Someone with a great sense of humor who is self-conscious about his looks suddenly becomes the center of attention, dominating a whole room with witty remarks and timely comebacks.
On three of the most popular chatting networks, AOL, Internet Relay Chat, and Powwow, each person has a screen name and the option to fill out a personal profile. The profile may describe physical appearance, religious affiliation, favorite music and what he or she is looking for in an online relationship.
"If you write a good profile, you can weed out 90 percent of the people you don't want anything to do with", says Jeremic. "The choice of an online name is important because you want to choose a name that will make people want to look you up."
If another member is interested in communicating privately with you, he or she may IM you.
Though there are not rules of etiquette for online communicators, one should take common sense precautions. It is never wise to reveal your full name, address, or telephone number to a stranger.
Harless advises meeting the person during the daytime in a crowded venue like a cafe. There is little risk of anything happening with other people around, and you will have a better idea if you can trust the person before giving them your home address or telephone number.
Of course, if your cyberfriend lives in another town, or another state, it may not be plausible to meet for lunch.
Robert Gregonis, from Albion in northern California, met a woman named Christie, from Long Beach, online. Gregonis met Christie through Powwow, a system of networks through which users can communicate in real time, watching the letters appear on the screen as the other person types them. It was through a common interest in music that the two hit it off.
"It's just by accident that she's a Mr. Bungle fan and I'm a Bungle fan. If I was online, I would hail her or she would hail me, and we would strike up a conversation." At the time, Gregonis was spending from two to eight hours per day online. "It would go into the early morning sometimes, Gregonis recalls.
After two weeks, Gregonis and Christie began e-mailing each other, and after a month they progressed to telephone conversations. Gregonis had a photo of himself attached to his online portfolio. Christie transferred one of herself over to him and Gregonis found her very attractive. "A close, emotional attachment started to form," affirms Gregonis.
After four months of talking on the telephone, the two decided it was time to meet face to face. Gregonis flew to LAX to meet Christie. When he stepped off the plane and saw her face, he knew that something had gone terribly wrong.
"When I got off the plane, the picture and the person didn't match. I freaked out. For some strange reason, the photos that I got were not very good detail. They were either kind of fuzzy or at a distance."
Gregonis began to feel guilty for judging Christie by her physical appearance. Was he just a typical guy? He tried to make himself attracted to her, but it did not work. "We were so compatible on so many different planes," explains Gregonis, "but on the physical plane, things were a mess."
After spending two days with her in Long Beach, he fabricated an excuse to return on short notice back to his hometown in northern California.
Like Gregonis, Justin Bass gave up looking for love online after a similar bad experience. One day while Bass was doing a web search looking for fans of a record he was putting out, he came across the profile of Melissa Chappell of Los Angeles.
"Melissa is a fan and she had in her profile on AOL a half-dozen artists in there that I am also a fan of. I sent her an e-mail and quoted her profile and wrote that she would probably enjoy the No Depression CD."
Two weeks later, Chappell sent Bass eight blank tapes to record music for her. Knowing that Bass lived in Nashville, and she in Los Angeles, Chappell felt comfortable giving Bass her home address. Bass and Chappell progressed from e-mailing to instant message sessions to exchanging photos.
"We both sent our pictures on the same day, but for some reason he got mine three days before I got his. I was dying. When I got his picture, I was so excited, I was jumping up and down and screaming," related Chappell.
However, the first time Bass telephoned Chappell, she was slightly taken aback. "I was freaked out. I didn't give him my number. He called information, he knew my name," Chappell recounts.
After a couple more months of telephone conversations, Chappell flew to Nashville where Bass was living and the two drove north to Chicago where Bass's parents live. "The first time we met it was great, but it wasn't natural. She met my parents five hours after she met me," Bass relates.
Bass flew twice to Los Angeles to visit Chappell and Chapell flew once more to Chicago before making the decision to move cross-country to be with Bass. "I had moved to Chicago and she was kind of done with L.A. It seemed the perfect time for her to move here and she did," explains Bass.
Was it love at first byte? "We never said that word until we met a couple times. The phrase we would use was e-love. I e-love you. We were in e-love. I don't think you can fall in love with someone online," says Bass.
When did they know it was love? The second time they met, when Bass flew out to see Chappell in Los Angeles. Bass muses, "When we think that we met online it really blows our minds. We can just punch up on my hard drive our whole relationship."
