Love at first click: dating sites gain popularity
MIMI ENSLEY
Bradi Dixon never thought of him as "the person I met online" - but that's exactly where the sparks began to fly between Dixon and the man she dated for two years.
"He [became] just some guy I knew who went to Clemson [University]," said Dixon, a junior from Blackshear. "The online aspect really only lasted a few months."
Dixon's venture online began when she perused the pages of www.HotOrNot.com at the urging of some of her friends.
"Honestly, it started as a self-esteem builder," she said.
Dixon initially was surprised to find someone who interested her on the online dating site. She contacted the man who caught her eye - a graduate student at Clemson - and the two realized they had similar interests.
They started sending e-mails back and forth and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, working their way up to telephone calls and face-to-face meetings.
"It was really easy to just chill and be yourself," Dixon said in a telephone interview last week.
But when the couple began to get more serious, it was not easy to tell people the truth about how their relationship began, she said.
Dixon, who is no longer romantically involved with the person she met online, acknowledged a definite stigma associated with Internet dating sites.
"I didn't tell anyone for a long time," Dixon said. "Honestly, I was embarrassed."
Despite the negative opinion some college students have of matchmaking Web sites, the younger age bracket makes up a significant portion of online daters - and the number is increasing, said Sam Yagan, co-founder of www.OkCupid.com, a free online dating service.
Approximately half of the visitors to OkCupid are between the ages of 18 and 24, Yagan said.
In a society so tied to technology, Yagan said he finds these trends normal.
"[College students] buy their texts online," Yagan said in a telephone interview last week. "They use Facebook to hang out with friends. They search for apartments on Craigslist. Why not use an online service for dating?"
But using online dating services requires certain precautions, said Keith Sims, executive director of Safe Campuses Now, in a phone interview last week.
"Anybody can make themselves out to be Prince Charming on the Internet," Sims said. "They don't have to be honest about who they are or what they do."
Sims urged Internet daters to be especially careful if they decide to meet their online love interests in person.
The first date should be in a public place, and the person involved should let a friend know a general timeline for the evening, Sims said.
Julie McGuire, who set up a free eHarmony account as a joke to help cheer up her roommate, said she found the experience disappointing and a little scary.
"Seeing [online dating] first hand, I really think that it's even creepier than it's stereotyped to be," McGuire said in a telephone interview last week.
For McGuire, a junior from Easly, S.C., the online dating site just served to depersonalize the process of forming relationships.
"I'm a huge believer in fate," McGuire said. "[The person you're dating] has to be someone that you see, someone that you encounter in your real life when you're actually living it - not when you're sitting in front of your computer screen."
