Why and when did you turn to online dating?
Julie Spira: I was one of the first people that I know that actually went online in 1994 at “Love at AOL.” I was probably one of their first members. Most of my friends didn’t even have an email address at that time, and I went on because the man I was in love with didn’t want to commit to being married, so I said, “I’m going to find someone else.” And I went online.
Were there not a lot of people online looking for the same at the time?
There weren’t a lot of people on the site, but the people that were on the site were certainly very committed. There weren’t a lot of other options. There was no match.com. But there were some bulletin boards for people who were very computer.
How do you choose the right website?
Sometimes it’s hit or miss, but I think because there are over 2,500 online dating sites now and over 40 million singles dating online, there are so many options for singles to pick. [Plus,] it’s more common now for someone to choose more than one site at the first time. So the best thing to do is do a little bit of research, find out who the best sites are, talk to some of your friends that have been online and find a site and try one of their free trials and see if you like the way it works.
Who is the ideal reader for The Perils of Online Dating?
I thought I was targeting the book toward women who were single between the ages of 25 and 54 with an email address. But, much to my surprise, I have a huge male readership and a lot of married people love reading this book because they’re living vicariously through some of these stories. If any of them were fans of Sex and the City and they just enjoy the escapades.
What is the split between male and female users of online dating sites?
From the research I’ve seen, there are many more men online than women. And as a result, with all of the men online, some of the women might be a little gun shy about doing it because there are certainly a lot of single women.
What happens is that when a woman has a brand new profile, she gets inundated with hundreds, thousands of emails from men. Then she may pick out her five favorites, and then the men get disappointed because, “I’m a perfect match for her, why didn’t she write back to me?” They need to understand that, when a woman is brand new, is a fresh face on the site, everybody wants to talk with the new girl and the new face. So, typically, you get over 100 emails a day.
For me, I had to put them into a spreadsheet, it was like running a business to figure out, OK, now who’s in my age rank. I almost had to look at it like a fulltime job; in the evening it’s a part-time job. More men write to women than women write to men, which is traditionally the old-fashioned type of courtship coming out.
If you go to a single’s event, a single’s dance, you will see probably 60 to 70 percent women and 30 to 40 percent men, and the women complain that there’s only single women there. There’s no men. You go online, for some reason there’s many more men online, but not all of them are really available, some of them are just having a little fun, playing online like a hobby.
What is the public’s biggest misconception about online dating?
I think more people in the past felt there was a certain stigma attached to going online to try to find a mate. They think, “Shouldn’t I be able to meet someone on my own?” and they wimp out. I fell into that category early on as well: I actually did get married. I met him on matchmaker.com, and I told people, even up to my wedding day, that we met on a blind-date because that wasn’t untrue. I just felt like, “Why should I have to meet a guy online?”
So it takes a while to really say, “OK, I’m going to try online dating. It’s not a bad thing.” And I think now it’s become so mainstream, and there’s so many successful stories of couples who have met and gotten married online, that it’s OK for people to try online dating and not feel like they’re the loser.
Out of your 250 dates, what has been the worse one?
It’s about 300 now: It sounds like a lot, but I don’t necessarily consider myself a serial dater. I just feel that in the periods of time that I was single I went online to find a relationship.
There were some funny things that people do that I thought were inappropriate. I wrote about them in the chapter “The Rules of Net-Etiquette and those who Broke the Rules.” You’d be surprised, one time I was at a date with a gentleman and he told me about the graphic details of his colonoscopy that he had the day before, and the preparation for it. And I’m sitting there eating my lobster salad going, “Oh my gosh, I’m losing my appetite. Why did he think I needed to know”? So sometimes you really need to think about what you are talking about.
Very early on there was a man that went berserk in a restaurant because he realized I looked like his dead wife. So I felt very, very badly for his loss. He took the photo out of his wallet, stood up in the restaurant and shouted, “She looks like my dead wife! She looks like my dead wife!” I’m like, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” as I gracefully exited the restaurant. So it was kind of an embarrassing situation and maybe the next time he should pick a blonde instead of a brunette.
What are the challenges in taking an online relationship to a person-to-person relationship?
That it will be a huge disappointment; and that actually happened to me. Once I met someone online where everything matched up and, not only did our emails just flow naturally, our phone calls every night flowed naturally. We had so much in common, we really started thinking this could actually be the one. He finally flew down to meet me. But when I looked at him, and he looked at me, the conversation stopped. There was nothing to say. For some reason that online chemistry did not equate to an offline chemistry. It’s disappointing, but it does happen.
Do you have any tips or clues for online dating?
When you look at someone’s profile, you really need to see some red flags. If someone has a profile that’s very long—it’s a novel, they’re pouring out their heart and soul, they’re promising you trips all over the world—run the other way.
Sometimes, when I look at a profile, I would say, that’s just more like a business card; it’s like a snapshot of who you really are, what you are looking for. I think it’s very important to be specific, but some of the red flags should really make you concerned about someone’s availability. Sometimes they’re still married; sometimes they are not over their ex. If they’ll only see you on a Friday over a Saturday, those are the kind of red flags that you notice more offline rather than online.
Can you use Facebook for dating?
Absolutely. There are over 200 million users on Facebook, and it has a lot of applications, like the one from a company called ZOOSK. It’s a Facebook application for dating and meeting on Facebook, and they actually have it for other sites besides Facebook. I think that a lot of people, instead of clogging up their email address, will send a direct message to someone on Facebook rather than email.
With news of the so-called Craigslist Killer, how does one stay safe when online dating?
The most important thing you can do is not give out too much information about yourself before you meet someone for the first time. I don’t give out my last name. I don’t say exactly where I live. It’s important to meet in a public place. It’s also important to have your cell phone handy.
I have a little trick when I’m at a lunch date or a dinner date, where I’ll go to the ladies’ room and call a girlfriend to give an update, to say that I’m OK. I don’t want to live in a paranoid world, but you need to have your eyes wide open and you need to be careful about what you’re doing.
In the situation with the Craigslist Killer, [the woman] she wasn’t...exactly in a dating situation, and I think it created an awareness for everyone about being careful about who you date. Be careful about who you agree to meet. Some women are so excited that they agree to go into a hotel or a weekend vacation for a first date. I say never.
