Looking for love in all the wrong places

The 'net is not the place for romance, and I can prove it

by Jessica Liese '01
Features Editor

Valentine's Day is, without question, the worst time of the year to be single. It's like not owning any green clothes on St. Patrick's Day or running out of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. Celebrating Valentine's day without a significant other is a hollow ritual, no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise by sending my friends Barbie valentines and eating heart-shaped chocolate

But what's an overcommitted, heterosexual woman to do? Mount Holyoke has done wonders for every aspect of my life except romance. I have neither the time nor the desire to go to TAP. I have no friends on other campuses that are willing to hook me up. It's around times like Valentine's Day that some twisted part of my brain whispers options to me I'd never consider otherwise. Try the Internet, it said to me. You're a web junkie. You know how it's done.

The more I thought about it, the more curious I got. Perhaps online personal ads were not necessarily just safe havens for the bottom-feeding scum of the Pioneer Valley. With the advent of the technological revolution, maybe more people turn to the 'net as a viable means of making new friends and love connections. Small-town television stations love to do human interest stories about couples who met on the Internet. So, with the thought that I could provide some help for fellow lovelorn Mount Holyoke women, I fired up my laptop and began to explore.

I chose Yahoo! Personals initially because it was not only free, but Yahoo! is a relatively prominent landmark in the cyber-world. After a quick registration form, I was instructed to compose my ad and tell the public who I was and what I was looking for. I explained that I'm a college student, 5'10", blonde hair, blue eyes, who loves Wally Lamb novels, the Talking Heads, Pulp Fiction, and Star Trek. I said I was looking for a creative, intelligent guy with a sense of humor. Pretty standard stuff.

The next morning, I opened up my personal mailbox. Twelve responses, less than eight hours later! Shocked and pleasantly surprised, I clicked on the first message. In graphic detail, the message explicated all of the things the author wished to do to various parts of my body. Needless to say, this did not bode well for the rest of the adventure.

Over the past three weeks, I've received over 50 responses to this ad. While most of them, thankfully, have not been solicitations for sex, I am continually amazed by the new lows in humanity I have discovered. "I'm an artist," said one response. "I want to do it profesionaly (sic)." Intrigued, I wrote back asking him what sort of art he was interested in. He responded by sending a drawing he'd done that I believe was of an airplane dropping bombs on dinosaurs, though I'm not entirely sure. It was rendered in ballpoint pen on notebook paper.

Another response was unique in that every word of the message was spelled incorrectly, including "to" and "before", which were written as "2" and "b4", respectively. I wondered briefly if Prince had become unhappy with his marriage. I know it is not PC to condemn people for bad spelling, but I also can't see myself dating anybody who confuses "there" with "their".

While I must admit that a few replies were actually normal-sounding and coherently written, the majority of responses ranged from inarticulate to just plain weird. I would love to say that it's worth it to dig through the rocks in search of the rare gems, but it's hard for me to be so optimistic when I received replies like: "Before I dazzle you with my wit, charm, intellect, worldliness, and supremely romantic soul, I think I should ask you if it will matter a great deal that I'm thirty years older than you."

To be fair, I did wind up exchanging e-mail and instant messages with several appropriately-aged prospective suitors who had mastered the use of punctuation, but by and large, these, too, turned out to be slugs in studs' clothing. It was a relief to be able to finally tell them I was writing an article and not actually interested in forming a relationship. It's surprising how quickly they disappeared when I mentioned I was writing about them for the News.

I entered into this experiment without expecting very much. I ended up extremely surprised- not at the actual presence of normal, articulate human beings in search of real companionship, but at the fact that losers of this magnitude actually do lurk on the 'net in droves. The popular myth of the sociopathic geek that uses his computer as a means of hiding from real life is actually founded in more truth than I realized.

I suppose the realization that being single is better than dating these people could be viewed as a good thing that has come out of this experience. My Valentine's Day crusade thus ended, I've decided to celebrate the holiday the way I usually do- by wearing all black and burning candy hearts. It seems somehow safer this way.

Jessica Liese would like to state for the record that no actual sociopathic geeks were harmed in the writing of this article. She is still single, but no longer bitter about it.