By Erica D. Rowell   

N E W Y O R K, February 14, 2001 — Love sparks between a college freshman in Chicago and her online friend of four years, who lives in New York City. A year later, and still several states apart, the relationship blossoms. Elsewhere in New York, a wife discovers six computer disks containing 3,000 pages of salacious chat exchanges between her husband and an unknown Australian woman. Less than a year later, the husband and wife divorce.

Indeed, for some the Internet is a high-tech Cupid, capable of matchmaking magic. For others the Net is a tangled Web of woe, where wandering eyes lead to love gone bad. But for all, cyberspace offers a relatively new outlet for actively pursuing, or just stumbling into, romance with all its fascinating rhythms and disastrous pitfalls. Exactly what works online is as difficult to put one's finger on as what works offline, but cyberspace does lock into that ever-important part of love: fantasy.

Web Dating
Online dating services, which have taken off in the past couple of years, offer listings chock-full of potential mates searchable by location, interests, age, sex, sexual preference. And while it might take a lot of time to find someone compatible and worthy of dating, these Web sites turn personal ads into an interactive pursuit.

Leslie Valdes, a 35-year-old television writer in New York, found his girlfriend through match.com. He says he went looking for love online for pragmatic reasons.

"I was tired of meeting people who, while their personalities were compatible with mine, their interests were sometimes diametrically different," he says.

A $25 fee for a three-month subscription launched Valdes into the online dating game, in which he began communicating with women whose profiles appealed to his tastes. The resulting onslaught of e-mails was staggering.

"I actually communicated with about 15 to 25 women on match.com. I wrote about 150 e-mails back and forth and I met up with two of them," he says.

He really clicked with one of them, and he's been dating his online find for seven months now. Though it took him almost three months to find the right one, he says he's happy with the results.

"I got a very accurate picture of who [the women] were and what they were like simply by the way they wrote and what they wrote about," he says.

Online Pitfalls
But AOL's expert on romance, Dr. Kate Wachs, says that a potential downside to pursuing a relationship online is the sometimes irresistible temptation to create and interact with a fantasy.

"Every age has its secret pen pal," says Dr. Kate, who's also the author of Dr. Kate's Love Secrets: Solving the Mysteries of the Love Cycle. "In the '50s, it was the decoder ring. Today it's the Internet."

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