Once, while I was profiling a guy for my blog, we got to talking about online dating.
"I don't believe in the online-dating thing," he said. "That's just not my thing."
I once was one of those people. But time and singledom wore me down. Eventually, I acquiesced, trying free and pay dating sites.
FOR THE RECORD - In the BaltAmour column appearing in Go Today on Jan. 19, the number of dates occurring on speeddate.com since its launch was reported incorrectly. The number is 250,000.
The Sun regrets the error.
I exchanged lots of e-mails and winks, and met some cool people, but more often than not, nothing really panned out. And after getting to the point where I saw the same people -- the ones who seemed interesting and never wrote back, the ones who wrote back but were weird and the ones I just tried because was bored -- my online experience fizzled.
But there seems to be a growing response to this online-dating fatigue. Take, for instance, Crazy BlindDate.com. You pick when (tonight, tomorrow or another time) and where you want to date, and say what you want to do (have dinner or go to the movies, for example) and bam! -- the site sets you up.
Sam Yagan, co-founder of online-dating site OKCupid.com, started Crazy Blind Date because he wanted to make online dating easier and more fun. When he and his friends were talking, he says, the biggest complaint they had was that online dating was too much work. You spend so much time filling out profiles, e-mailing like crazy to ensure this guy is not an ax murderer, that it loses its spark. "Online dating has no spontaneity," he says.
The site, which was launched in November, isn't available in Baltimore yet -- it's offered in Austin, Texas, Boston, New York and San Francisco right now -- but he says Washington is likely one of the next expansion cities. And after that, Baltimore is probably not that far behind.
Yagan says the goal of the site is to get people out there. He says technology has helped bridge differences in the dating world and get daters out of their comfort zones, such as familiar locations, class or race, but people can easily fall into another trap -- spending too much time online.
Dan Abelon, co-founder of SpeedDate.com, agrees. Profiles and e-mails are not important, he says, contact is.
"The only stuff that matters is meeting [people] and interacting with them," he says. "Meeting with someone is the first step." Abelon says he and a friend started SpeedDate, which was launched in October, because of frustration with conventional dating sites.
