The numbers keep going up and up!
The Internet is fast approaching THE most popular place to meet your future spouse. The numbers are astounding. See my underlines.
Study: One in three relationships start online
BY TONY CASTRO
LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
LOS ANGELES — Almost a decade ago on separate coasts of the country, George and Judy Lightbody, now of Reseda, were on an Internet game room with no intention of chatting with anyone until another player began cursing.
“George asked him to watch his comments—that there were ladies in the game room,” recalls Judy, 55, a native of the San Fernando Valley who was impressed by the native New Yorker’s chivalry. “It was the icebreaker.”
Soon George and Judy, then both divorced, were communicating regularly online.
“Next thing you know, I came out here for a week, liked it, said goodbye to her at LAX and said I’ll be back in six months,” remembered George, 57, who had been a longtime civilian employee of the state corrections department.
“And he was,” Judy said.
Married now for five years, the Lightbodys typify the meteoric rise of cyber love couples—with almost one in three relationships now beginning on the Internet, according to a new National Science Foundation-funded study at Stanford University.
Between 2007 and 2009 alone, the study titled “The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary” found that just under 30 percent of couples in the survey met their partners online. Only friends help to hook up more couples than the Internet these days.
“It is possible,” wrote Stanford associate professor Michael J. Rosenfeld, author of the study, “that in the next several years the Internet could eclipse friends as the most influential way Americans meet their romantic partners, displacing friends out of the top position for the first time since the early 1940s.”
Still, plenty of stories abound on how even Web-made lovebirds sense a social stigma attached to telling others how they met.
Many shy away from publicly acknowledging that they met in a chat room or on a dating site. One successful Sherman Oaks woman said she was so embarrassed that she did not tell her mother how she met her husband until the night before their wedding. A businessman in his late 40s reported that his two grown children raised objections when they learned their father was trying to meet Ms. Perfect online.
“It took us a real long time to finally tell our folks that we met on the Internet,” said Carmen Escobedo, 34, of North Hollywood who met husband Ralph on the Web three years ago.
“I think meeting your mate online has become more acceptable in society, but it’s still not the romantic cute-meet that some of the older generation have in mind.”
Nevertheless today more than 120,000 marriages a year owe their origin to the Internet, according to Online Dating Magazine—which could include meetings arranged through matchmaking and dating sites like eHarmony to connections made on social networking sites like Facebook or Internet chat rooms or classifieds.
And, contrary to the notion that only young people are looking for love online, a 2007 Harris Interactive survey of more then 10,000 people for eHarmony found that 31 percent of married couples age 45 to 54 met on the Internet, compared with 18 percent of 20 to 44-year-olds who did.
All told, 40 million Americans look at online dating sites each month, with online dating revenues growing 10 percent to 15 percent per year and, according to Piper Jaffray & Co., on pace to hit $1.9 billion within three years—marking a revolution in the way people meet and court one another.
Dating sites on the Web now claim they are responsible for one out of every five new relationships, and Pasadena-based eHarmony maintains that every day an average of 236 singles marry a match they met on the site.
It’s gotten to be such a big industry that conferences are now held that focus exclusively on the business of digital matchmaking. This week, Beverly Hills will host the Internet Dating Conference from Wednesday through Friday, gathering technical wizards, venture capitalists, lawyers and others involved in the fast-growing industry.
On Aug. 5, when she marries a man she has been dating almost two years, journalist Carol Bidwell, 64, of Ventura County will be among those who found their spouse on eHarmony.
But Bidwell, who has never been married, said that finding true love was hardly the easy fit that dating sites’ television commercials make it appear.
It took Bidwell three different Web dating sites and a slew of bad experiences—including a disbarred lawyer and a suitor who abandoned her when his ex-wife was diagnosed with cancer—before she finally met Mr. Right.
“It’s been like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” she said.
Even then, Bidwell almost missed out, originally believing the man in his 70s that eHarmony lined her up with was too old.
“But he had such an interesting background—he had been a mechanical engineer in the film industry, he’d helped build Disneyland, he was into auto racing,” she recalled. “He had all these pieces of history that I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to meet him.”’
It is not surprising that relationships that begin on the Internet become at least as powerful as those that start face-to-face because many people are better at revealing their true selves online than in the flesh, according to studies and relationship experts.
“Dating has become more difficult today for a lot of reasons, with people increasingly afraid of being rejected,” said psychiatrist Carole Lieberman of the clinical faculty at UCLA and an author of relationship books.
“That’s made the Internet a refuge and a way that people can try to take baby steps into the dating pool with less chance of being rejected, and, in that sense, you do feel safer in revealing yourself.”
George and Judy Lightbody swear they are living proof that online magic led to a solid relationship. Today, they are not only spouses but best friends.
“We each have grown children by previous marriages,” said George, who manages a hardware store in Reseda. “And our spare time is our own.”
They spend each evening and every weekend moment together at a Chatsworth ranch where they stable their horses—a hobby they took on two and a half years ago.
“I knew nothing about horses at all, and he wanted to get into doing something where he and I could do something together,” Judy said. “So we bought horses, and I went from knowing absolutely nothing about taking care of a horse.
“And now we have three.”
