COLOGNE, GERMANY (dpa) – Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks did it in the Hollywood comedy “You’ve got mail”.
But flirtatious approaches via the Internet are no guarantee against the usual disappointments and confusion that are all part of falling in love.
Numerous Internet dating agencies in Germany have specialised in the love market. For example, there is an agency specialising in people who fancy an affair or a fling, Bleibtreu.de, Friendscout24 for people who want to get to know others, and Moms-dads-kids.de, a service which arranges contact between single mothers and fathers.
“I realised years ago that many people who go looking for a partner in the Internet actually find one,” says Susanne Keuneke at the Media Sciences Institute, part of Dusseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University. Her thesis investigates “MUDs”, or multi-user dungeons. These adventure games found on the Telnet online service, originated in role-playing board games popular in the 1970s and ’80s. In the ’90s, they found their way on to the ‘Net.
The media scientist discovered that communication in the Internet follows a certain pattern. The first virtual encounter is followed by an exchange of e-mails. Then the telephone comes into play. People in chatrooms communicate by sentence fragments, but in MUDs, it is apparent that the development of relationships is less divorced from real life. “You get a clear picture of your opposite number when you play together.
Willingness to help, for example, can be tested in these games,” says Keuneke. “Emotes” can also help: the pictograms can be inserted into message to allow players to virtually hug, slap, caress, kick or kiss one another.
Online, the senses are focussed on reading the letters on the screen. “I can’t smell, hear or see him or form an opinion of his laugh or gestures – all that’s switched off,” notes Keuneke. She found that anonymity leads to participants revealing things about themselves quicker than they might usually do.
“Imagine you’re sitting alone at your PC at night when all of a sudden the apparent safeguard offered by anonymity actually gives you the feeling that there is someone there who you can pour out your heart to.” The illusion of kindred spirits invariably ensues as the faceless and bodiless correspondent becomes the embodiment of the ideal partner.
These high-flying dreams are often shattered by the first meeting. Some people try to ignore the obvious alienation, Keuneke discovered. They plunge into a relationship regardless, along the lines of: “He’s my dream-man, you can’t fool me.” But in the following weeks, the fantasy cannot be maintained. The scientist does know of positive examples, though, including marriage, children and setting up house together. “These are the stories of people who met by pure chance and then kept up contact for some time, without necessarily being on the look-out for a partner.”
“The Internet is an ideal place to look for a partner,” agrees Henrike Froechling, who manages dating agency Parship in Hamburg. A personality test of 100 questions helps Parship match up people of similar qualities.
The resulting character profile is fed into the company’s database and matched with five other subscribers who may be suitable. This first stage is free of charge; a fee only becomes due when the client wishes to meet one or several of the people presented to him, by e- mail at first if they desire. “Saying that, people are keen to shed the cloak of anonymity from the word go,” says Froechling.
The agency is aimed at people aged 30 and above. Froechling says that she has a customer base of 23,000 lonely hearts. “They are people who don’t have the time or the willingness to leave it all to chance.” This is an area where a dating agency has the advantage over a chatroom, an open forum or the like, she says. In a world typified by mobility, it seems that the number of single people is rising and the acceptability of dating agencies increases with it.
A recent study by market-researchers EMNID in Bielefeld confirms this evaluation. If the answers of the almost 1,500 they questioned are extrapolated to the whole population, there are 32.3 million Germans who could picture themselves turning to the Web for a flirt or a steady relationship. At present, 8.9 million surfers currently use the Internet to form contacts, says online service providers AOL Germany, following its own poll.
People appreciate the irrelevance of time and place as well the anonymity that the medium provides. Chatrooms, e-mail groups and discussion forums are all suitable as a meeting-place and singles can also browse through small ads on certain webzines. As projections of surveys show, more than 60,000 surfers in Germany have got married as a result of their Web flirts.
