Online Dating Lacks Dimension

By Regina Lynn| Also by this reporter
05:00 AM Mar, 16, 2007
Editor's note: Some links in this story lead to adult material and are not suitable for viewing at work. All links of this nature will be noted with "NSFW" after them.

Sex Drive columnist Regina Lynn
Sex Drive
A friend asked me last weekend if I was going to go back to online dating, now that I'm single again. I answered truthfully: It hasn't even occurred to me.

Even if I were looking for another lover, or boyfriend, or husband, or hookup (which I'm not; let's nip that e-mail in the bud right now), I don't think I would return to an online dating service.

If I'm going to get involved online, I'd rather meet people in a 3-D virtual environment. The avatars they wear and the environments they build tell me more about them than their online dating profiles.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so. The BBC quoted Mark Kern, president of game company Red 5 Studios, predicting that in just five years, "a social-networking site without a 3-D universe will look like a dinosaur."

The adult sites get it. Social-networking site Utherverse (NSFW) launched in conjunction with its erotic universe, Red Light Center (NSFW). And Naughty America: The Game describes itself as "the evolution of online dating," not as "the Sims on steroids."

Even though MMOs carry an even greater social stigma than online dating, a virtual world more closely resembles the way humans meet and relate than a database of personal profiles. You have a group of people with a common interest spending time in shared pursuits on a regular basis. Shared pursuits other than dating, that is.

The strongest love relationships in my life have been the ones that grew, often unexpectedly, from friendships and community, not from set-ups or browsing through a catalog. And how many people do you know who only fell in love after they stopped trying to?

When UCLA professor Janet Lever studied online romance a few years ago, she was surprised to learn that just as many relationships emerged from chat rooms and what she delicately called "erotic sites" as from online dating services. The couples reported about the same levels of happiness and solidity, regardless of where they first met.

Unlike the internet relay chat rooms of old -- and I am not the only one to have found love there, not by a long shot -- a 3-D universe adds a new dimension of interaction and communication, along with several layers of complexity that help screen out the uninvested.

It takes dedication to reside in 3-D. But in 3-D, you can show each other what you mean when words become inadequate. You see how people interact with their friends, how they handle come-ons or rudeness from strangers, how they respond to fetishized avatars or environments, what they like to build and create and what they will spend money on.

Maybe that's the appeal, for me. I'm apparently drawn to people who are willing to commit to a shared hallucination and make it real. Second Life isn't just in our minds -- residents can supplement the family income through in-world businesses, and the in-world currency has value in the offline world. How long before we stop calling 3-D worlds "virtual"?

And I think I've always preferred to form connections and let attraction, lust and even love arrive in its own time, although I wouldn't have known that five years ago.

In fact, upon reflection, I think my initial response to new sexual and loving relationships has often been surprise. When did this happen? How did I get so lucky? Look at this cute guy I get to make omelets with in the morning!

That is probably why I found love (and sex, and friendships that are still going strong 10 years later) in a text chat room while I can barely remember who I met through online personals, other than that they were all nice men and nothing horrible happened.

For those who recoil in disgust at the thought of meeting anyone through the internet, that's fine too. If the internet is not integrated into your life such that relationships flow online and offline and back again so naturally you can't even remember where things started, we're probably not compatible anyway.

Most of the 3-D worlds I've ventured into provide optional profile pages for adding a "real world" dimension to a place where you represent yourself with a cartoon. But because you are constantly interacting with people in real time, the profile is not the first, or even the primary, point of contact for the relationship.

After that conversation with my friend, I called up my old Salon Personals profile, which has been in the database and set to "invisible" for seven years. It's been at least five years since I last used it to meet someone.

I stared for a while at this artifact from my past, taking in the photo of a younger, slimmer self, reading the double entendres I'd thought said more about me than any long-winded résumé. ("Q: What is the best or worst lie you've ever told? A: It doesn't matter.")

The scary part, the part that made me catch my breath, is that what I wrote is still true. Technically. On the surface.

I could probably set the profile back to "visible" and not have to buy my own soy-chai-latte-with-added-shot for a month and no one would know the difference, because those half-hour coffeehouse dates aren't enough to get below the surface either.

But I have changed so much. I have grown and matured and suffered and discovered and explored and chased dreams (and caught some of them, too). A static profile cannot keep up with life. That the descriptions I worked on so meticulously then could be stretched to fit who I am now shows just how little we learn about a person from a profile.

The New York Times ran a feature last weekend about services that help people capture more of themselves in their personals, showing them how to take better pictures and replace clichés like "I enjoy travel" with specifics like "I hiked the Great Wall of China."

In a 3-D environment, you don't have to list your travel résumé -- you just go do the things you like to do, and see who's there. If there's no great wall to hike you can get a group together to build one or petition the developers to create one.

Maybe I would feel differently if I had a biological clock, like the men Salon writer Elline Lipkin kept running into on dating sites.

Or maybe I have just grown into a person who would rather relate in the here and now with the people I run into on a regular basis, online and off, than comb through a directory looking for someone new. Sexual attraction can be built over time, something those 30-minute coffee dates to assess "chemistry" don't allow for.

Alternatively, immediate sparks can be acted on -- but are no guarantee of lasting satisfaction.

I took one last look at my 30-year-old self, then deleted the profile from the database. If sex is going to find me online, it will find me. And meanwhile, I'm hoping to spend a lot more time in more than just three dimensions. Yes, Luddite, that's right: I'm going to go outside.

But I'll take both my cell phones with me, in case you want to text.

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn