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Suddenly everybody’s doing it: clicking on a computer to find friends and romance, instead of risking an office affair or a chat-up in a bar

Suzan is a 50-year-old woman from Derbyshire. She is married, has a son, doesn’t drink or smoke, enjoys European travel, prefers reading George Eliot to watching films and idolises Oscar Wilde and Nick Owen. She is keen to meet friends from all over the world — though not for kicks or sex, “so pleeeeeeease leave it out! Just genuine friends and contacts”.

I’ve never met Suzan and yet I know all this. There’s more: beneath her smiling face and neat bob on the computer screen is a list of her online friends. Among them is her own son, Wez, who is in a band called 3 Storeys High. Another is John, a 49-year-old journalist from West Sussex who works from home so has trouble meeting people in real life. Olga, a Russian opera nut from Cabot, Arkansas, recently sent Suzan a picture of a babushka doll because Suzan says on her profile that she likes that sort of thing.

Olga has 43 friends, John has 80, Wez has 395. Suzan finds herself connected with all of them. Play six degrees of separation and she is linked to a cast of thousands, potentially millions, including sweet old ladies, policemen, porn stars, politicians, musicians, doctors, astrophysicists, minor celebrities and an overwhelming number of grumpy- looking teens.

That teens are hardwired to their modems comes as little surprise. But why is a cultured married middle-aged woman networking on the internet? Does it make her seedy or, even worse, pathetic? Must her life be lacking in some fundamental way?

Until recently public opinion held that grown-ups who did anything other than order groceries, buy plane tickets and Boden clothes or research their children’s history homework online were socially defective. But take this example of an exchange at a dinner party I was at the other week.

Some attractive, slightly toffy thirtysomethings were tucking into fennel salad when a Cambridge-educated lawyer said: “I met a lovely woman online the other night. We messaged for a bit and it turned out she works around the corner from the office. We went for coffee yesterday. She’s a lawyer too. We’re going to the National Portrait Gallery on Sunday.”

A few months ago the immediate response to this would have been mirthful laughter followed by a chorus of:
“Internet dating! Could you be any more of a loser?”

Instead his sister turned to him and asked: “Does this mean she might come skiing with us in March?” Then everyone talked about something else.
He is not alone. Among hardworking long-hours-at-the-office thirtysomethings almost everyone is doing it. The internet has replaced the workplace, the bar and the party as the safe way to make friends and find romance.

Just how did socialising on the net become de rigueur? More specifically, how did we go from thinking it the last word in desperation to a report last month that two-thirds of British singles looking for love do so by switching on their computers?

My internet-dater friend explains: “I moved to London after uni and, like everyone I know, work a 60-hour week. The only girls I met were colleagues, and who wants the aggro of that? You either get done for sexual harassment or you end up in a very awkward situation when you break up three months later. I’ve been dating online for a year and all I can say is: what’s the big deal? My world was small. Now it’s huge.”

In this country 3.6m people use sites such as Match.com, DatingDirect.com and loveandfriends.com. These are merely the big hitters. “1-daters” with less catholic tastes are seeking singles on an ever increasing array of niche sites such as ConservativeMatch.com (“Sweethearts not bleeding hearts”), Single FireFighters.com (“The ONLY place to meet firefighters without calling 911”) or AsexualPals.com (“Because there is so much more to life”).

Though every taste is catered for, the surge in online users (24% in five years) is introducing previously unlikely (some would say normal) people to online socialising.

The high number of new women users can take particular credit for this sea change. Their numbers are up 28% and research shows they prefer using the net to catch up with friends, share experiences, and “talk”. All this has turned the web into what its founders threatened at the dawn of its creation more than a decade ago: a 24/7 meeting point.

Sites like Friendster.com (for hipsters) or Bebo.com and Facebook.com (for schoolkids and students) fire up the young, allowing room for personal expression that the formulaic MSN instant-messaging service never did. The sites rise and fall in popularity like nightclubs, with Friendster currently on the wane and Bebo on the make.
Recently MySpace.com — now owned by News Corporation, which also owns this newspaper — has exploded in popularity and changed everything.

Every day 220,000 new members sign up. They create their own web pages filled with pictures of themselves, their thoughts, their diaries and their creative endeavours, such as music they’ve recorded or shorts they’ve filmed. They chat to their real-life friends, flirt, blog and make lots more virtual friends in the process.

The majority of users are aged 18-34 but plenty are older, which means MySpace gets more hits now than eBay or Amazon. Astonishingly, MySpace gets even more hits than Google. Last week it was confirmed that 2m of its 55m users are British, and the company has plans to open a UK office in the coming weeks.

Flick on your computer now and you have a choice of social experiences. Go to aSmallWorld.net to hang out with the Tatler set, Ecademy.com for business networking, TickJe.com to take lots of tests to match you up with friends and lovers or TheSocialService.com for young professionals who want to meet people in London.

Or you can go no further than cyberspace. All the sites give users an electronic alter-ego, turning the individual into a packaged brand
— with slogans and a soundtrack — to attract maximum attention from a world of potential acquaintances. You can log on and chat, flirt, dump or live out significant relationships with people you never meet.

“Aside from a tool to get over the hurdles of modern life, the web will become more and more socially appealing because it allows us to control our levels of intimacy, to pick and choose the best, to be surrounded but not touched,” said Marian Salzman, a futurologist.

Perhaps you’d like to talk to Monica, a 54-year-old clerk from Romford who likes gardening and the theatre and whose web page is laid out on a leopard print background? Or would you prefer Jordan, a 26-year-old US marine posted in Sussex? Or Peter, a 37-year-old commodities broker with a title, who hates his job but loves Elvis Costello? Some are looking for love, some for sex, some to get their band signed, but most simply want to make friends.

“When the web first came about there were so many studies that said it was the end of society,” said Tiffany Shlain, internet guru and founder of the Webby awards. “But 12 years later what we’re seeing is that the web is actually strengthening existing relationships and introducing us to new people. It’s a completely valid form of communication where virtual cultures are being created.

“It’s exhilarating to think that at any given moment 958m people are posing ideas, doing business and meeting new people online. It’s the network effect, which means the more people who come online the stronger our human network becomes.”

For all its connectivity, isn’t the internet still a lonely, isolating place? “Nonsense,” said Saleem Althaf. “It’s not a substitute for people, it’s a way to meet more.”
A 33-year-old doctor from Surrey, Althaf has used the internet to find romance since 1997. During this time he has had two serious relationships and made scores of online friends.

“In the Nineties most of the sites were American,” he said, “but over the years it’s changed. It’s become grown-up and there’s a real community spirit.

“I’m in the loveandfriends.com forums as we speak. The subjects up for discussing are dieting, Harley-Davidsons, theoretical physics, what makes you cry? In the last year the taboo about socialising and dating online has lifted and all sorts of new people are flooding in. These are intelligent people, the kind you would meet at a dinner party. Sometimes we meet up in person, too — 100 of us had a night out in Brighton only this month.”

It would have been hard to imagine Alastair Gamble socialising online a year ago. A 31-year-old square-jawed Rugby-educated architect, he is a mother-in-law’s dream.
“I mentioned I was doing internet dating at work for the first time today,” he said, “and one girl said, ‘Aren’t they all freaks?’ But they’re not. I’ve began to realise that I really want a long-term relationship and as I don’t ever meet people in bars and only 17 people work at my company it wasn’t proving easy.”

Gamble gets a lot of hits on his page on loveandfriends.com. “They’re all surprisingly normal.”

Shlain says the transfer of social lives to the net was the natural consequence of e-mail’s domination of business communication, which segued into its use at keeping friends and families in touch. “The web has been keeping us in touch for years. Networking was the logical next step,” she said.

The Institute for Social & Economic Research at Essex University said last October that the average person requires 18 close friends and relatives to be happy. Unable to find them day-to-day, people have moved online.

Likewise, real world romance has become harder to find. Loveandfriends.com is owned by Mary Balfour, a doyenne of the dating scene since she founded the introduction agency Drawing Down the Moon 22 years ago.

“In the past relationships were principally for economic survival and procreation,” she said. “There is less emphasis on these things now so the main goal is emotional fulfilment. We want lots of choice but work in jobs that mean we meet fewer people. Ideally we want to shop around.”

The 55m people who bought books on Amazon last year know how good the web is for shopping. “So why not log on for love?” asked Balfour.

Under-25s remain the largest group of internet socialisers. Having grown up online they are digital natives, but this hasn’t stopped a new breed of older digital immigrants flocking to the web.

“I look at my father, in his seventies,” said Salman, “and realize that he would be in social exile if he wasn’t online. He’s managing his whole social life from his deckchair, tracking everyone from old school friends to former business partners. He’s not planning to meet up with many of these people, but he’s in contact with them countless times a day.”

The net, she argued, is “becoming a substitute for real life. Google has replaced the Yellow Pages, Froogle is replacing shopping centres, eBay has replaced garage sales and Match.com has replaced your mother’s best friend’s third cousin suggesting some awful guy you’d never dream of dating. Sites like MySpace replace Thursday nights when you used to drag yourself out for one more drink because you thought you needed to meet more people. It’s low-risk friendship making”.

Or is it,? Peter Hain, a Londoner, recently had a nasty surprise when he met his date. ‘She claimed to be 37 but was really 47, asked to borrow ?20, spent the evening smoking spliffs and told me she could see her therapist’s office from the club we were in. Then she said she was already in love with someone else. And also pregnant.”

There is another risk: prospective employers have taken to Googling job applicants to see if they have online profiles. Pictures of you drunk and naked (save for a traffic cone) might delight friends but can present a serious obstacle at a first corporate interview. Some nubile New Yorkers, on the other hand, are reporting that they’re getting more job interviews if their net pics look attractive to bosses.

Perhaps the greatest risk — apart from striking up internet intimacy with a serial killer is that you can become an addict. Jeffrey Rosecan, a New York psychiatrist, is leading the charge to recognise internet misuse as an addiction alongside alcohol, drugs, food, sex and gambling.

A 34-year-old Scottish woman thinks her Friendster membership is spiralling out of control. “I feel unplugged from life when I’m not at my laptop,” she said. “I chat with lots of people and meet lots, too, but the trouble is that I can’t seem to stop. I went out with a couple of guys romantically and I really liked them, but I’m always thinking that someone better could log on the next day. A better friend, maybe, or a boyfriend who’s a little bit cleverer or better looking. It’s a problem.”

A YouGov report last week confirmed we have entered the age of “fast friendships”, which are exacerbated by the new online experience. Young adults say they have nearly twice as many close friends as they did 20 years ago, but that these friendships are half as likely to last.

“Internet friendships can be very intense, involving 15-20 messages a day,” said Salzman. “The rub is that they may only last six months and can be very exhausting. We don’t have such stable social networks as we used to.”

Marriages and long-term romantic relationships are also taking a hit. It is now easy to arrange an affair online — www.philanderers.com offers “discreet extramarital personal ads exclusively for discriminating men and women seeking an extramarital affair”. Relate, the marriage counselling service, blames the internet for the breakdown of one in 10 of the relationships it deals with.

“I think some people are beginning to pursue a life of serial monogamy,” said Balfour of loveandfriends.com. “If a relationship isn’t everything they want they simply move on. We’re just not working as hard at them as we used to.”

On the other hand, internet dating sites such as eHarrnony.com and Chemistry.com claim to be proof against future break-ups. They say they use statisticians, psychologists and sociologists to pen questionnaires that result in their members finding the “perfect” match.

Bev Bishop, a research consultant from Birmingham, logged onto loveandfriends.com two years ago and spent an hour filling in its detailed questionnaire. She was told her top match was Pete North, then in his late thirties, a lecturer at Liverpool University. Their first date was a walk in the Peak District, their sixth ended in a marriage proposal. Next month Bishop is due to give birth to their first child.

“My sister gave a speech at our wedding,” she laughed. “She said, ‘It’s amazing what you can get online these days’.

(Source: The Sunday Times 5^th March 2006)