Looking For Love In All The Right Web Domains

Right before Christmas I had dinner with my uncle and his new girlfriend. My family first heard rumors of her existence at Thanksgiving, and I was meeting her for the first time. As we dug into our lasagna, my cousin asked the question we all wanted to hear answered: “So, how did the two of you meet?”

The girlfriend looked at my uncle, smirked, and said, “Which story do you want to give them?”

He laughed, looked at the rest of us, and said, “We met online.”

Meeting online doesn’t seem terribly romantic, they explained, so they joke about crafting plausible scenarios of their paths crossing without the Internet.

Of course, as you CatholicMatchers know, there’s nothing unusual — or silly — about finding love online.

A recent article in The Economist pointed out that in 2009, the Internet was the third most common way for couples to meet. (The first was the tried-and-true introduction by friends, and the second was the standard bar/restaurant encounter, but the latter is only slightly above online connections. And, if you’re honest, you’d likely admit to Googling the name of anyone you met in person as soon as you get home.)

As the article stated, “Once seen as the last resort for a bunch of lonely geeks, online-dating services have gradually shed much of the stigma formally associated with them.”  Indeed!

I got married on Jan. 1, and although my husband and I met while studying abroad (much more unlikely than meeting online, methinks), I did take note of the dates friends brought to our wedding. One of my bridesmaids danced the night away with her boyfriend of more than a year — a great guy she met after reluctantly putting her profile online — and another nearly burst like a champagne cork as she introduced me to her date, a guy she too met through a dating website. And I can think of a good handful of other friends who’ve met online and don’t know if their paths could have crossed any other way.

(However, someone you won’t likely meet online anytime soon is the single Winona Ryder, who explained her anxiety about using the Internet to Jimmy Fallon Jan. 10.)

Here at CatholicMatch, we regularly highlight matches we’ve made because we’re proud to be bringing couples together. But don’t just take our word for it: Chances are, your friends and family members are the real proof that it’s entirely possible to find love in a once untrammeled and mistrusted territory.