Online dating becoming more common Many sites for area singles can be found on Internet

It was during my senior year of college that my friend Candi started talking seriously about a man she had met. No surprise there – Candi is a vivacious, confident brunette who never wanted for male attention.

What caught most of us off-guard, however, was where she met him.

Candi met Sean on the Internet (insert mid-1990s look of shock and skepticism here).

Candi, who if I recall correctly had the creakiest computer of all of my friends, had managed to hook up with a man online. His name was Sean, she told us, and he lived in Canada.

I’m not sure any of us said anything to her at the time, but I remember being major-league wary of the situation. My Internet experience to that point involved chatting with a Slovenian man who started calling me. Every day. From Slovenia. Besides, no one actually met anyone online, right? That computer stuff was for geeks.

But Candi and Sean, who actually started talking on something called inter-relay chat (IRC to those of us in-the-know), clicked when he e-mailed her a poem and she gave him an honest critique. Honestly, she told him, it was awful.

But he liked her forthrightness. Once they actually met in person, over New Year’s in 1996, they knew it was love. They moved in together after college and will celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary this summer.

Candi clearly was ahead of the curve on this one. Internet dating Web sites clearly are here to stay and the stigma of meeting someone online seems to be vanishing. But, I wondered, is it popular in the Bangor area?

I wasn’t sure until I ran into an acquaintance at the Sea Dog, a woman I knew from my days of frequenting Barnaby’s. The subject of Internet dating came up.

Does anyone do that around here, I wondered out loud.

OK, she said. See that woman over there? She’s seeing a man she met on the Internet. And that couple over there? That’s how they met.

I made a mental list of all the different Internet dating sites out there and decided to check out match.com, which is one of the more popular sites and claims credit for “hundreds of thousands” of relationships since launching in 1995.

I entered the Bangor zip code, told the program I wanted it to give me matches within 50 miles, and entered an age range of 25 to 45.

It spit back about 200 men and 200 women looking for each other. The numbers were much less around Presque Isle and Machias as the population in those areas is much smaller. But clearly there are people in eastern Maine on this site, looking for relationships.

And that’s one Web site. There are plenty of places online to meet potential dates, including friendster.com, nerve.com, lavalife.com, personals.yahoo.com and udate.com. There are ethnic-specific Internet sites (ital.com, for example, is a site for those looking for Italian singles), religious sites (jdate.com for Jewish singles, for example, or catholic-singles.com) and any of the general dating sites are searchable for gays and lesbians, too.

Along with the proliferation of Internet dating Web sites, there are also lots of books about how to date online. And they all offer advice on meeting that special person. But I want to hear from those of you who have actually done it – your successes, your failures and your advice. There must be lots of Candi-and-Seans out there.

My best advice? Be honest (and I know this from a first-hand Internet dating experience I will save for another time). And don’t give out your phone number to any crazy Slovenians.

Jessica Bloch can be reached at 990-8193 and jbloch@bangordailynews.net.