“My hands were literally shaking,” Erin Davis recalls about the day she first met her husband. The blonde 22-year-old turns to her spouse and speaks with the animated and candid tone that characterizes their conversations. “Do you remember?” she asks. “I walked up to you. I couldn't even talk because I was so out of breath.” Chris, a bit shyer than his bubbly wife, agrees he was as nervous as Erin. “She was prettier than I remembered from the picture,” he says.

While first-date jitters are perfectly normal, Chris and Erin differed from traditional couples. The two met via a Web site that matched people in the same region, which for this couple was southern Ohio. Their first date was the culmination of many e-mails, marathon phone calls, and exchanges of photos online. There was also some old-fashioned courtship with a digital twist: “I sent her the standard virtual flowers,” Chris says.

Online dating is becoming more common than ever before, and Chris and Erin are just two of the millions who have found love on the Web. The world's largest dating site, Match.com, boasts a membership of 29.6 million registered users, and meeting online is becoming part of popular culture as well as a new branch of academic study.

“The biggest misconception is that it's just a bunch of people who can't find a date in real life,” says Andrea Baker, associate professor of sociology at Ohio University's Lancaster campus. Baker has been studying online relationships since 1997, when an undergraduate told her about an online trivia game in which people were connecting and forming relationships. “At that point I was online, but I had no idea that people were meeting like this,” she says.

Her general curiosity and graduate school studies on marriage and the family allowed her to delve into the growing field of online studies. In her book to be published this fall, Double Click: Romance and Commitment of Online Couples , Baker used e-mail questionnaires to study both partners in 89 couples that met online in a multitude of ways from 1997 to 2003. She also interviewed some of the couples, several of whom sent her copies of a selection of their e-mail exchanges. Baker believes people can meet in any group on the Internet where there is a discussion, such as chat and game rooms, instant messengers, and dating sites. And she's identified certain factors that contribute to successful online couplings.

MATCH MADE IN CYBERSPACE

Chris, now 25, is a general manager at a computer technologies firm in southern Ohio. Personally and professionally, computers have been a major part of his lifestyle. Conservatively dressed in a collared shirt and khakis, Chris has a quiet demeanor and appears to give a good amount of thought before he says something. “I've always been the geek, the nerd, the computer dork person,” he says.

Chris was naturally drawn to the freedom of chatting on the Web. Teased often in high school, Chris still describes himself today as pretty shy, but the Web allowed him to be himself. “You are free to be who you are without people being critical of you,” he says. “You get past the whole ‘judging the book by its cover' thing.” Online, Chris had the confidence to talk to any woman, and offline, he felt more confident meeting face-to-face. After a while, he became enmeshed in the online culture and still remains close with some of his early cyber friends. Romantically, he had logged seven online relationships before he met Erin, and was still hopeful the Web would provide a love match.

While Chris was a seasoned online dater, Erin wasn't looking for love when she took to the keyboard. Erin's roommate convinced her to fill out an online personality quiz and told her it would not only decode her personality, but also match her with people in her area. Thinking it was completely harmless, Erin filled out the quiz. It wasn't until Chris sent her an instant message later that night that Erin realized she had been officially thrown into the arena of online dating — and she was apprehensive. Erin's attitude about online dating was influenced by programs she had watched on television. “My only experience with online friendships — on any level — were the stories you see on newsmagazines like 20/20 and Dateline about predators on the Internet,” she explains. So in response to his message, Erin curtly replied, “Send me an e-mail sometime,” and provided him with her address.

“She was so against talking to anyone online,” Chris says, reflecting on those first, brief exchanges. Erin became more comfortable as the communication between the two grew deeper. “We could talk about more than just the weather,” she says. Over the next two weeks, they communicated via instant messaging programs, email, and the phone. Erin was finding it easy to communicate her values and feelings to Chris, and he was able to be as honest with her. “It's easier to assert your opinion because you don't have to worry about hurting someone's feelings as much,” she says. “You aren't talking to someone you have to see at work or school the next day.”

This type of story is familiar to Baker, who found this thread of communication in many of the relationships she's studied. Although communication theorists would say a huge part of communicating is nonverbal, Baker believes the absence of these nonverbal distractions forces online couples to really pay attention to each other. Online writings and thoughts carry more significance, and partners have less of an opportunity to disregard them. “It's a more focused type of communication and potentially more valuable,” Baker says.

For this reason, it's also important for couples to agree on a mode of communication — whether it's strictly online, or, like Chris and Erin (who were not part of Baker's study), a combination of online and phone. In Baker's research, some of the unsuccessful couples were never able to agree.

Chris and Erin also could agree on something else: They reveled in the fact they had no prior history. “It was a lot less risky situation as far as social consequences went,” Erin says. “That was a huge benefit from my standpoint.”

Chris points out that online dating isn't just for those in big cities. They both came from small towns only 20 miles away from each other. City dwellers may use the Internet to make their urban sprawl feel smaller, but rural residents often use the Web to expand their dating pool. This bigger pool of people is a benefit of online dating, says Baker, and can only increase a user's chances of finding someone.

Although Erin had found love, she hid the fact that she had met Chris online from many of her friends and family until after they were engaged. Her family's limited contact with computers made Erin think they would not view this type of meeting as legitimate. “Many members of my extended family have never even been on the Internet before,” she says, “To them it is a whole different world.” Now, after two years of marriage, Erin is more comfortable telling people how they met.

This newfound ease with online dating is widespread, according to Baker. She sees the stigma felt by online couples receding. Of the 89 couples in her study, only about 6 percent concealed the information completely. Another 16 percent kept the information from some family or friends until the relationship became more serious.

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MAKING IT LAST

There are certain factors that might make online relationships more successful, according to Baker, and she calls it the POST model. First, the place where the couple met is important. Meeting around a similar interest improved her couples' chances for success. The second factor is how they overcame certain obstacles such as distance or the possibility of other relationships. Long-distance couples also had to worry about moneyand relocation issues. The third is self-presentation, or how much or little they shared with each other. If couples were honest, they would have a successful offline meeting because they had represented themselves accurately.

Couples that faltered here had little chance to recover, according to Baker. A few people in her study were caught trying to deceive his or her partner; common crimes included exchanging old, out-of-date photos or occasionally lying about one's marital status. Not all white lies online are malicious. One woman in Baker's study avoided describing her appearance because she was sick of men pursuing her only for her looks. The last factor for a successful online relationship is timing. Baker asserts that in long-distance relationships, the longer you communicate with someone, the better.

Still, there are instances when an online match doesn't translate to the real world. “There has to be some amount of chemistry,” Baker notes. She believes the face-to-face meeting is an important point in the relationship that puts all the work online and chemistry to the test.

Chris agrees. “It was a little easier because we had gotten past the whole ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?' or ‘What's your favorite color?'” he says. Covering such basic questions on the Internet allowed them to move on to more substantial topics. “I think that's why our relationship moved so fast,” Erin muses.

The pace of online relationships can be slower in one way and faster in another, according to Baker. If the couple is long distance, as two-thirds of the couples in her study were, it might take longer to meet face-to-face. But in either situation, local or long-distance, once they meet and hit it off, the pace accelerates. A recent Match.com survey confirmed this idea of fast-forward relationships. The couples surveyed tended to date for a shorter period of time before getting married, compared to offline couples.

After dating a year or less, 72 percent of Match.com couples were married, compared with 36 percent of couples who had not met through the service. Chris and Erin fall into the accelerated category. They were engaged two months after their first date and married exactly a year later on June 22, 2002. Is there a sociological explanation to love? “They have all that background from writing to each other and a lot of knowledge about each other,” Baker says. “If they click it just seems to take off.”

A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

This fascination with online relationships is not exclusive to the United States, but is part of an emerging field of Internet studies around the globe. “It attracts attention because this is a relatively new way of meeting people,” Baker says. “For a long time there was this disbelief that people could become interested in each other before seeing each other.”

Monica Whitty, a psychology professor at Queen's University in Belfast, Ireland, sees the emergence of online dating as an extension of our busy lifestyles. Not only does it reduce the time an individual takes to meet someone, but the whole idea also reflects our technology-driven society. Whitty has been conducting online research since 1998 and is currently interviewing singles on Australia's largest online dating site, RSVP. These subjects' approach to online dating differs from the couples in Baker's study, who already had formed relationships before joining her research project. Because they meet people only on a dating site, they are more interested in finding out quickly if a person is a good match for them — especially when they are paying to use the site. On the other hand, Baker's subjects — who had met in a variety of online places — were pursuing long-term relationships with no time frame. But there is one thing that both Baker and Whitty have observed.

“There is a wide range of different people and age groups,” Whitty says. “And they all have different reasons as to why they went online.” The scholars have both found online daters who dislike the bar scene, face time constraints because of jobs with odd hours, or have to care for their children.

OFFLINE ALL THE TIME

For Chris and Erin, they've been able to make the successful transition from online to offline with ease. Those conversations that lasted for hours and hours on the computer and phone are now held sitting next to each other in their home in Ironton, Ohio. Describing their ability to communicate, Erin says, “On a scale of one to 10, we are at least a nine. We have always been very open and honest with everything. The way our relationship started really laid the foundation for us.”

For Baker, the Internet provides its own rich foundation for further research. Baker plans to continue her work with online couples to show how the Internet may foster successful relationships. In the future, she hopes researchers can conduct comparative studies between online and offline couples, and also truly find out how many Americans are meeting their spouses online.

While many people may be surprised at who is meeting online, Erin still seems in awe of the digital path her life has taken. “Not in a million years did I ever think I would meet my husband this way,” she says. She envisioned her future husband as a “country bumpkin,” farming behind a white picket fence with a menagerie of pets and children.

Spectacled, business casual-clad Chris doesn't seem to fit the bill, but he just laughs at Erin's description. “Give it time — you'll have your collie and white picket fence,” he says. Erin smiles and adds, “But I couldn't be happier.”

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