Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love, get married and live happily ever after.
In today’s world, the realities of your typical fairy-tale romance tend to be a bit more complex.
It can be hard to find Prince Charming, especially for someone who has other responsibilities like work, school and children, and for someone who doesn’t have the social structure to meet new people easily.
Sarah Clark, of Creve Coeur, Ill., knows this firsthand. The 42-year-old is twice divorced and the mother of two small children, 8-year-old Joshua and 6-year-old Lydia.
The bar scene isn’t really her thing, and she said meeting people at church can sometimes be like meeting people at work — if it doesn’t work out, you still have to interact with that person regularly, so it might be a better idea to avoid the situation to begin with.
But where does that leave today’s singles? Apparently, with technology.
More and more single men and women are turning to the Internet to help them find true love. In today’s world, it’s possible to trade the awkward pick-me-up lines for an in-depth survey that lets the computer decide who is compatible.
That’s how Clark met her fiance, 47-year-old Mark Parshall, using the matchmaking website eHarmony. Smiling and settling in to tell their story, the couple laughs about who will go first.
“He tells it so much better,” Clark said.
“They had a free online communication weekend with eHarmony,” said Parshall, who is also twice divorced and the father of two children, 17-year-old Coy and 15-year-old Sara.
“Sarah (Clark) put a thing on there that she wanted to communicate, so I responded back to her,” Parshall said.
The free communication weekend allows users to communicate with their computer-generated matches without paying membership fee. Both Clark and Parshall had been paying members of the site over the past few years — Parshall had just paid for a three-month membership when he met Clark.
“She already knew my age, that I lived in Chillicothe (Ill.), that I was divorced,” Parshall said. “It was Valentine’s weekend, and open communication was coming to an end, so Sarah said if you want to keep contacting me, here’s my email address. It wasn’t long after that we started talking on the telephone, and I would say within two weeks later we met at Red Lobster ... and then we’ve been dating for a little over a year.”
Clark also had an advantage in getting to know Parshall because of the extensive survey eHarmony users are required to fill out when they join.
“They do a really good job of screening out people that would not be a match or would not be a long-term, committed relationship,” Clark said. “The key to it is being honest with your answers.
“You have to decide between what you strongly like and need to have in a relationship versus what you dislike. Values stuff, sense of humor, communication, affectionate. To me, that is where it was at –– the fact that we were so similar in our likes and dislikes,” Clark said.
Clark had used a few other dating websites over the course of about three years and had even gone out with about six other men she met through eHarmony. Parshall had also used other sites, and he has been out with three or four other women.
“Some, you go, and they’re totally different than what they say they are,” Parhsall said. “I’d rather not even have a picture than to have somebody say they’re ‘this’ when they’re totally different. The big thing is you have to be honest with each other. If at the very beginning you can’t be honest with me, how am I ever going to trust you later?”
Both Clark and Parshall admit not everyone looking for love on the Internet has the same goal for a long-term, committed relationship.
“If you’re just looking to have fun, there are sites geared toward that. You just have to be honest,” Clark said.
They also both know people who have fallen victim to online scams. Although online dating may seem very modern, there are some parts of it that are the same as any kind of dating.
Using the communication tools on the website, couples are able to ask questions back and forth in a sort of interview process. There is also the ability to “close” the match, which — just as in dating without a computer — a person can do with or without explanation.
“It’s a human being on the other side of that coin,” Clark said. “What I’m saying is, if you want people to be considerate to you, how can you not be considerate to somebody else? I tried to be an adult about it, and if I wasn’t interested, I told them I wasn’t interested.”
“When we first met, I just wanted friendship because of my schooling,” Clark said of Parshall. “There was a lot of persuasion on his part.”
But Clark said she knew the relationship could go further when she realized she and Parshall share the same spiritual beliefs and he was interested in going to church with her.
The couple got engaged a year after they first met online and are planning to get married on Clark’s birthday, June 23, 2012.
Without the Internet, they both say they would be “just still looking” for true love, and they’d recommend anyone who is still looking to give online dating a try.
“I think the big thing is they have to know what they want, and they plan on being honest,” Parshall said. “If they aren’t honest, and they don’t know what they want, they might as well not even waste their time.”
