It seems finding the right online dating site these days can be as tricky as finding the perfect partner, and in the war of online dating site “values” it looks like it’s eHarmony.com vs. Chemistry.com.

From a May 5 piece by Lisa Miller in Newsweek:

Among the young and the single—especially those with Blue State values—wariness about eHarmony runs high. For one thing, there’s the association with Dr. James Dobson. Warren published several of his books under the imprint of Dobson’s Focus on the Family and then, when he was first flogging eHarmony, he did it largely via Dobson’s radio show. “James Dobson … did more to help us get started than any other person,” Warren told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2005. Because of Warren’s strong evangelical bona fides, the impression persists that eHarmony is a dating service for Christians—even though the company has severed its ties with Dobson’s group, and eHarmony “has never been limited to a Christian audience or any particular subset of the population,” says a company lawyer.

A clever marketing campaign by competitor Chemistry.com recently seized on those concerns — and the fact that eHarmony, which has had about 20 million users, rejects about 20 percent of applicants and doesn’t offer a full explanation, as the story notes.

The Chemistry.com TV ads feature seemingly attractive, nice people who mull over their possible reasons for being rejected by eHarmony: Occasionally unhappy. Too many late fees at the library. Too scrawny. “Nope, still gay.”

The accusation that eHarmony discriminates against homosexuals drew the most attention. The site currently only offers two options: “man seeking woman” and “woman seeking man.” eHarmony says it has not ruled out offering same-sex matching in the future — the service is just not available right now.

The 20-percent rejection rate on eHarmony may seem high, but it’s not unreasonable for singles seeking others online to want the sites they use will weed out the serial killers, the weirdos, the stalkers and the crazies.

But, for those who haven’t been lucky in love beyond the Internet, it would be nice to think that your online dating site, at least, would love you the way you are, right?

Where did your parents meet? In college? At a concert? At work?

Online?

Odds are, if you’re my age or older, your parents probably didn’t meet and fall in love on the Internet. For many couples nowadays, however, that first romantic spark could have happened through an online social networking site, an online dating site, a chat room — even an online game.

Nowadays, there’s an online dating site for everybody. Through the wonders of Facebook and MySpace, it’s possible to connect with singles on your area according to specifics like musical interests and movie tastes. There is a site for single parents, and one for singles with disabilities. Several of my Jewish friends have met people through JDate, a site for Jewish singles that has about 700,000 members.

There is even one for pirates. It is called Pirates Passions.

“Ahoy, me Hearrrties!” the welcome message says. “If ye be seekin’ booty, ye be havin come t’ th’ right place. Pirates Passions be a 100% free social networrrkin’ an’ online datin’ site ferrr buccaneers an’ buccanneers at hearrrt.”

Despite its popularity, fears remain, like, is it really OK to meet a total stranger you’ve only spoken with in a chatroom? And what about the other stigma: that Internet dating is somehow reserved only for those who lack the social skills to meet people in real life?

How do couples who met online address this when talking to others about how they met? Would you tell your wedding guests? Your kids?

Is Internet dating still, in some ways, a taboo topic?

I’ve honestly never had the urge to try online dating. I admit it sort of scares me. I grew up in the Internet age, where the rule about never meeting online strangers in person was right up there next to the one about looking both ways before crossing the street.

I wonder if true love is possible via the Internet, though. Surely, meeting someone in a chat room lacks the romantic ring of traditional, in-person first-time encounters, like meeting on a blind date, or falling in love in college biology class — although I can think of many a thing more romantic than college biology class.

I expect that five or 10 years from now, meeting and falling in love on the Internet will become more commonplace, and maybe won’t have the same stigmas that some couples are now dealing with. In time, describing the first instant messages you exchanged could be as cute and romantic a story as any your parents ever told.

And if you met on Pirates Passions, wouldn’t THAT be a good story to tell. Arrrrrrrrr.

Cartoon: OnlineDatingMagazine.com

I like to think I’ve given up a lot of the naivete I possessed in high school, but one thing I still can’t get over is the shattering disappointment I felt when I found out that long-distance relationships do not work.

The question inevitably arose at a college information night with seniors I attended at my high school in April: How hard is it to do long-distance? Everyone on the four-person alumni panel gently explained that regardless of how you might feel about your high school honey, 95 percent of these relationships are bound to fail. Nervous laughter followed, with some seniors whispering hopefully: “There’s always that five percent.”

So, the end of the summer after graduation bears down upon high school couples like an enormous tidal wave. And still, they promise to keep in touch, and visit each other, even if one is at NYU and the other at USC, and fuel prices are through the roof. Four months into it, there’s an argument, one becomes interested in a classmate, one gets too busy for the other, and the relationship, so full of hope at the beginning of that summer, ends.

And, in retrospect, that’s not always a bad thing.

When it comes to long-distance relationships, Hawai‘i people really have it rough. Being the most isolated land mass on the face of the earth means that maintaining a relationship with anyone who is not in Hawai‘i will involve a several-hour-long time difference and at least $400 and five hours spent on a plane.

Some couples enjoy the freedom that time away from their partner gives them. This doesn’t necessarily mean dating other people, but concentrating on a job or hobby, or spending time with family members or friends — individuals who might otherwise be pushed to the side once you’ve found Mr. or Ms. Right and start living at his or her house six days a week.

That’s fine if it’s just for a few weeks or months. But what about a few years?

At what point does a long-distance relationship cease being a real relationship?

These are all questions I’ve wondered about, having attempted — and failed at — a number of long-distance relationships in the past few years. Distance was definitely a frustrating factor at the end of each, but I also wonder how much of it was my own lack of maturity at the time.

All these thoughts swirl in my head as I look toward the future. Like many young people who were born and raised in the islands, I’d like to eventually settle in the place where I grew up. But, at 24, I know my days of traveling and living in other places are not yet over. I often wonder what I’m going to do when I’ve finally had my fill of exploring the world and decide to hop a plane back to Honolulu. Who’s going to be sitting next to me?

Or — who’s going to pick me up from the airport?

At some point, it seems likely that long-distance will again have to come into play. When it happens, I’ll still hold out hope that two people committed to each other but separated by thousands of miles can make it work. But, I guess we’ll see. It may be the last remnant of my high school self that I’ll need to let go of.

As if there hasn’t been enough parental hand-wringing about co-ed dorms, now there’s a new college housing trend to get worked up about: co-ed rooms.

At least two dozen schools across the country, including Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, Clark University and the California Institute of Technology, now offer some or all students the option of sharing a room with any person they choose, even someone of the opposite sex, according to this Friday article on CNN.com. Stanford University appears to be the next to introduce co-ed rooms.

Some parents are horrified. Even if the couple sharing the room aren’t engaged in any kind of romantic relationship, why put yourself in an intimate living situation where all kinds of embarrassments and sexual tension could develop down the road?, they ask. Says CNN:

As shocking as it sounds to some parents, some students and schools say it’s not about sex.

Instead, they say the demand is mostly from heterosexual students who want to live with close friends who happen to be of the opposite sex. Some gay students who feel more comfortable rooming with someone of the opposite sex are also taking advantage of the option.

Certainly there are advantages to allowing students the choice of living with someone of the opposite sex. It’s sometimes a better arrangement for heterosexual couples who want to save themselves the effort of locating another roommate and who want to save money. And it seems unfair to deny heterosexual couples the option when school rules, ostensibly written to discourage romantic relationships from becoming distractions in dorms, allow same-sex couples to live together.

But it’s easy to see why some, especially Baby Boomers, are balking at the idea. My dad likes to remind me that in his day, you wouldn’t see people of the opposite sex interacting on the same campus, let alone the same hall or dorm room.

As much as I’d like to write the critics off as “old-fashioned,” men and women were kept separate for reasons that still pertain today — regardless of how progressive you are, or how platonic your friendship may be with your best guy friend or female friend, your relationship will be a little different when you start sleeping, studying and changing clothes in the same room.

Parents can take a breather — from the numbers, it appears not all students are signing up immediately. UPenn, for example, started offering the option in 2005, and only about 120 of the school’s 10,400 students took part this year, according to the article.

If I were offered the option, I’m not sure I would jump at the opportunity, either. It would be nice to have that choice if a boyfriend and I wanted to live together to save on rent. But just as I’m not sure I could stand even my closest guy friends’ personal living habits, so too would I not want to subject them to my clothes on the floor or my make-up strewn around the bathroom sink.

Some of my male friends have these hilarious visions of how perfect and neat girls are, and I’d like to be able to still revel in messiness without letting them catch on.

In college, I enjoyed living in co-ed dorms, even a co-ed suite with co-ed bathrooms, and I never felt uncomfortable. But living with a guy, even a close friend, in close quarters would be a much greater challenge. I don’t know. Call me old-fashioned.

photo: www.cnn.com

Joey and Chandler. Matt and Ben. Bill Clinton and…Al Gore?

The Seattle Times on Monday explored the “bromance” — “the complicated love and affection shared by two straight males,” as defined by urbandictionary.com.

More than one woman I know has had momentary suspicions — even if only fleeting — of her boyfriend’s closeness with his roommate, teammate or co-worker.

The “bromance” assures women that men — tada! — can be close and still straight!

Wait. Is this news? Isn’t this article not so much about an amazing new social phenomenon as about a new word coined to describe, well, men who are FRIENDS?

The article says one of the reasons behind the  popularity of the “bromance” is that the average man is getting married later, at an average age of 27, according to a 2007 report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. The average marrying age in 1960 was 23. The study also found that men with more education were tying the knot even later, in their 30s.

All of this apparently is rolled up in the dreaded “quarterlife crisis”:

Experts say the prevalence of these friendships can in part be explained by the delay in major life milestones. Fifty years ago, a man could graduate from college, get a job and get married all within a couple of months. But today’s men are drifting, as opposed to jumping, into the traditional notion of adulthood.

“The transition to adulthood is now taking about a decade longer than it used to,” said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University in New York whose upcoming book is called “Guy Land: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.” One set of men Kimmel interviewed for the book were fraternity brothers at Dartmouth College. Following graduation, seven of them squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment in Boston.

The article also links the “bromance” trend to changing perceptions of homosexuality in America:

According to Peter Nardi, a sociologist at Pitzer College who specializes in male friendships, all these phrases are safer than they used to be because men are less afraid of being perceived as gay. It has become more acceptable for them to show some emotion. Al Gore and Bill Clinton hugged when they won the 1992 election and sports figures cry on camera when they’re busted for steroids, Nardi pointed out.

Finally! So, straight men are relieved of the burden of worrying about others thinking they are gay, and can just admit that they like other men and show some emotion!

Women: I hope this doesn’t create confusion about who wears the pants in the relationship.

photo: www.nbc.com/scrubs