Justin Rowe had never been on a date with someone he only knew through website pictures before, but when he saw Connie on Facebook, he thought the fellow Long Islander was so cute that he decided to put his fate in the hands of the digital love gods and go for it. “I’m a sucker for redheads,” he said.

But when Rowe finally saw Connie at the Roosevelt Field Mall where they were supposed to meet, she was not the fire-maned fox that her profile had led him to believe. “She couldn’t walk—she was bowlegged,” he said. “And she talked with this annoying, high voice, like ‘High Pitch’ Erik on Howard Stern.”

Feeling duped and hopelessly trapped into an awkward situation, Rowe text messaged his brother. “I had him orchestrate a [fictional] horrific car accident and then call me,” he said. “And then I just flew the fuck out of there.”

Rowe, a junior communication major at the University at Buffalo, is one of the millions of singles across the nation who are now turning to their computers to help them find love.

Internet dating, once sneered at as the breeding ground of socially inept cyber-geeks, is now gaining mainstream acceptance. Its pay sites alone created a market of almost $470 million in 2004, making it the largest segment of “paid-to-post” content on the web according to the Online Publishers Association, an industry trade organization whose members include the digital arms of The New York Times, CNN, and ABC News.

With so many people logging on in the hopes of finding that special someone, it leaves many wondering if there is a possibility for web-based romance or if dating on the digital frontier is just one more barrier that modern technology has created for human contact.

In a 2002 Wired article, Rufus Griscom wrote, “Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won’t look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because ‘the right books are found only by accident.’”

But communication experts say there are very good reasons why you can only tell face to face whether a person is a good match or not. Not only can daters be downright untruthful in their profiles and online relationships, but much can be lost in the vast digital gulf that separates them from each other.

“You lose many of the nonverbal cues and nuances of face to face conversation over the Internet,” said UB professor and Chair of the Communication Department Frank Tutzauer. “There’s a lot of misinterpretation because of the way things read—tones of sarcasm, frivolity, and lightheartedness can be hard to discern when you’re reading them off a screen. You lose the evaluation of truthfulness. The interaction’s just not going to be as rich as real physical contact.”

But while certain inherent difficulties will arise from dating someone over a computer, Tutzauer does believe that romantic relationships can work over the Internet.

The basic setup is the same for each dating site: users sign up and get their own personalized account, fill out an extended profile about their interests, personality, and what kind of relationship they are looking for, they then post a picture of themselves, and voilà —their information is posted on the Internet and instantly accessible to millions of other users.

For pay sites, like eHarmony.com and Match.com, any correspondence between interested parties costs a nominal fee. Other sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com offer their own venues for those interested in e-love free of charge.

Proponents of Internet dating like Wired’s Griscom say that by using the web, people are able to cast a wider net in their search for a mate than by hitting the local bar scene or partaking in other “real life” social situations. They are able to seek out singles with the same listed values and interests as them in much larger numbers than would traditionally be available to them—raising the odds of common ground before even meeting their prospective dates.

Rowe, who was not deterred by his experience at the mall, agrees with that viewpoint. “Personally, I’m tired of the Main Street douchebag scene,” he said. “You never hear anyone say ‘I met my girlfriend at a bar.’ You can’t really judge the character of someone at a place like that. Meeting likeminded people is easier on the Internet.”

He acknowledges that cost is an issue, but thinks it’s a decent use of his disposable income. “When I get my tax refund I’m going to just bite the bullet and sign up for a few sites,” he said. Rowe cites convenience as his main reason for searching online for dates and his willingness to fork over his hard-earned cash for the chance to meet Ms. Right. “I’m going to be in school for four-plus years, and I want to graduate. I don’t want to waste my time.”

Still, other advocates have gotten into the online love market for reasons other than convenience. Two years ago, after a string of bad dating experiences, Mary Kozak, a 28-year-old Kenmore resident signed up for eHarmony.com at the urging of her mother. “I basically did it to appease her,” she said. “My mother just said, ‘come on, you’ve seen it on TV. It works for a lot of people, it can work for you.’ It was the best $50 I ever spent.”

After filling out eHarmony’s infamously extensive profile—436 questions that take approximately three hours to complete—she received a number of “matches.” In the process of weeding through each of these matches, Kozak began messaging back and forth with a man named Fred.

“We talked online a few times,” she said, “and then we called back and forth once or twice before he asked me out. I never went out with anyone on eHarmony except for Fred.”

The couple hit it off as soon as they met face to face in January 2004, dated for almost two years, and were married this past October. They are now living in Kenmore and expecting their first child together this coming fall.

“I would recommend eHarmony specifically,” Kozak said of her Internet dating experience, “because they really take you through an exhaustive process. By the time you meet someone, you know they’re a good match for you.”

Indeed, one of eHarmony’s biggest selling points is its claim that it produces the most marriages per match. But not everyone who forks over the money for one of these sites walks away happily.

According to several news reports, a pair of unrelated federal lawsuits were filed in court against two online dating giants in November. Robert Anthony, a 39-year-old businessman from Florida, is currently suing Yahoo Personals. He alleges that the site sends users “matches” for fictitious profiles—“date bait”—to lure customers who had cancelled their membership back into paying status. Anthony told the court that he found several different profiles using the same picture of an attractive woman in different cities.

In a similar suit, Matthew Evans of Los Angeles took Match.com to court after he claims to have gone out on a date with one of their employees—what he sees as an extreme case of date bait. Match has denied that the woman was their employee, as well as his additional claims that they too post fake profiles in an attempt to entice users back to their service. Both cases are still pending in court.

Then there’s the issue of gay dating. In an article published in Salon this past June, eHarmony was criticized for its refusal to cater to homosexual couples. The article, which features an interview with founder Neil Clark Warren, showed a link between eHarmony’s discriminatory coupling practices and its roots as a politically conservative, evangelical Christian dating service.

Warren defends his company’s policy with its ultimate purpose as a tool to create happy marriages—which, he notes, are not legally available to most American gay couples. “We’ve got thousands of years of history of the human race in which this was never treated as a marriage,” he said of committed homosexual couples, “and there are a lot of people who think it’s just not going to have the same kind of stability over time.”

In addition to denial of service, some lovelorn web surfers feel that they face logistic obstacles in their quest to find a mate. “Minorities like myself are at a tremendous disadvantage,” said UB’s Justin Rowe. “If you want to date outside your race, it’s very hard to find other people who are willing to do that.”

While many today are hitting brick walls in their active searches for soul mates in cyberspace, some people are finding romance through serendipity. Sarah Jankowski, a 19-year-old resident of Lackawana met her fiancé over MySpace.

“I wasn’t exactly looking for a boyfriend,” she said. When Joe Barnett of South Buffalo added Jankowski to his band’s profile, she didn’t think much of it—local bands often scour the site for prospective fans in their area.

When he began to leave comments on her wall—a practice of public message sharing on one’s MySpace profile—she realized who he was and was intrigued.

After emailing Jankowski, Barnett invited her out for a drink, and the rest was history.

“At first, I didn’t want to tell people,” she said of how she met him. “I was embarrassed.” Jankowski had never considered dating someone she met online, but she has since changed her tune.

“I think it depends,” Jankowski said of whether or not people should go looking for romance online. “I’d recommend at least knowing a lot about them before actually meeting them because sometimes, it just works.”

But not all impromptu Internet dating stories turn out as well as Jankowski’s. One 22-year-old UB senior who wished to be called only “Emily” had a distinctly different experience.

Emily was new to the school and to Facebook when she first started here last semester. Not yet knowing many people at school, she agreed, against her better judgment, to meet up with “Joe,” a guy she was briefly acquainted with who had tracked her down over the popular college website.

“It was only Starbucks,” she said.

According to Emily, the meeting went well, so she accepted Joe’s invitation to get a drink at a bar. This was when things began to get strange. “He whined about breaking up with his girlfriend the entire time,” she said. “When we got to the bar, he ordered both of us drinks and set up a tab at the same time. When we went to go he made a comment about me paying for my own drink—I had no problem with doing it, but it was just weird.”

When Joe asked Emily out for a third time, she again agreed despite her reservations. “I went over to his house and as we were sitting there, his little dog threw up all over my jeans,” she said. “They were my favorite jeans. I thought to myself, ‘I’m not going to be a bitch and make a big deal out of it,’ and tried to remain calm. The only thing he said was not to grind [the puke] into the carpet.”

As she was cleaning herself up, she accidentally spilled a cup of soda onto the floor. “He freaked out at me,” she said. “That was pretty much the end of everything right there.”

“Facebook is neat because you can meet people on it,” she said. “But romance—courtly love—is so big because of the hunt, and with the Internet, there is no hunt. You lose that social interaction.”

Whether Internet dating is just a passing fad or the beginning of what romance will become in the future remains to be seen. Online relationships—just like their “real life” counterparts—face their own distinct set of advantages and disadvantages. The only thing that is sure in this new realm of techno-love is that eventually these couples will have to power down their laptops and enter into the living and breathing world where the rest of us play out our day-to-day human tragedies and romances.

“There’s a reason that the human race has survived for so long,” Emily said, “and that reason is physical contact with each other.”