Grant Reviewers/Teens/marriage-poverty conf/Online Dating - 7/03

[Smartmarriages ®]

subject: Grant Reviewers/Teens/marriage-poverty/Online Dating - 7/03

from: Smart Marriages®

- MARRIAGE EDUCATION REVIEWERS NEEDED
- COST OF DIVORCE 
- TEN THINGS TEENS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MARRIAGE
- NATIONAL POVERTY CENTER CONFERENCE ON MARRIAGE
- ONLINE DATING SHEDS ITS STIGMA AS LOSERS.COM

 ##################
- MARRIAGE EDUCATION REVIEWERS NEEDED:

Your help and expertise is needed. This is an opportunity to serve the
marriage education effort while you get an insider's view of the process.
I've heard that there is nothing quite like being part of a review panel to
help you figure out how to write a grant proposal. If you can't do it, alert
anyone you know in the greater Washington area that might be interested.
 - diane 

> Diane, I am assembling review panels for the Refugee Family Enrichment
> Program. We have had an incredible response to the RFP - at last count 229
> applications! We are planning to split the review into two weeks. Group 1 will
> meet July 28th - Aug 1st. Group 2 will meet August 4 - 8th. Is there anyone in
> your network that that you could suggest as a reviewer. We have lots of
> reviewers with refugee resettlement experience, but not so many with Marriage
> Education experience. Pay is $150 a day plus per diem for out-of-town
> reviewers.  We strongly prefer those that live in the greater Washington area.
> We'll meet in DC at the HHS offices.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> Have people contact me asap.

> Jocelyn Rowe
> jrowe at acf.hhs.gov

#################

- COST OF DIVORCE

> Hi Diane, 
> Do you have the citation for the David Schramm Cost of Divorce article?  I¹d
> like to read it. 
> Thanks! 
> Don Azevedo 

Go to www.utahmarriage.com and click hot topics.  - diane

################
-  TEN THINGS TEENS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MARRIAGE

>> Diane, I did my own little focus group with my teenage niece (she's 14) who
>> just spent a week with me and she really blasted the Popenoe/Whitehead
>> pamphlet for teens.  Her two main comments: (1) she hated the graphics, she
>> said the sunlight coming through the guy's head was just weird; (2) She said
>> the word "teen" was too small -- the first word that jumped out was marriage,
>> and she felt miles away from marriage, didn't want to think about it, and
>> certainly wouldn't pick up a brochure focused on it.
>> 
>> So I told her, OK, you wouldn't pick it up...but read it for me and what do
>> you think.  She looked through it and said "WHAT?  How can being married make
>> you healthier??"  So we chatted a bit, leading her to tell me one of her best
>> friends has contracted an STD in the past 6 months....a conversation that
>> wouldn't have happened if I hadn't MADE her read it.  - KC

It sounds like she's doing a perfect job of being 14.  It sounds like teens
might like more info on the benefits of marriage - HOW marriage makes you
healthier, wealthier, etc.  Guess the message is that pamphlet developers
could benefit from teen focus groups.

EAGER to hear from anyone else that has shown the pamphlets to teens. We'll
take positive or negative reactions - not sure which this is - after all, we
are dealing with teens, she did read it, and it did spark conversation and
maybe even curiosity.
  - diane 

#########################
- NATIONAL POVERTY CENTER CONFERENCE ON MARRIAGE

Diane,  
A good sign: the National Poverty Center at the University
of Michigan is holding its inaugural conference on the topic of "marriage
and family formation among low income couples."  Here's the
URL:  http://www.fordschool.umich.edu/npc/

Bill Doherty

##################

- ONLINE DATING SHEDS ITS STIGMA AS LOSERS.COM

> ''The traditional institutionalized means for getting people together are not
> working as well as they did previously,'' said Norval Glenn, a sociology
> professor at the University of Texas. ''There's a need for something new and
> the Internet is filling that need.''
> 
> Two or three decades ago, most American couples met in high school or college,
> Professor Glenn said. But as more people choose to marry later in life, few
> social institutions have arisen to replace the role that local communities,
> families and schools once played.
> 
> Internet dating may finally be stepping into that breach.

Norval Glenn presented at the Smart Marriages Reno conference on Adult
Children of Divorce and on Marriage Scholar Wars.  - diane


The New York Times 
June 29, 2003, Sunday

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com
By AMY HARMON 

Of the 120 men she traded messages with online in her first four months of
Internet dating, Kristen Costello, 33, talked to 20 on the telephone at
least once and met 11 in person. Of those, Ms. Costello dated four several
times before realizing she had not found ''the one.''

It is one of the first lessons learned by many in the swelling ranks of
subscribers to Internet dating sites: soul mates are harder to come by than
dinner and a movie. But like a growing number of single adults, Ms.
Costello, a fourth-grade teacher in Florham Park, N.J., remains convinced
that the chances of finding her life partner are better online than off.

''The difference is there's a huge number of people to draw from,'' said Ms.
Costello, who is getting divorced and tried Kiss.com on the advice of a
friend who met her current boyfriend through the site. ''I just haven't
found the right one.''

Online dating, once viewed as a refuge for the socially inept and as a
faintly disrespectable way to meet other people, is rapidly becoming a
fixture of single life for adults of all ages, backgrounds and interests.
More than 45 million Americans visited online dating sites last month, up
from about 35 million at the end of 2002, according to comScore Media
Metrix, a Web tracking service. Spending by subscribers on Web dating sites
has soared, rising to a projected $100 million or more a quarter this year
from under $10 million a quarter at the beginning of 2001, according to the
Online Publishers Association.

And despite the Web's reputation as a meeting ground for casual sex, a
majority of the leading sites' paying subscribers now say that what they are
looking for is a relationship.

Stories of deception persist. Many online daters turn out to be married, and
it is taken for granted that everybody lies a little. But they are more
often trumped by a pervasive dissatisfaction with singles bars, dates set up
by friends and other accepted ways of meeting prospective mates.

''My brother told me to join a canoeing club or something stupid like
that,'' said Dan Eddy, 28, who met his fiancée, Sherry Sivik, 27, of North
Ridgeville, Ohio, on Match.com.

Ms. Sivik sent an e-mail message to Mr. Eddy when she saw a picture of him
with a shaved head. She refused to meet him for weeks, afraid he would be
''some kind of lunatic.'' But after hearing that Mr. Eddy drove a Jeep, Ms.
Sivik's friends, who had a long-running joke about trying to find her a bald
guy with a Jeep, knew it was all over.

As word spreads of successful matches, the stigma of advertising for a
romantic partner online rather than waiting for friends and fate to conjure
one is fading. ''I really don't think there's anyone under 35 who would
think twice about it,'' said Sascha Segan, 29, who has persuaded several
friends to try online dating since meeting his fiancée, Leontine Greenberg,
on Nerve.com. 

Not prepared to cede the potential of a better love life to youth, older
singles are also logging on to dating sites in growing numbers.
''We're at a time of life where nothing's structured where you can mingle,''
said Judith Carrington, a public relations executive who lists herself on
Match.com as in her late-50's. ''And as you get older it's hard to find a
deep bond with people because you've had rich lives and you haven't lived
them together.''  

After a few unremarkable dates, Ms. Carrington, whose husband died several
years ago, said she recently had dinner with an investment adviser she met
through the service and felt drawn to him because of a shared experience
with a family member's mental illness.

''Just to have someone in the running is nice,'' she said.
 
As it did for book buying and auctioning used toys, the Internet reduces the
transaction costs of meeting romantic prospects. With pictures, long essays,
sometimes even videos -- and a cut-to-the-chase etiquette that encourages
pointed questions in e-mail messages -- singles say they can learn far more
about potential partners online than they can by sizing them up across a
crowded room or wringing information from a friend.

''The traditional institutionalized means for getting people together are
not working as well as they did previously,'' said Norval Glenn, a sociology
professor at the University of Texas. ''There's a need for something new and
the Internet is filling that need.''
 
Two or three decades ago, most American couples met in high school or
college, Professor Glenn said. But as more people choose to marry later in
life, few social institutions have arisen to replace the role that local
communities, families and schools once played.

Internet dating may finally be stepping into that breach.

''The Internet gives the impression, and it may or may not be truthful, that
you can find someone who is more specifically tailored to your desires,''
said David M. Buss, author of ''The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human
Mating'' (Revised edition, Basic Books, 2003). ''So perhaps the sense that
you don't have to settle as much will bear out in more solid bonds.''

Along with large dating sites like Match.com, which boasts nearly 800,000
subscribers who pay $24.95 a month each, and 8 million separate profiles,
numerous dating sites now exist for every imaginable group of people.

Generally, there is no charge for posting a profile on a Web dating site,
but to contact a prospective date, most sites require users to pay a
subscription fee. 

Lativish Gardner, 24, a Web designer in Valdosta, Ga., switched from Yahoo
Personals to BlackPlanetLove.com last month, for instance, to better focus
his search. 

''I'm a black man and I'm using Black Planet to find a black queen,'' said
Mr. Gardner, who flew to Houston recently to meet a woman he found on the
new site. 

Web sites like TONY.com (Time Out New York), Nerve.com and Boston.com offer
online dating services by pooling a collection of profiles submitted by
their younger, more urban subscribers, through a template provided by their
New York-based company, Spring Street Networks. In addition to the
fundamentals, subscribers are asked to complete sentences like, ''In my
bedroom you'll find,'' and to cite their most humbling moment.

Greg Bush, 34, an emergency room doctor in Huntington Beach, Calif., swears
by Eharmony, one of several sites that profess to take a more scientific
approach to the matchmaking process. Prospective subscribers to Eharmony,
founded by a psychologist, fill out a long questionnaire, and the service
says they are rejected if it appears a match for them cannot be found.

''She's gorgeous,'' said Mr. Bush of the woman the service set him up with,
a pharmaceutical representative he said he planned to propose to soon.
''She's the kind of girl I'd look at all night but never go up and talk to
because I'd be too intimidated.''

The first trick to online dating is to narrow the search without
inadvertently ruling out a perfect match. Helen Gaitanis, 35, of Los Angeles
searches only for white men aged 33 to 43 who are at least 5-foot-9. She
refrains from filtering out brown eyes, despite her strong preference for
blue. Typically 600 profiles of men within 25 miles of her zip code show up
in her Match results, Ms. Gaitanis said.

''You can kind of get a feel: Are they dorky, are they going to be a slick
cheeseball party guy?'' Ms. Gaitanis said. ''I look at my profile and I
think sometimes it's more intense than others. It's not as flirty or
playful. But it says who I am.''

Indeed, for women, who have long been taught to search for a mate while
scrupulously pretending not to, social historians say online dating may be
making it more acceptable to openly signal what they are looking for.

But gender rules still apply. Men say women rarely send the first e-mail
note. And like many women, Ms. Gaitanis found that when she did send an
e-mail message to a man, he almost never responded. Instead, she is
concentrating on refining her profile and updating it often enough that it
does not get lost in search results, as profiles are generally ranked in
order of the latest updated. She has also seized on Match's new ''wink''
feature, which allows subscribers to indicate interest in someone's profile
simply by clicking a button, which sends them a prewritten message.

''It's like saying, 'Hey, look at me, what do you think?' '' said Ms.
Gaitanis, who received 6 winks back out of the first 10 she sent. ''They can
respond or not and at least you didn't spend any time writing an e-mail.''

There are still plenty of holdouts. Ms. Gaitanis's brother, John, 28, told
her that online dating was ''strictly for losers.''

And even those who embrace online dating acknowledge a major flaw: the
frequent disconnect between who people say they are online and what they are
really like. In one recent example, the Army said it was investigating
accusations that a colonel, who is already married, duped dozens of women on
tallpersonals.com into believing that he would be marrying them.

Most online dating deception is of the run-of-the-mill variety.

''It's amazing how all women say they're slender when a lot of them are
overweight,'' said one 79-year-old Manhattan man who lists himself as 69 on
his Match.com profile.

A Culver City, Calif., woman who lists the adjacent, more upscale Santa
Monica as her residence, said, ''I swear every time they put 5-10 you have
to deduct 3 inches.''

But what is most persistently frustrating, veteran online daters say, is not
so much the obvious lies as the difficulty in judging physical chemistry
through virtual communication.

''Certain things look really good on paper,'' said Rebecca Hammond, a
computer consultant in Manhattan who has met several boyfriends through
Nerve.com. ''Then in real life it's a completely different story.''

After enough of such encounters, many online daters burn out.

Those who do find partners say they are often plagued by the insidious sense
that they might find someone better -- if only they paged through a few
hundred more profiles.

''If you get unsolicited e-mails coming in it's hard not to look,'' said
David Kleinbard, a researcher for a credit ratings agency in New York who
has dated several women from JDate, a Jewish online dating service. ''And if
the person's cute it's hard not to give it some thought.''

But for Jonathan Gerstel, 40, a university fund-raiser who was looking for a
Jewish woman in Durham, N.C., with a kind disposition and at least
shoulder-length hair, JDate proved the perfect tool.

Amid the 20 matches he found Marta King, 38, an actress and teacher looking
for a Jewish man who knew what he wanted in life, made at least as much
money as she did, and liked to dance, or was at least willing to try. If the
process lacked a certain romantic sweep that Ms. King once imagined, she
said she had come to prefer reality.

''I just don't think it matters how you meet,'' Ms. King said.

Just this month, the two reached an online dating milestone: They removed
their profiles from the JDate site.

Correction: July 1, 2003, Tuesday Because of an editing error, a front-page
article on Sunday about the increased popularity of online dating misstated
the Web address for Time Out New York, which offers such a service. It is
Timeoutny.com, not TONY.com.
 
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

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