My Virtual Valentine

In the 1980s Soviet film "Lonely Woman Seeking to Meet," a woman getting on in years posts her address on local lampposts only to receive a sympathetic visit from a band of Young Pioneers. These days, the lonely-hearts business has moved on and up, with Internet sites becoming a safe, speedy way for the technologically savvy to get a date. Often associated with foreigners seeking brides, many Russian sites now specifically cater to local working singles.

Anna met her husband on the site MissingHeart.ru two years ago. She hadn't found Mr. Right among her friends and didn't think night clubs and bars were the way to go. To make matters worse in a country where women marry in their early 20s, she was already 22. After the first two dates fizzled out, she came across a picture of her future husband, who is two years older. "Of course, the first thing you notice is looks," she admitted. "When you read the personal details, it's a formality. He wrote that he liked tea with lemon, and I like tea with lemon too."

After exchanging messages, Anna said, she realized that her correspondent was a "normal, sensible person," and the pair met up. "Personally, for me, the photo and how he looks in real life weren't at all different. He's very photogenic," she recalled. They went to an ice-sculpture show, moved in together within a week and got married last month.

"To be honest, I don't regret using the site at all," Anna said. "There are perfectly normal people out there." However, she added, it's always the luck of the draw. While she described herself as a "shining example," Anna said that her friends hadn't been as lucky with their own Internet romances. "Nothing worked out for them. They just had a couple of dates," she said.

Tati, 22, also had two dud dates through DatingService.ru before spotting a photograph of her current boyfriend, a Russian who lives in America. She first turned to the Internet after breaking up with a boyfriend and reading an article in Cosmopolitan about the sites. "A lot of people work and don't have time to go out," Tati said. "Even if they do go out, they don't relax."

For Tati, another attraction of the Internet is that users "can say what they think, they're not afraid." People who meet each other in the outside world "feel obligated," she said. After communicating by e-mail and instant messaging, Tati traveled to the United States to meet her pen pal face to face. "My expectations were the same as the actual person. I didn't see any mismatch," she recalled. Her boyfriend, a 30-year-old computing engineer, now phones her every day and plans to come to work in Moscow.

According to statistics published on popular sites, women predominate among those hoping for dates. To get ahead, some have their portraits taken at professional studios, Tati said, while Anna commented that others post pictures of themselves with "huge cleavages and flowing hair" to ensure themselves places in the top 10 most visited entries.

"A photo means everything," said Sergei Pomukhin, who runs the Internet site Eye2Eye.ru. While only around a quarter of date-seekers upload photographs of themselves, the most visited postings are always "beautiful ladies and handsome men," he went on.

Ladies, as Pomukhin, a fluent English speaker, prefers to call them, account for about 55 percent of Eye2Eye's clients, and most are aged 25 to 45. But Nadezhda, a divorced woman in her 40s, had no idea how to use the Internet when her details were posted on Fortune.ru. That's because her daughters Yelena and Viktoria put up the entry themselves, hoping to get their hard-working mother a boyfriend. When Nadezhda found out, Yelena said, "she laughed, and said that she wasn't going to have anything to do with computers."

Soon afterwards, however, Nadezhda started phoning home to ask her daughters to check her mail, and, after a date with Slava, a divorced designer, she came back "on cloud nine." That was three years ago, and now the daughters have stopped worrying about their mother being left alone.

Better known for advertising imported brides, Russian matchmaking sites on the Internet have expanded to a wider, local audience. Founded in 2000, Eye2Eye straddles both fields, with a charge for foreign men and free service for Russians. According to Pomukhin, though, the latter account for about 90 percent of traffic.

"We thought that international dating was popular, but it turned out that Internet dating is much more popular in Russia," he said.

Taking into account the scarcity of personal computers, Eye2Eye allows users to scan in their photographs and documents at offices in 30 Russian and CIS cities, allowing organizers to check materials for falsification of age or appearance. It's a formula that works, Pomukhin believes, saying that "there have been very many weddings," although he was unable to give an exact figure. He put down the site's popularity to the pace of modern life, whereby people "work a lot and don't go to bars," but can always check the Internet at the office.

That view may be common, but Anton, a longtime user of dating sites, takes a different point of view. Anton has been meeting men on sites such as Gay.ru for four years and is convinced that "a person who says he doesn't have time, or that Internet dating is a more reliable way to meet people, is lying."

Anton attributes the craze to "psychological complexes," since in cyberspace people are protected from real-life rejection. The more practice he gets, the less nerve-wracking he finds it meeting Internet dates in the flesh. "It's a question of experience. I think that the first time was strange for me," he said. For Anton, the sites are a "guaranteed way to satisfy lust," but they can also be used to seek out long-term relationships. Anton has been living for a year with a boyfriend he met via the Internet, he said.

Without the membership fees charged to foreign men seeking Russian brides, open dating sites turn to advertising to support themselves. Focused on the youth market, Eye2Eye prints ads from leisure goods stores Nokia and Sportmaster.

"These kind of sites are not profitable," said Dmitry Taratukhin, public relations manager for Globo.ru, which owns dating site Sudba.ru. Taratukhin described Sudba.ru as "an image-enhancing project" rather than a commercial venture for the company, which also runs the online casino Va-Bank whose ads pop up on Sudba.ru's front page.

When this journalist put up a brief posting on five popular sites, specifying height, weight, hair-color, eye-color and education, but leaving out nationality, she got eight replies in just two days.

Most were short and gave few personal details. One shy person sent a blank e-mail with "Hi" in the subject line. Others were more forthcoming, such as a man who described himself as "28, clever, handsome and incredibly modest." After allaying any worries as to his housing problems and bad habits, he stated that he was looking for a pretty, slim, intelligent girl, but "not a wife or correspondence, or a sponsor."

In less slick style, another wrote: "I'm 34, 165 cm, living in Moscow. I'm a bachelor and don't have children. In life, it seems that everything is going okay, no particular problems, but I can't seem to start a family. I haven't yet met my one and only." The lengthiest reply came from a 39-year-old Muscovite, who sent his phone numbers, instant-messaging address and links to his books on child psychology.

And then, just to boost this journalist's fragile ego, a psychotherapist sent her a standard letter advertising his services.