When love is on the net

It started as so many relationships do — the long phone calls, the movie dates, the tentative introductions to family and friends. But the courtship of Mark Passerby and Salwa Al Saban was hardly ordinary. The two were separated by the Atlantic Ocean, a time difference of seven hours and vast cultural contrasts. He lived in Lansing, Michigan, she in Cairo, Egypt.

They say they fell in love over Skype, a service that allows users to call each other free over the internet. In November 2005, one month after they first “clicked'' online, they were married. “Everyone around us thinks we're crazy,'' said Salwa, a 26-year-old doctor who just moved to Lansing and took her new husband's name. “But it is much more perfect than anything I could have ever wanted.''

Software such as Skype is creating a world of online dating that enables relationships between people who live all over the globe, some of whom may never meet in person.

The software routes phone calls over the internet, substituting voice for instant messages. Web mail services such as Google, MSN and Yahoo also allow customers to make net-phone calls, but Skype has kept a few steps ahead of its competitors by being one of the first to offer this for free.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype and Net 2Phone are, however, not permitted in the UAE.

At first, Skype was used mostly by people who already knew each other: spouses on business trips, camp friends and college students. Then specialised dating websites discovered Skype and its role as a matchmaker started growing.

On most online dating sites, singles send messages to one another, but “it takes an awful long time for them to find out if they're compatible,'' said David Finlay, the co-owner of someonenew.com, a 14,000-member dating site. Finlay says by using Skype, people are able to determine whether they're compatible after a few phone calls.

“The natural thing to do is to talk to one another, not to type,'' he said. “It's a little bit of nostalgia here — we're actually speaking to each other again.''

Salwa said, “You can hear the laughter, the way the person talks — if he's tired, depressed. It really is much better than e-mail''.

After discussing their shared interests online (caving, crying during romantic movies, pop music), Salwa and Mark began to operate on the same sleep schedule. Mark, a 41-year-old technology developer for the real estate company Re/Max, set up a movie projector and trained his web camera on it so they could watch movies together.

He soon bought a ticket to Egypt to meet Salwa, and they were married on his first trip after they convinced her conservative family that this American who had shown up out of the blue was a suitable match for her.

There is something in the idea that people get closer by speaking on the phone, said Nancy Baym, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas.

Revealing

Voice can be more revealing than e-mail, she said: “It's going to be harder for a 45-year-old man not to notice that he's talking to a 12-year-old girl and vice versa.''

That's what appealed to Marcel Janneteau, a 41-year-old man from Montreal.

Janneteau, who gets tested in medical experiments for a living and is a member of the Raelians, a religious group whose members believe in UFOs as well as human cloning, said he'd gotten “burned'' when he'd been communicating with a woman online who put up false photos of herself and pretended she was a millionaire. From then on, he decided to require that anyone he dated over the internet have a web camera and a microphone so he could see and hear that she was legitimate.

He soon found Mimi Quan, a 42-year-old nail technician in Guatemala. Quan said she was immediately interested when Janneteau contacted her, especially when he sent photos of himself.

Quan said she felt secure because she knew if Janneteau made her uncomfortable, “I can just turn the computer off'' and stop talking to him, something that is less easy to do when dating in person.

They've never met face to face, but they talk over Skype four hours a day and watch each other sleep using web cameras. He's met her three children over Skype; she's invited him to visit Guatemala. “It's exactly the same as having a real relationship except that you can't touch,'' Janneteau said.
Some psychologists say a relationship created and sustained by net-phone can be incomplete.

Net-phone contact is “simultaneously allowing people to become more intimate and yet have less patience with real life and real-time human fumbles and foibles,'' said Linda Young, a psychologist at Seattle University who has counselled many students who have sustained or developed relationships over Skype. Not having to deal with another person's bad temper or foul-smelling habits makes the internet pal seem more perfect than he or she actually is, Young said.

Still, Young and others acknowledge that Skype allows people to maintain more intimate relationships over greater distances than ever before.

“Online, I can meet anybody from around the world,'' Janneteau said.

This enables some matches such as Quan and Janneteau's, that would seem unlikely in a computer-generated world of sites like E-Harmony that match individuals with similar backgrounds and interests. Skype seems instead to match people who are quite different.
Such relationships could become more common because the stigma about online dating is decreasing. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found 74 per cent of internet users who are single and looking for a partner have used the internet to further their romantic interests. Majority of adult internet users don't think people who use online dating are “desperate''.