Lifestyle

By Christina Endres

As the Internet continues to make communication more and more effortless, sometimes it seems like technology such as email and networking sites have taken the mystery and excitement out of getting to know someone.  However, talk to Lee and Jim King and it’s clear that when it comes to online dating, modern technology can certainly lead to some old fashioned romance.

Lee & Jim

Two years after her husband passed away, Lee King was sure she would never remarry.  She lived in a small town with few opportunities to meet new people, and at 53 years old felt secluded in her country home.  Lee’s sister urged her to put herself out there and start dating – online.  While Lee wasn’t comfortable with the idea of making a profile herself, one night she clicked on Yahoo Personals, typed in Minnesota, and started reading profiles.

“It’s surprising how much you can learn about a person, not only by the content of what he writes, but also by the way he expresses himself,” she says.

Lee emailed and talked on the phone with a couple of the men whose profiles she found interesting and even met one of them, but felt no real connections until she came upon her future husband Jim’s profile.

“I just couldn’t believe how beautifully that man could write.  He was bright, intuitive, sensitive, charming and hilariously funny,” Lee explains.

Jim was similarly taken with Lee’s letters.  “You can kind of tell by the way someone replies to your ad whether they’re worth pursuing, and I did respond to a couple of the inquiries but nothing just gave me that spark of interest,” he says.  That is, until Lee contacted him.

“She’s such an extraordinary words-craftsman,” he says.  “I don’t think there was something specific in her email response to me that got my antenna up, but more that it was just an intriguingly substantive response.”

While Lee was hesitant to reveal her identity and hometown to Jim, he was more open and told her all about himself and his community.

“Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be my small community,” she says.  Soon after revealing where he lived, Jim revealed his name and Lee realized she knew exactly who he was.  She had seen him only once, years earlier at a banquet, but the two had been just outside each other’s radars for years.  Jim had worked with Lee’s husband on projects for work, and had appointed her son to his ethanol board and her daughter to his daycare board.  Her daughter and son-in-law bought their snowmobile from Jim, and Lee’s mother, a beautician, used to do his mother’s hair.  Despite an unlikely number of connections, Jim and Lee had never met.

“I almost deleted him,” Lee says with a laugh.  “I thought we had nothing in common and it was a waste of my time.  He had lived on the West Coast, been trekking in Nepal, been a county commissioner, ran for Nevada legislature once.  And here I am, this little country girl who’s never lived anywhere but Minnesota.”

The Lee remembered how much fun she was having and decided to keep corresponding with Jim – after all, he had no idea who she was yet.  Jim wanted to meet her and persisted until eventually she felt comfortable enough to reveal her identity.  On their first date in October 2000, both Jim and Lee confirmed with each other that they had no plans to remarry.  Two months later they were engaged, and this July the Kings celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary.

“That process [of getting to know each other] from September to December really was the foundation for a strong relationship,” Jim says.  “I would recommend it to anyone.”

“This is such a different way of meeting people than any of us grew up imagining,” Lee explains.  “You can meet some extraordinary people online and you wouldn’t have the opportunity if you didn’t look.  You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

Lee and Jim have no regrets about the process, but Jim says he was a little hesitant to start online dating because there was almost a sense that online dating wasn’t socially acceptable.
“In 2000, it was kind of thought as, ‘Should I really do this?’” he says.  “Later we learned there were other people who had the same experience we had had, and that reinforced our feelings that it’s okay to do it that way.”

For Jim and Lee, their email beginnings have led to a meaningful tradition.
“I told him I don’t ever want to lose the written words that go back and forth between us,” Lee says.  So, after eight years of marriage the couple still exchanges love letters every holiday.  That Yahoo personals led Lee and Jim to what is now an old-fashioned form of expressing their love makes surprising sense, and it doesn’t get more romantic than that.

Heather & Bill

Heather, who met her husband of five years on Match.com, says she initially wasn’t sure about online dating either.

“I really didn’t want to go online,” she says.  “I thought it was cheesy and even tacky.”  Despite her reservations, Heather’s friends convinced her it would be the only way to meet someone outside her normal social circle.  As an event planner with her own business dealing mostly with non-profit organizations, most of the people Heather woks with are women.  With her friends’ encouragement, Heather checked out Match.com.

“There is a stigma attached to online dating that it’s cheesy,” Heather says.  “To admit that’s how we met to people that are older was a challenge, but I think as time goes on more people realize it’s a good thing.”

For heather and her husband Bill, it was definitely a good thing.  After a divorce from her husband of ten years, Heather had decided she would forget marriage, date and have the time of her life.  Along with a friend, Heather started looking online.  She was still unsure about the process but one particular guy stuck out to her as she perused the profiles.

“Right away I saw this one guy that was absolutely gorgeous and had everything I wanted.  So I thought, all right I’m going to try this,” Heather said.

Heather and her friend went through it all together.  They started with emails, then phone conversations and sometimes met men in person.  There were so many people online that the pair came to call Match.com “the man buffet.”  Heather’s daughter was three years old at the time, so she knew she had to be careful about the men she chose to meet and set up specific rules and guidelines for dating.

“My girlfriend and I had a strict screening process,” she says.  “We talked via email.  That showed us writing ability: could they spell?  Did they get back to us right away?  Then we would talk on the phone.  Did they just talk about themselves?  How did they talk about their ex-wives?  If there was any negative energy there then they were gone.”

After several weeks, Heather had not forgotten about her original crush.  Then, the day after Christmas, he contacted her.  It was Bill, and he lived just five miles away.  Eventually the two met in person for dinner at a little restaurant just outside the Twin Cities.

Heather wasn’t sure where the relationship would go after the first date, but Bill knew from the start.

“After the date we’re saying goodnight and he says, ‘You’re the one.  We’re going to married.’ And I said, ‘Oh come on, I’m never getting married,’” Heather remembers.  “Five months later we were married,” she says.  “He totally swept me off my feet.”

Karen & Kevin

Sometimes finding the right match takes a little more patience.  Kevin Olson, a Del Monte warehouse manager and volunteer ambulance squad member from Sleepy Eye, almost gave up.  He signed up for eHarmony after an unsuccessful year and a half on Catholic Match online dating service.  In March of 2008, after a few months with eHarmony, he wasn’t having much more success and was planning to delete his profile, but didn’t get a chance to before it automatically renewed his membership for another month.  Several days later, eHarmony matched him with Karen, a teacher from Dallas, Texas.

Kevin thought Karen seemed to have everything he was looking for, and they began corresponding through eHarmony and eventually started talking on the phone.  In November, Kevin flew to Dallas to see Karen in person for the first time.

“I was pretty nervous, flying halfway across the country to see her,” he remembers.  “But when I got off the plane and she was waiting for me… I said ‘hi’ and she said ‘hi’ back and it was like we both knew.”

The couple’s smooth beginning led to more visits and eventually, a proposal.  One weekend toward the end of January 2009, Kevin went to the jewelry store and picked out a ring to be shipped to Mankato for him to pick up.  The day the jewelry store called to say the ring had come in, Karen called Kevin with the news that she had President’s Day off and he should try to come visit.

Kevin made the trip to Texas and surprised Karen with a proposal at a dinner play on Valentine’s Day.  The couple will be married on November 14, a date they chose by chance but have since learned is the same day Kevin’s grandparents were married.

While not everyone who tries online dating has success, there’s certainly no denying that taking a chance online can lead to wonderful relationships.