By Barbara Deppisch
Selina, 23, told people she met her boyfriend Kevin, 25, at the vet’s—she was bringing in her cat, he his dog—and it was love or like at first sight. The truth is, however, they met through the telepersonals of The Montreal Mirror.
Telepersonals, newspaper ads and dating agencies are a popular way for young people to meet their match, but don’t expect too many of these couples to own up to it. There’s still a stigma attached to using these types of methods to find Mr. or Mrs. Right among the younger crowd.
Gloria, a client services manager at the Allied Network, says her Toronto dating agency currently has over 200 members between the ages of 19 and 29. She says everyone, whether young and old, feels slightly embarrassed when joining “because they think they’ll meet losers, but usually they are pleasantly surprised.”
Selina, an educator at a daycare centre, made up her own telepersonal message in January, 1993, but she had a problem when it proved successful. How would she explain meeting Kevin, a fitness instructor.
“(We) fabricated a story so we wouldn’t have to be embarrassed. It’s embarrassing because you think only pathetic losers go on the telepersonals system but it’s not true.”
Selina says that most people now know the truth about how they met but is still embarrassed by it.
My sister, law student, Joanna Deppisch, 26, can understand Selina’s embarrassment and thinks her 49-year-old mother should join a dating agency, but not herself.
“I feel it’s too pathetic to do at my age. I feel I should meet someone on my own. I have this feeling all the guys in an agency would be older, desperate guys and that the younger guys are not using dating agencies. I think it’s something people resort to when they’re older and want to settle down.” She says if she was 30-years old and still single, she might consider it.
Julie, a 23-year old executive secretary at a Montreal advertising agency, also had the impression that men her age might not be using dating agnencies. She says she thought “there would only be geeks.”
Her father convinced her to join his agency for a yearly membership fee of around $250. She was shocked that there were quite a few young, good-looking men to choose from.
Julie refused to talk about the dating agency for the first month, even to her sister. She was “terribly embarrassed and skeptical,” but she’s more relaxed about it now. She’s been on eight dates and is still single.
Carolyn, 25, a customer service representative for a computer distribution company, says she answered an ad in The McGill Daily during a dry spell. It was in her first year of university when she was 21.
“It was an interesting way to meet somebody and why not?” she says. The ad was in the school newspaper and she was not meeting anyone in her mostly all-female education program.
She phoned him and they met for a coffee in the afternoon. He was a graduate engineering student. “He was a small, thin 28-year old man who just wanted to talk about steel. I might have been more willing to listen to that if he had ben a gorgeous, hunky football player!” She wasn’t interested in him and based on that one date, she figured maybe this was not the way to meet someone.
When she answered the ad, Carolyn only told some close friends. “People sort of look at you kind of weird. If I told my grandmother she would be shocked. When you’re in your early 20s and you do this sort of thing, people think, “have you gotten that desperate?” she says.
Gloria, of the Allied network thinks more young people are joining in because it is “becoming more and more difficult to meet people. The traditional methods have gone by the board. People aren’t gong to church as much, they are disillusioned by meeting in bars, the sexual climate is dangerous. People in their 20s don’t have a lot of time to look for the right person.”
But the stigma remains. Jerome Breslin, 26, a computer programmer and law student, knows a couple who met through the telepersonals and they are now living together. Jerome is from Switzerland and he says dating through computers is very common among younger people in some European countries. He says, “I think it’s a pretty good way to meet someone but I don’t see myself doing it. I’d have to be pretty desperate.”
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