It promises you something priceless: that thrilling ride of romantic love via the internet. In fact within the last few years, the website businesses (there are 14,000 of them at last count) that are built around finding love on line has burgeoned into a $2 billion a year industry. Who knew that there is such money-making scope for those in the love-lorn business? The internet has indeed revolutionised Cupid’s reach.

What are these sites that many of us pretend not to know or frequent, but mouse around them during our spare time? Well, in case you have not yet received that spam mail, the decent (versus sleazy porn websites) ones inviting you to look for on-line love range from e-Harmony, Match.com to Christian Mingle to the racially specific ones. If you are, for example, more partial to the African-Americans, you can get the hook-up there as well. Then there are those that are even more audience specific: Farmers Only, is aimed at those rural, farm-folks looking for love with kindred spirits; the EquestrianCupid.com, is looking to hook you up with mates who are horse lovers like yourself. I think the only one I have not yet seen is the one for Reggae or lovers of dancehall, but perhaps I missed it in the rush. Check it out and let me know.

Don’t tell me you too have never thought about rummaging through the on-line dating websites, because some people, with big star power seem to be going that route. Just yesterday I read in the Jamaica Observer’s People’s Post, where Martha Stewart revealed to the world that she “almost” joined Match.com in her efforts to find Mr. Right. According to the story, which I had no right reading because I think, we the ordinary folks, put too much stake on the doings of the rich and famous.

Nevertheless, so there was I poking around in Miss Martha’s life, reading that the 71year old media Mogul, , told the Today Show’s Matt Lauer that, “she tried filling out the questions on the dating site’s sign-up page but failed to complete the process. “I tried filling out the application . . . but I started to laugh halfway down the page – it was, like, impossible!” she said. Ms Stewart added that she was not even planning to use an alias, and would have signed up with her real name. “I want to do my real thing,” she said.”. Well, well, money is certainly not all – even millionaire moguls will look for love in the strangest of places.

Of course, with the typical zeal of the academic, a Harvard Business School Associate professor Mikolaj Piskorski, for the last five years, has studied on-line dating and brought us back some answers to the urgent questions we had pending. Piskorski studied a random sample of 500,000 members of an on-line dating website OKCupid, focusing on two important stages of forming a relationship: spotting a potential mate, and initiating contact.

“The initial results showed that older, shorter, and relatively overweight men tended to view more profiles than their younger, taller, slimmer counterparts. With the female sample, tall women were the ones who tended to view the most profiles. I was very encouraged by these results,” Piskorski said. “It is presumably harder for older and overweight people to identify potential partners in the offline world, and the online worlds are helping them do that, thereby potentially equalizing access to romantic relationships.”, said the article (HBS

Working Knowledge – April 2, 2013) .

While I understand the importance of research and the results that they provide us, this finding was one that anyone with an overweight or older friend could have handed the Professor on a silver platter. In the on-line world, you can be anyone you want to be: if you were booty-deprived at birth, you can photo-shop Beyonce’s rear-end and, if you feeling even more adventurous, you could slap on Rihanna’s top half and, “a you dat”. I guarantee you that the more naked you are, the more hits you will get. Trust me. On the other hand, in real life, the truth is that in real life we only have what the God Lord in his infinite wisdom gave us. For some of us it is that we have more brains than booty or more curves than a race track. Some of us are fat and bald, or skinny like a broom stick and we will never get one hit no matter how hard we try. Funny enough, though, for years, our fore parents learned to work with that programme, made their various connections and the human race thrived. Now enter: on-line dating.

Piskorski also found that the older, shorter, overweight crowd sent out relatively few messages after viewing hundreds of profiles, as compared to the taller, sportier men. “Basically, the big finding is that men who view most profiles are least likely to message.” Piskorski said. “These results show that people who expect rejection may simply refrain from writing, unless the site gives them an encouragement to do so.”The results, he said, were similarly discouraging for female users. “Even though women look at as many profiles as men do, they message men much less,” Piskorksi said. “It seems that these sites have done little to overcome a very restrictive social norm that makes it inappropriate for women to make the first move.”

Says Piskorski “If you’re asking whether these sites help the people who need the most help to communicate, the answer is that it really depends on the individual site and the functionality it provides,” he said.

An anonymous comment posted to the article, reads: “I am very proud to say that I met my Fiancée on an online dating forum. With lots of work, a daily 4-hour commute and a disdain for the bar scene, the on-line option made sense for me. Also, I get to choose whom I want to contact and that is critically important to me since I was looking for something and for someone really special. I was searching for a specific physical profile, but I was also looking for beauty, brains and a heart of gold. Not an ordinary combination of attributes but the “TAG” on-line social network was the perfect meeting place for me and a great lady that is now my Fiancée. Go figure – you really can find love anywhere in the world.

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with

RO Communications Jamaica, specializing in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.