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It's Valentine's Day, and love is in the air, but it's nothing compared with the amount of romance that's happening 24 hours a day, every day, online.

Over 16.3 million people visited online personals sites during 2002, according to Jupiter Research, and as the medium becomes more socially acceptable, that number is expected to grow.

"There's a lot of love happening out there," said Trish McDermott, vice president of romance at leading online personals site Match.com.

And, it seems, this love knows no boundaries. Men and women--gay, straight, young, and old--are all jumping online in search of romance. Underscoring the boom in online dating, Match.com reported Monday that it had a 90 percent increase in paying subscribers at the end of 2002 over the previous year. The company now has almost 725,000 subscribers and nearly 3.4 million registered members.

Changing Attitudes

Much of this growth is due to a shift in attitude, said McDermott.

"Online dating has profoundly changed since Match began in 1995," she said. "Early on there was clearly a stigma, and people would lie about meeting online." Now the company is seeing people order Match.com T-shirts and even put its logo on wedding cakes, she said.

The online dating stigma has been shattered by word of mouth, she added. "People talk about dating," McDermott said. "They ask, 'Where in the world did you meet him?'"

The answer to that question is increasingly not "at a bar," or "through a friend," but "online."

"I realized that no one new had come into my social circles for a long time," said Katie Redding, a Toronto resident who began online dating about a year ago.

"I figured that if I wanted to meet people, it was either take a commercial lease on a comfortable bar stool, or post an online personal," she said.

Redding posted a profile on the personals service of literary sex magazine Nerve.com, and quickly began receiving messages from like-minded romantics. Since then, she has had several relationships with men she met through Nerve.

Common Ground

Nerve.com's personals service is powered by a company called Spring Street Networks, which actually sprung from Nerve and provides personals for other niche sites such as Salon.com and The Onion. By providing personals services for distinct Web communities, Spring Street executives believe there is a higher chance that people will meet other singles with whom they already have something in common.

"When the product you're selling is yourself, the largest market isn't always the best place to go. You want to be matched to a segment of people with common interests," said Brian Battjer, vice president of product development at Spring Street.

Finding potential mates with a common set of interests is a big draw for users like Redding.

"Generally, when you find a site you like, you know that the pool of people is going to be a pool you want to dip your toe into," she said. "It saves you a step or two of figuring out if you've got common interests or perspectives."

For McDermott, however, a wider pool has its advantages in that people can search for potential partners with a laundry list of qualifications and turn up a decent number of prospective matches.

Match.com just refined its searching capabilities for this purpose, allowing users to do detailed personality searching.

"Users can search for a 35-year-old man who is clean and athletic and likes cats but doesn't like to watch football, for example," she said.

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