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Way back in the twentieth century, looking for love required hours of hanging around crowded bars and begging your friends to find you dates. Now, even the lonely, desperate and agoraphobic can find love... on the Internet. Internet dating sites have exploded in popularity over the past few years, and have become far more socially acceptable. I have to admit that I've tried my hand at a couple Internet dating sites, with varying degrees of success. It was time to explore new options. It was time for eCrush.
eCrush is a romance site designed for teens where grown-ups can play too. The basic idea is that you log on and submit an email address for your "crush." eCrush will send them an anonymous email that says, "Someone likes you!" If your crush logs on and lists you as the person who sent the note, you've made a match and you will live happily ever after. There are also advice columns and horoscopes, success and "horror" stories, which range from slightly icky to downright painful. There's a "hot list" section, where you can nominate and rank your favorite stars (Taylor Hanson has been on the list for 86 weeks). You can send people a "shag," highly entertaining animations of various types of carpeting (get it?). There's a section with tried and true pick-up lines ("Baby, you must be a shotgun, 'cause you just blew me away!"). One of my personal favorites is the Cootie Catcher, an animated version of those paper fortunetellers you used to make in school. There are hours of entertaining stuff on eCrush.
I tested out the traditional eCrush method by sending anonymous notes to my friends... who were instantly creeped out. I realized that this technique wouldn't work for me until I actually had someone to have a crush on, and knew his email address. I moved on to a relatively new eCrush feature, eSpin-the-Bottle. eSpin-the-Bottle works like most other dating sites. You choose a "handle" (I chose Sara_Lumholdt, one of the A*Teens), you tell them where you live, how old you are, etc. Then you get a bunch of fantastic pop-up options, which I found both cool (a WWF event for a first date) and just plain bizarre (would anyone really admit that they were a high school drop out on a dating site?). Once you've created your profile, you spin the (virtual) bottle, and it brings up potential mates. These matches are chosen by looking for exact matches to your answers from the pop up lists. It's nice to be matched up with someone who also enjoys "art house" movies, but I would have preferred to narrow my search by something a little more practical, like my location, which eSpin groups by state. eSpin-the-Bottle is also different because it retains the basic eCrush principle. You can't write to someone you've picked unless they pick you too, thus reducing the rejection quotient. When you've made a match, you can enter the Make Out Closet, and get to know each other better (wink, wink). The thing that surprised me most was that within a week and a half, seventeen guys had put me on their Spin Lists. The process of actually finding the people who have put you on their list is a little tedious, but at least the site has lots of fun Flash-enhanced graphics to keep you entertained while you wait for the bottle to spin to your match. Needless to say, I'm still spinning away. Even if I don't find my true love through eSpin-the-Bottle, at least I had fun trying.
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