Wanna D8?

A friend of mine, who would rather his name not be featured in an article about online dating, is telling me (on facebook chat, no less) about the guy he is meeting up with later tonight. “You’ve got to see him!!” he types, and immediately sends me a link to a picture of a teenaged Puerto Rican guy. In the corner of the picture I can see the tell-tale watermark of OKCupid.com.

This friend of mine, a 19 year old art student living in Bushwick is not who anyone thought would be using the Internet to find dates when Match.com, EHarmony, and a whole crop of other matchmaking websites first cropped up. However, he is fairly typical for the New York heavy OKCupid.com.

According to OKCupid stats, students at Sarah Lawrence (one of the schools represented by people I spoke to) expect sex more frequently than any other college. Full chart available at OKCupid's blog.

Bring up OKCupid in a room of college students and recent grads and you will find yourself with hours of entertaining stories. When asked why they joined OKCupid, many students tell a story far different from free wheeling sex-capades of college in the movies. One recent college graduate told me, “I was going to a college filled with Franciscan Friars and Nuns and I couldn't deal with finding someone to date there.”

Many straight women attending liberal arts colleges in New York City are on the site because "all the guys here are gay." 

Carly Anonsen, a senior studying elementary education at Towson University in Maryland, signed up with the dating site a few years ago. Living with her parents and commuting to school made it difficult for her to meet new people, her dating options where bleak.

This guy really, really wanted to meet Anonsen

“I though what the hell, if I don’t meet anyone it could be good for a laugh,” while she still has not met anyone worth dating on the site and has basically given up on it, she still checks it. Anonsen even showed me some of the messages she gets on the site. Her favorite is a real gem, “hey…hws u?? u look hot in ur pic !! wud u lik to hav a hot  chat with me ?? it will b fun n no harm at all !! wot say ?? i’ll do whotever u say”

The guy who went to school with Franciscan friars has recently given up on OKCupid too (it should be noted that I got in touch with me because he recently broke up with an acquaintance of mine he met on OKCupid), "I had 6 or 7 girls persistently hitting me up in a creepy way," he wrote to me, "so I had to delete it."
There are many hilarious, and creepy, OKCupid stories (and entire blogs devoted to sharing them) but every once in a while something like a "normal" college relationship develops out of the pink and blue, youth friendly site.
While writing this article I got a message from Jessie Lochrie, a 20 year old poetry student, informing me of the progress of her OKCupid date: “i just got laid via okc. he is super fine and also a phd student at MIT, who knew. i think this puts my success ratio at about 2 out of 4? literally writing this from his bathroom”

"We can just tell people we met through mutual friends, that's not weird, right?"

And my friend from the beginning the article? He and the lucky guy he met online, a student at Columbia, hit it off and are now in a relationship, but they only tell a few people how they met.