Blind dating gets back in the game

Friends don't let friends date guys like Spank Me Frank, who took a gander at Ashley Nichols' derriere during their first and only rendezvous and declared, "I want to spank it later."

Nor do friends let friends meet men like the one who romanced Kristen Howey with a comped "blue-hair hour" buffet at a "cheesy" Las Vegas hotel. "He pulled out these coupons, and I just thought, 'You've got to be kidding me,'" Howey recalls.

In this increasingly difficult dating world, friends -- and cousins and aunts and their hairdressers -- are the first line of defense against, at the very least, a dismal evening and, at the worst, a dangerous liaison.

These days the old-fashioned blind date -- aka the setup -- seems the least of three evils, the other two being the new old-fashioned online date (Spank Me Frank's provenance) and the double old-fashioned bar or party encounter (how Howey met her cheapskate).

It used to be that blind dates felt, well, dated, practiced by the likes of Larry and Jack on Three's Company -- and then not so successfully. (Remember Kim Basinger's boozy, blowzy turn as an '80s Blind Date?) They were for desperados who couldn't get asked out any other way.

But, now, considering the menu of available mating methods -- add speed dating to the aforementioned -- matchmaking by friends or family carries the most potential for establishing a relationship on the one hand, singles say, and maintaining dignity on the other, especially important during the holiday party season.

Dates are vetted and vouched for by the common friend or relative, who -- unlike, say, an Internet personals mug shot -- can manage expectations more accurately, like whether someone's a little shorter than average, or a little heavier or a little hairier.

With a traditional, pre-approved blind date, "at least you know that if they tell you he's a Delta Airlines pilot, he's a Delta Airlines pilot, not some guy working at the Avis rental counter," says Nichols, 35, who works in human resources in Atlanta.

When it comes to misrepresentation, when an online date says he's 5-foot-10 and turns out to be more like 5-foot-6, "everything kind of goes back to the beginning. Everything that was communicated by e-mail or phone just kind of goes out the window, and you wonder, 'Oh, my gosh. Is this the person I thought it was?'"

As a result, blind dating is "definitely" more popular than before, says Andrea Miller, founder and president of Tango, a new magazine devoted to relationships. "There, frankly, is no stigma attached to it."

Years ago, people thought blind dates were "horrible," says Laurie Graff, writer of You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs, a novel chronicling 15 years of Mr. Wrongs, and the soon-to-be-published Looking for Mr. Goodfrog. Now, thanks to the Internet, "we really know what horrible dating is." Blind dates of yore were "the uncool guys I now meet online."

Seasoned singles are experiencing "online dating fatigue," Miller says. So their blind-dating efforts are a form of backlash.

"The technology of Internet dating, while it may seem like a great thing in terms of multiplying your opportunities to meet people, more options does not necessarily translate into a better chance of meeting The One," says Jillian Straus, author of the forthcoming Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We're Still Single. "Sometimes having so many choices makes people hesitant to commit."

Daters and dating analysts agree there are two kinds of people trawling the Internet and the speed-dating circuit: those shopping for sex and those shopping for a mate. The anonymity of the online world makes fulfilling the first goal "so much easier," says Straus, 33, who interviewed 100 singles ages 25-39 across the country. And distinguishing those who want to hook up for a night vs. a lifetime can be tough.

The anonymity also breeds rudeness, Straus says. The Internet date is much easier to stand up.

"I can't tell you the number of friends of mine who say they met a guy online, they chatted electronically or by phone many times, and he completely blew them off. You're not going to do that if you have a friend in common." The online date is "just not accountable."

And yet thanks to the Internet, the blind date's resume isn't limited to the personal reference. Before the first meeting, blind dates are Googled, Friendstered (researched on the popular social community) and JDated or Matched (looked up on online dating sites).

Their wired lives notwithstanding, "many GenXers have a romantic notion of falling in love and meeting someone, and many feel the online thing feels contrived and less romantic," Straus says.

The blind date, "while it's not like seeing someone from across a crowded room, has that factor" of gauzy fantasy.

Online dating "just kind of skeeves me out," says Scott Robinson, who works in information technology in Atlanta. "It doesn't feel natural."

Perhaps his buddy's story of online wooing woe turned him off. "They met and she had a deeper voice than he did," says Robinson, 28. "So he started looking for an Adam's apple."

Robinson's other strategy, asking women out at parties and during other spontaneous encounters, hasn't exactly worked.

"I've been shot down too many times," he says.

And once you're out of college, drunken escapades don't exactly telegraph marriage material.

So he has gone down the blind-date route six or seven times in the past few years; one segued into a five-month relationship. It ended amicably, largely over religion (she was God-fearing, he wasn't) -- except that, as can happen if the setup goes sour, the matchmakers (Robinson's friend and his wife) took it a little personally.

"They'd give out guilt trips: 'You're going to let a little thing like that get in the way?'"

This past summer, the fortysomething Graff, who lives in Manhattan, went out on a blind date with a guy in his 60s (a friend's husband knew the man at work).

"He was nice-looking but dressed a little like a used-car salesman," Graff says. "But I could see he was a quality person. If I was of a different generation, I would have been more interested."

Even though they never went out again, "he was a nicer caliber of person than I would meet online."

Her brother, Steve Levine, tried Internet dating for eight months while living in San Francisco recently and "hated" it.

"It was just so disappointing, much more disappointing than going on a blind date," says Levine, 47, a defense lawyer now in Santa Monica, Calif. "You get pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that," upon meeting in person, "just don't match."

One woman, "she had a nice picture," started bawling over drinks about how her first Internet love ditched her. "I was being sympathetic, but I was thinking, 'I'm not surprised. The girl's out of her mind.'"

Another time he corresponded with a woman, "really pretty," who emerged as "some fat guy in Wisconsin, I'm guessing."

"The Internet is for broken people," Levine philosophizes. "You meet another broken person, and if you're lucky, you're not broken in the same places and can prop each other up."

That doesn't sound too tempting to singles such as Howey. But neither did blind dating until two or so years ago when she turned 30 and when that date took her to that "side-street, messy old" Vegas hotel for dinner.

She used to fear that would-be matchmakers were being magnanimous only out of pity.

"People maybe thought I was helpless, that I wasn't getting out there enough or doing my part, so out of desperation they were going to set me up," says Howey, who works in public relations.

But now, 15 dates in 2 1/2 years later, she prefers them.

"I would never go to a hairstylist without a referral, so why go out with a guy without one?"

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