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With all its rules, compromises, break ups, and make ups, love's a bitch
for most of us. But CEO of Love Bill Schreiner sees things differently. As Executive Director of America Online's romance channel, Love@AOL, Schreiner reigns as cupid over the company's most trafficked original content area.
Love@AOL was set up as a special one-off Valentine's Day event four years ago by Schreiner and a handful of people from AOL's content development group. Members were invited to send in their pictures as well as answers to a handful of questions such as what animal they would want to be. "The response was so tremendous we decided to not take it down," Schreiner says.
Today, Love@AOL has amassed about 540,000 personals, adding 6,000 to
10,000 a day. Some 4 million people visit the site via the Web and
AOL's proprietary service each month. Schreiner says he gets between 300
to 400 success stories a week and estimates that about 10,000 marriages
over the past four years have resulted from couples who made their first
connection on the service. "Romance and the Internet coexist quite
easily because they're both basically all about communication,"
Schreiner says.
REAL CONCERNS.
What kind of training does it take to become CEO of Love? Tinseltown, of course. Schreiner made the move to AOL in 1996 from Hollywood, where he was an actor and director for both film and television. "What's been natural for me in making the transition to the online universe is that I was already immersed in computer culture, and I've been a student of human nature my whole life," he says. "I'm very interested in what makes people tick."
But Schreiner's job has its serious side, as well. The anonymity of online communication and the proliferation of Web matchmakers over the past few years -- some with overt sexual agendas -- has caused many people to cool on the idea of using technology to find and foster a relationship. The biggest reasons are a growing concern for personal safety and the chance that your E-mail amour is not the same person in the physical world.
"We're not seeing as many talented Mr. Ripleys as we used to," Schreiner
says, referring to the movie where the lead character pretends to be someone he's not. "Most people are really looking to find their soul mate, and they have a pretty good antenna as to what is real and what is not. They don't want to doom their prospects through exaggeration. Plus, the amount of faking out someone is able to get away with becomes hard to sustain beyond chat rooms or the first E-mail."
PHASES OF LOVE.
Still, Schreiner says he encourages people to be cautious and take things slow. "People are brutally honest about themselves -- to the point that my biggest worry is them giving out too much information before really getting to know someone," he says. "I remind them to let the exchange of information continue for weeks or months even. In other words, don't meet someone online, have one great all-night chat session and then plan to get together with them the next day. That's how a phony can take advantage of someone."
Over the years, Schreiner says he's noticed some distinct differences between developing relationships online vs. offline. "Cyber-relationships are interesting because they have distinct phases," he muses. "You actually get to know the inside of a person first, and then you almost meet them for the first time all over again once you're on the phone, and then you get to meet them all over again once you're with them for the first time."
Another difference is the intensity of the communication. "On a date [in the physical world], people are often doing something that's a shared activity, something that could distract them from figuring out who the other person is," Schreiner says. "But when it's online, the first contact is very intense and focused."
Put another way, online romance is a little old-fashioned. "Technology has brought back the love letter, and it's a very primal thing," Schreiner says proudly.
FIND THE HUMOR.
Of course, some people are better at wooing online than others. The key, Schreiner says is to be as specific as possible. "Love is in the details," he says. "Telling me you loved the book Angela's Ashes, for example, says a lot more than telling me you like to read."
Perhaps even more important, though, is finding a way to express a sense of humor with words alone. "If there's one quality about another human being that people seem to appreciate the most in the game of love, it's a little humor," Schreiner says.
Ultimately, Schreiner, who has been married for 15 years and did not meet his wife online, says his job is simple: to put people in touch with one
another online as unobtrusively as possible. Says Schreiner: "I want people to fall in love, and I want to get out of the way and allow them to do that."
Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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