Cyber love: The ’90s way to meet is online — but use caution

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER

Kara Heinzmann needed a nudge. She’s certainly not the forward type. “I would never walk up to someone in a bar and start a conversation with them,” Kara says.
In January, her dad’s girlfriend practically dragged her to the computer to check America Online for single men in the Springfield area.
“She said, ‘Come on, let’s go downstairs and get you online,’ ” Kara says.
Kara, 23, didn’t have qualms about meeting someone on the Internet. She had seen it work out quite well in her own family. “It didn’t seem quite as big a deal to me because my dad had done it, and my brother had done it.” But she just wasn’t used to making the first move.

Her father, Ken Heinzmann, had been online when he met the woman who is now his wife. Kara’s brother, Kevin, is engaged to marry a woman he met online. “Neither Kara nor Dad nor I are bar people,” Kevin says.

Kara sent a few messages to men whose online profiles, which are like personal resumes, interested her. Mark Lewis, who happened to be on the Internet at the time, was the first person Kara chatted with online. She and Mark, 29, continued to send each other e-mail, and they coordinated times to be online to chat in “real time.”
They got the vital statistics out of the way, then discussed their interests. The convenience of e-mail worked well with their conflicting schedules: Kara, a nurse at St. John’s, works nights; Mark works days at the governor’s office. Occasionally, they’d talk for hours online. Then Kara, against her shy nature, suggested that they meet in person. “My friends are like, ‘I can’t believe you did that.’ ”
Three days before their first date on Feb. 14, they started to talk on the phone. “We were still getting to know each other,” says Kara, who rarely spends any time online anymore. On their first date, Kara broke Online Dating Rule No. 1. She let Mark come to her house to pick her up, with nobody around. Dates should meet in public, according to conventional wisdom. “It is Rule No. 1 — and it should be Rule No. 1,” Kara says. 
She admits worrying a little about what Mark would look like; she hadn’t yet seen his photo, although Mark was able to see Kara’s photo on a Web page her father created. She was pleasantly surprised, and their dinner at Ground Round went smoothly. 
“We talked back and forth, no problem. We got along really well,” she says. 
He called her that week, and they went to lunch the following Friday. Saturday was Kara’s father’s wedding, but she went solo. 
“I wasn’t going to do that to (Mark) — or myself, for that matter. We went to Sunday brunch afterward.” 
The wedding was a celebration of the online union of Jane and Ken Heinzmann, who met last fall via the Internet. Jane’s first husband, Alan Osterbur, died three years ago of a massive heart attack at age 37. He left behind Jane, then 35, and their two daughters, who were 9 and 12. To deal with the devastation, Jane was able to look up fellow widows online and discuss her feelings with them. “The computer became a way for me to find a support network,” says Jane, who worked as director of youth and children’s ministries at Laurel United Methodist Church in Springfield. She had tried to attend local widow/widower support groups, but the popular ones were filled with older people and the young widows’ group was sparsely attended. 
“There were three of us,” Jane says. Jane had dated two men she met online, one who lived in Des Moines, Iowa, and one from Chicago. But she had run into too many divorced people who carried a lot of bitterness. After an unsuccessful visit to a widows and widowers chat room — “I’m not much of a chat-room person,” she says —she decided to look up some widower profiles. That’s how she found Kara’s father, Ken, 51, marketing and sales director for Gateway Seed Co. in Centralia. Ken’s first wife, Dee, died unexpectedly when Kara and her brother Kevin were young. Through e-mail, Ken and Jane discovered they had a lot in common. 
“I think that because these relationships start through communication, it’s wonderful,” Jane says. 
Quickly, they started talking on the phone. Within a few weeks, they met on their first date. 
“We had already talked for hours and hours.” Within a few months, they were married, although Jane and her daughters didn’t move to the Centralia area until the girls were out of school for the summer. 
“I think it’s really the ’90s way to date,” Jane says. Still, Jane remembers being somewhat careful, making sure Ken had a real address. "
“I didn’t go to any extremes,” she says. “I also had neighbors who knew he was coming and wrote down his license plate number.” 
Jane believes you can tell a lot about a person through e-mail: whether they’re educated, whether they’re sincere, how well they communicate and how much you have in common. Kara’s brother Kevin Heinzmann, 26, and his girlfriend, Emily Siegmund, 23, have plenty in common, including growing up in nearby towns. Even so, the two probably would never have met if it weren’t for an “online blind date” set up by a friend of Emily’s. 
Kevin, a farmer in Sandoval, was just ready to log off his computer last fall when an instant message popped up. It was from Emily’s friend, who had read Kevin’s profile, which mentioned his height (he’s 6 foot, 4 inches) and his interest in ballooning (he works on a balloon crew each year at the annual festival in Centralia). Emily also was tall (she’s 5 foot, 11 inches) and had spent time ballooning. But the friend wouldn’t disclose Emily’s name. A couple of days later,Kevin was online when Emily sent him an instant message. 
“I saved all the text from our first conversation,” Kevin says of the June 22 chat. 
Who says online notes aren’t romantic?
They talked via e−mail over the next several days. They were waiting until Kevin could get a day off from farming so they could go out. “A week later, it finally rained,” he says. They went to Lone Star Steakhouse and to see “The Truman Show.” 
In the fall, Emily, a graduate of Southeast Missouri State, will teach third grade at St. Mary’s in Centralia. Kevin is looking for a job outside of farming that will use his business degree. 
“I’d like to farm part time, but farming doesn’t pay the bills,” Kevin says. 
The two got engaged on June 30, the one-year anniversary of their first date. Their wedding is scheduled for April. They plan to buy the house Kevin’s great-grandfather built.