Love Match

As teachers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chris Stuart and Susan Seaton worked in adjacent buildings, had mutual acquaintances and parked in the same lot.

They never met, though, until they ventured into the world of online dating.

Mr. Stuart, an English professor, and Ms. Seaton, an adjunct instructor in the art department, encountered each other on match.com. They e-mailed once, met two days later and were married six months after that. If not for the Web, they say, things would be very different.

“We were in buildings right next to each other,” said Mr. Stuart. “We knew (mutual) people but hadn’t met.”

“And probably wouldn’t have,” Ms. Seaton said.

“And probably wouldn’t have,” he echoed.

This is a typical exchange. The newlyweds — they married on June 24 of this year — have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences. If one gropes for a word, the other supplies it. Their courtship was whirlwind; it was obvious to both early on that they were headed somewhere big.

“We started talking about (marriage) way too soon,” he said.

“We just kind of knew,” Ms. Seaton said.

“We met on a Monday, right?” Mr. Stuart chattered. “She went home for Christmas on Thursday, and she told her family ‘I might have met the one’.”

They laugh as they recall their story.

Ms. Seaton and Mr. Stuart didn’t have a typical online courtship. She was the one to reach out first, sending a brief e-mail to invite him for coffee. He countered with a suggestion of dinner. There was no composing of witty e-mails, no coy instant-message flirtation. Both were divorced and ready to brave the waters once again; neither was interested in playing games.

“(I thought) let’s meet in person and let’s go or not,” Ms. Seaton said.

“When you’re 40, you’re less interested in playing the field than maybe when you’re 20,” Mr. Stuart added.

The concept of dating again was intimidating, they agree. The decision to seek out a possible partner online was partially motivated by lack of practice and social limits placed on them by geography.

“There comes a point after being in a long marriage that to start dating again is ...” Ms. Seaton trailed off, trying to formulate the right word.

“Daunting,” Mr. Stuart supplied after a beat.

“Yeah, it’s daunting,” she agreed. “I don’t know how to do it, where do I go ... Chattanooga’s not that big.”

Mr. Stuart was separated for three weeks before he went online. It took her a year. They met on her second attempt at match.com. In her prior experience, she said, she’d found that the more online preamble there was before meeting, the more disappointing the ultimate meeting was. The second time around, she said, she questioned whether she even wanted to take another shot at meeting someone online.

“I had reservations about (meeting Mr. Stuart) and about going back online in the first place,” she said.

He’s the one who brings up her prior bad dates — clingy men or pretty faces with little substance.

“I had people write me back and (say) ‘Well, I thought you were cute. What’s up?’ ” she said. “That’s not enough, and (it was) freaking me out.”

She brushes off his urging to go into detail about a particularly harrowing experience, summarizing the man with: “He was insulting, he’d been married before, I think he was a meth addict ...”

“I had (no bad dates),” Mr. Stuart said. She was the first woman he encountered online, though he had a few other offers, she teased him.

As the veteran online dater of the two, she was more aware of its pitfalls, including misrepresentation. Fortunately, their proximity afforded her the opportunity to offer a reference — a mutual acquaintance. He didn’t bother.

“I figured anyone who’s honest enough to say ‘you can go talk to this person’ is probably all right,” Mr. Stuart said.

So what if they hadn’t been so close? Would the match still have been made?

He thinks so. She doesn’t.

“I would have made the trip, probably,” Mr. Stuart said.

“Not me,” Ms. Seaton countered.

Ultimately, she said, while the proximity was good, it was the proverbial icing on the cake, not the draw and attraction. They had common interests and similar backgrounds.

“We were going to have things to talk about, even if we didn’t fall in love or whatever,” he said.

“I am an artist. I am liberal. There aren’t that many of us (in Chattanooga),” Ms. Seaton said. “It wasn’t about ‘we work at the same place.’”

“It was about the right kind of person,” Mr. Stuart said. “Which was the cool thing about (match.com) ... you can make the pool a lot smaller real fast instead of feeling like you’re looking out at this vast sea of not knowing.”