These ladies got fed up with their in-person options and tried their luck on the World Wide Web. The result? A few horror stories, a long-distance deal and a speakerphone dream come true.

by Susan Reinhardt . photos by Matt Rose

You can never tell what lurks in the rivers of online dating. No matter what the site, they all seem far from safe territory. Stalking? Ripoffs? Rampant misrepresentation? Everything about looking for love online sounds like riding the rapids with one oar missing. But every now and then, a love story unfolds. Weaverville mom Carolyn Crook’s story, which ended with a snowy ceremony this past Christmas, sounds like a movie script. Others haven’t had such storybook experiences, but at least one found what sounds like an enduring romance. VERVE takes a closer look at love in cyberspace.

Cyberlove has been a bit brutal for Audrey Ball, a 35-year-old single mom with movie-star good looks. After trying many dating sites with no luck, she’s fed up. “I’m not doing it anymore,” she says, anger in her voice. “I met some crazy, freaky-deeky people. Some weirdos, creeps, users and abusers, alkies and druggies and just plain old fruitcakes.”

Ball, who lives in Asheville, has done her fair share of dating through sites like plentyoffish.com and eharmony.com. She has met a few nice men, she says. But they’ve all had their flaws (commitment-phobic, clingy, generally inconsiderate) and none have stuck around. One of her Internet suitors treated her like arm candy, she says. Another turned out to be Mr. Anal Retentive. “We met for dinner and he nitpicked everything I had on,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Why don’t you wear jeans, and why don’t you put your hair over to the side? You’d look good in khakis.’” Ball says she paid for her own dinner that night, but not before rushing to the ladies room to call a friend, who created a fake emergency.

Ball has a policy when it comes to online dating: no man comes to her house. She doesn’t want her two sons exposed to her “efforts.” “My last online date was in July,” she says. “He kept asking for dirty pictures and begging me to let him photograph me in the nude.” Others have cussed her, stalked her and duped her. Some posted old pictures of themselves, 60 pounds thinner, or pretending to be financially solvent. After a string of bad apples, she has a pretty dim view of guys online. “I’ve come to the conclusion they aren’t interested in knowing you,” she says. “These guys are ruining it for those wanting something true.”

Real estate agent Diane Vander Linden of Weaverville got similarly frustrated after scanning through online sites for years. Single for almost a decade, she tried at least six or seven sites, she says, even establishedmen.com (connecting “ambitious and attractive girls with successful and generous benefactors,” according to the site). “Every guy I went on a coffee date with never looked like his pictures or was who he said he was,” says Vander Linden, who turned 50 last May. “You spend all this time chatting and go on one meeting, but realize you wasted the last 30 days chatting with this person.”

Vander Linden decided to change her strategy. She dropped all the sites with the exception of tagged.com, a Facebook-like site that claims to be the third-largest social network in the U.S. She decided she’d only talk to a potential paramour through instant messaging. “This shows if they have quick wit and humor,” she says. “Composing an e-mail can take all day.”

Just when she’d given up, an interesting man popped up on the Get Tagged site. Vander Linden is a Midwesterner, and the man was from Chicago. His grandmother had a house in Fairview and he had lots of relatives in this area. It all sounded promising.

Turns out Guy is a microbiologist with the FDA. He had also done online dating for years, and both he and Vander Linden decided not to waste time chatting but to get in their cars and size each other up.

It was no easy drive. It took 10 hours on the road when Guy visited Asheville on June 1, 2009 for a golfing date. “As soon as I saw him, I knew,” Vander Linden says. The couple hit it off and have been dating ever since, with Guy still living in Chicago. They see each other about every three weeks, taking turns driving or flying. While neither is interested in marriage, they do plan to settle in the same town when Guy retires. “It always happens when you’re not looking,” Vander Linden says. “It’s working out great.”

It’s hard to argue that anything turned out as great as Carolyn Crook’s online love story. Divorced seven years, Crook, a single mom, decided to give it a whirl on Match.com. She met John Dorner in October of 2009. The Weaverville mother of two works in healthcare and says that, of all her online dates, Dorner was the only one she ever wanted to meet up with. “I just really liked what he wrote,” she says. They shared a few important values. Both volunteer with the Boy Scouts and other community groups. Both have teenaged children from previous relationships. They are close in age—she’s 49, he’s 47. Dorner lives in Cedar Mountain, about an hour south of Asheville, near the South Carolina border. He is a volunteer firefighter who works in IT.

They went out for about a month, and then suddenly, Crook got frosty toes. “Call me in a year,” she recalls saying. “I may be ready for this then.” But Dorner wouldn’t take no for an answer. Carolyn’s friends and relatives adored him. “My friends kept saying: ‘Nice guys are hard to find,’” she says.

After three weeks of reading his beautiful e-mails and running them by her friends for their thoughts, Crook agreed to see Dorner again. They decided on a bike ride, and Dorner showed up with a dozen red roses. “It was a perfect date,” Crook says. “Every now and then, I’d freak out or think, ‘I can’t do this.’”

During last winter’s storms, while snowed in at Dorner’s mountain cabin, Crook fell in love. She and Dorner both like playing board games, including Monopoly, and he gave her a “Get out of Jail Free” card to ease her relationship jitters. On the back, he wrote: “This expires on our wedding day.”

Crook kept the card in her wallet, and as time progressed, so did their love for each other. He proposed on July 4th last year, and Crook accepted. Crook’s mother died last fall, so their wedding plans were put on hold. But just a few weeks before Christmas 2010, they knew the whole family would be together, and they plotted a secret ceremony. Crook found a chaplain who agreed to drive out to her Weaverville house. That plan, too, hit a snag: the weather worsened, and the chaplain couldn’t make it. “Would a speakerphone work?” Crook asked on a secret call that snowy day. The chaplain said it would, and the marriage would be legal.

After opening presents Christmas morning, the couple asked their children to go outside for a photo. The group found themselves in the middle of a wedding. No music played. Only the whisper of falling snow and the chaplain’s voice over speakerphone, going through their vows.

As a gift, Crook framed and returned his “Get out of Jail Free” card. “It’s just easy with him,” she says of her new husband. “With him, it wasn’t work.”