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You’ve seen the TV ads, or maybe images online—schmaltzy testimonials of adoring twosomes who hooked up over the Internet and sailed off into the proverbial sunset. If you’re the cynical type, you’ve dismissed the stories as slick marketing, laughing off the notion that soulmates exist, much less can be found in cyberspace.

But those fairy tales sometimes come true—and have, right here in Baton Rouge.

“We have the same taste in almost everything in life,” says Travis McLavy of her husband, James Osborne, whom she met on eHarmony in early 2005. “I’ve never had someone in life who likes everything I do. We even order the same food when we go out to eat.”

McLavy and Osborne are among the lucky ones, but they are far from alone.

One in three American adults—63 million people—know someone who has used a dating Web site, according to a 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. And 15%—30 million adults—know someone who has been in a long-term relationship or has married someone they met online.

Still, for every dream-come-true story, there’s a string of bad dates and broken hearts. In a recent twist, some online dating services have tailored their pitches to people who’ve been disappointed, or even flat-out swindled, by other online services.

Online dating isn’t for everyone, and despite the comfortable distance it can provide, online dating isn’t always the easiest way to strike up relationships.

Says LSU student Will Harris: “It hasn’t gone well for me. Both times I ended up meeting the kind of girls I didn’t want to meet.”

That said, if you’re tired of the bar scene, fed up with blind dates, and believe in love at first click, it might be your way to wind up as happy as Travis McLavy.

Not that the 40-year-old boutique owner wasn’t skeptical at first. In fact, she thought online matchmaking services seemed cheesy and weird. But her father read about eHarmony in a magazine and encouraged her to try it. He was impressed by the in-depth questionnaire required and the stamp of approval of the conservative Focus on the Family organization.

“They have very strict rules,” McLavy says of the service. “You can’t send a picture of yourself in a bikini on the hood of a Corvette.”

On a cold February night, she decided to give it a try. It took nearly three hours to complete the questionnaire, plus $100 (a fee the service no longer charges). She chose to confine prospective matches within a 250-mile radius.

It wasn’t long before she started getting e-mails and pictures of doctors, lawyers and businessmen from Abita Springs, Denham Springs and New Orleans and an Oreck employee from Long Beach, Miss., named James Osborne. He was almost outside her geographic target area, but his picture immediately caught her eye, not because he was drop-dead gorgeous, but because he had a sombrero from Disney World draped over his shoulder. That suggested to her a good sense of humor.

She wrote back right away. “We e-mailed back and forth, and then we started calling on the phone, and we realized we could talk for hours,” she recalls. “We had so many parallels in our lives.”

After three weeks, they decided to meet. Osborne came to Baton Rouge, and she picked him up at his hotel for dinner at Mansur’s on the Boulevard. She was nervous, not only because they’d yet to meet, but because she felt self-conscious about the glasses she wears while driving at night.

“He took one look at me and said, ‘I think girls who wear glasses are hot,’” she recalls.

By the end of the night she was in love. By June they were engaged. By October, they were married.

If connecting emotionally with Osborne was easy, telling her friends and relatives how she met him was not. It took a while to work up the courage.

Osborne’s family was a little wary as well. The first time McLavy met his folks, they politely asked why there was a rush to the altar. “I knew there was no reason to wait,” she says. “I was then 38 years old, and I knew this was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.”

It’s pretty much been wine and roses for the couple ever since. Their biggest disagreement is over music—he’s an audiophile, she’s happy rocking out to party jams. He also loves soccer, a sport about which she could care less.

But those are minor differences. On just about every other front they’re surprisingly compatible. And they can’t say enough good things about the online matchmaker that brought them together.

“I feel like James loves everything about me, and I’ve never had that before,” McLavy says. “I’ve never had someone want everything in life that I want.”

The curator and the Cajun

Lara and Chris Gautreau are another success story, and their online romance began 12 years ago.

They met on AOL in 1995. The Internet then was brand-new to most people, and few had experience with it, much less any savvy in searching for a soulmate online.

Lara Gautreau didn’t even know how to operate the new modem she’d gotten for Christmas, which is how she ended up in a chat room to begin with. “I was playing with it that first weekend and just pushing buttons because I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, and all of a sudden I found myself in this chat room called “Sunday Brunch” talking to 30 strangers,” says Gautreau, at the time a 24-year-old art teacher in Kansas.

It was a motley crew, with sagas of all sorts. But one guy in particular grabbed her attention. He was witty and seemed kind, an assessment she based on some uplifting words of advice he was dispensing to one of the lonely-hearted women in the room.

“He was helping her get her life together and telling her about how she could get a Pell Grant and go back to school,” she says. “He just struck me as such a genuinely good person.”

Chris had noticed Lara as well. Something in the profile she’d filled out on entering the chat session had caught his eye. “I’d written on my profile that one of my hobbies was throwing pots, which is what it’s called when you make clay pots on a pottery wheel,” she explains. “So all of a sudden this guy e-mailed me and said, ‘When you throw pots, don’t you break a lot of stuff?’”

Touched by his naïveté and sense of humor, she replied, and a relationship was born. They started corresponding, then making online dates. That eventually led to phone calls and an exchange of photos.

“We decided at first to just photograph ourselves from the back, so we saw pictures of each other from behind, first,” she says. “One of my students said he had great hair, because he still had hair at the time.”

After a few months, she drove down to Louisiana to meet this wise-cracking Cajun from Gonzales. Students at her high school thought she was crazy. The guys warned her that she was going to be chopped to bits by an ax murderer. Secretly, she knew she was already falling in love.

The first time they met in person, they hugged. By then they’d exchanged normal photos, so she knew what to expect. She thought he was attractive, but the kind of cute that grows on you.

“Anyway,” she says. “I was proud to have fallen in love with a guy for his personality, not his looks. It was the whole package.”

That initial meeting took place in March. On a visit the next month, they already were talking about marriage, though they continued a long-distance relationship for the next year. In general, they got along so well they used to joke about when their first fight would be.

“We always wondered,” she says. “Turns out it was in the airport on the way to our honeymoon.”

It was a screaming match, no less. It stunned their fellow travelers in the airport bar, who just minutes before had been toasting the newlyweds.

“They thought we were crazy,” she recalls.

Needless to say, the Gautreaus reconciled. Twelve years later they have two daughters, ages 8 and 5, and are pursing successful careers—Lara is a museum curator, Chris a well-established journalist.

James Osborne and Travis McLavy have been living on Cloud Nine since they met via an Internet matchmaker.

They find it funny now to look back on how they met. She has printed and saved all their correspondences, which she’ll share with her girls when they get older. She looks back on it fondly, though—now that she’s a mother—her perspective on online dating has evolved.

“There are just too many crazy people out there today,” she says. “We got really lucky.”

Not so lucky

Will Harris has not been so lucky with his online search for a soulmate, at least not yet. Granted, at the age of just 20, he still has plenty of time, but he’s already wasted a good deal of it trying to find suitable women. And he’s getting fed up.

“I went on a couple of dates with one girl, and I paid for drinks, then I paid for sushi, then we went to Spanish Moon and I paid her cover and I paid for her drinks and she kept letting me pay for everything, but she kept drifting off,” he says. “I think she might have been looking for guys who were going to pay her way to have a fun weekend.”

Then there was the date who had nothing to talk to him about. It seems they exhausted all common ground in their online conversations and sat silent across the table from each other on a long, awkward first-and-only date.

“I’ve just had such bad luck with it,” he says. “I’m not going to create an illusion for myself that it will eventually pan out.”

And there are probably more stories like Harris’s than the McLavys or Gautreaus. But that doesn’t mean a single someone should scoff at the notion of ever trying out an online matchmaker.

As long as you use a reputable service, take the proper safety precautions (see tips at right), and go in with realistic expectations, you just might be surprised with how it works out.

“My mom always told me I’d know when I met the man I was going to marry,” McLavy says. “When I met James, I knew right away. I feel like I’ve known him forever.”