Okay fine, I admit it — I don’t have a Valentine. And I won’t soon forget it, as I’m inundated daily with advertisements hawking everything from diamonds to KY-Jelly warming gel in addition to being regularly asked which overpriced restaurant I’m taking my (non existent) date to. Nonetheless, in the good spirit of romance, I’ve tried to cast aside my sullenness and embark on a mission to discover alternative places for finding that special someone.

And so, per the suggestion of my editors, I arrived at the website of WolverineSingles.com — an online dating service that bills itself as a place “where wolverines get together.” If I was going to explore the merits of an online dating service, I was going to do it properly, damn it, so in the fair name of investigative journalism I created two accounts, one as an ordinary guy just looking for someone to talk to and another as a journalist who needed information from users on how the service was working for them. I was fiercely determined to discover all of the, “ins and outs” of online dating.

According to Brad Armstrong, CEO of White Buffalo Ventures, the Texas-based company that owns WolverineSingles.com, the site is just one of 130 other dating services, White Buffalo Ventures also operates around 130 other dating services based on university affiliations or affinities (TattooedSingles.com, CyclingSingles.com and BornAgaindating.com are just some of the matchmaking sites). Launched in December 2003, WolverineSingles.com, with 10,000 registered users, is one of White Buffalo Ventures’ most profitable websites, Armstrong said.

For my investigation, I only wanted to use this service for a few days, just enough time to ascertain — through my fellow WolverineSingles.com contacts—how romantically successful a user could be. The problem was, although you can make a profile describing yourself and your ideal soulmate down to the color of his or her eyes for free, you cannot directly contact anyone who strikes your fancy without paying a membership fee. This leaves you with two options: You can either wait for someone to be so impressed by your sharp wit or good looks that they pay the membership fee just to get in touch with you (via secure e-mail), or you can suck it up, pay the fee and go on the offensive.

A one-month membership costs $19.99, three months cost $44.95 and six months are $69.95, but the real Casanovas will have to shell out $99.95 to maintain an online romance for a full year. As a total newbie to online dating, I genuinely wanted to get the true feel for it, so I coughed up the 20 bucks (in my reporter persona, of course) hoping to easily find a host of people looking for men, women — or perhaps both — to indulge me in their online dating experiences. And so, in the course of 48 hours, I sent about 50 messages to random people introducing myself and politely requesting feedback on this unfamiliar online dating service.

My responses? One. I don’t know how this occurred, especially if there are 10,000 registered users. Maybe girls and guys aren’t as turned on as I thought they would be by the username I chose, “clubGuy05.” I won’t even try to speculate. The only thing that I do know is, every time I was logged into the service I clicked on the “who’s on” button to let me know who else was currently logged on and looking for love. At its peak, the highest number of people logged on aside from myself was seven people. That’s barely enough for a good old-fashioned orgy.

Although I received only a single response to my inquiries, it at least appeared to be very illustrative of the WolverineSingles.com user’s experience.

One member, a university alum, felt that this service, because of its affiliation with the University, is able to effectively counteract the most prevalent taboo affecting online dating services — the presence of those we’d all rather not divulge personal information to.

“I guess it’s different than the general sites — i.e. Match.com — since only University students use it ... so that automatically weeds out the less educated and older sketchy men, leaving you with a group of pretty similar types of young people,” she said. In addition, she added that she feels online dating is becoming more mainstream, which only benefits users on sites like WolverineSingles.com .