Searching for love online in Sonoma County

It wasn’t love at first sight for Pamela and Keith Reuter. Their eyes didn’t lock across a crowded room, butterflies didn’t take flight, and Cupid’s arrow didn’t penetrate their hearts.

That would have been impossible. Although they lived just six miles apart in Napa, they had never met before making a connection on Match.com. Three years later they were married.

Stories like theirs are increasingly common as the online dating industry continues to grow. It reached $2.4 billion a year in 2015, and more than 30 million individuals users now visit a dating site each month, about one of every 10 U.S. adults.

Nearly one quarter of online daters have found happy endings like the Reuters’, according to Pew Research Center studies. Others describe the process as humbling, time-consuming, expensive and frustrating, while still considering it a good way to meet people.

Traditional online sites such as Match.com and eHarmony account for $1.1 billion of the annual revenue, while mobile apps such as Grindr and Tinder gain traction among lonely hearts who use them to find potential partners based solely on their proximity.

The following Sonoma County daters tell their stories.

Pamela and Keith Reuter

Both were divorced after longtime marriages, and both had dated other people they met online. While getting to know each other on Match.com, they also discovered a shared passion for Mexican food and margaritas.

“We were just a perfect match in so many different ways,” said Keith, 61, who owned a swimming pool service and repair company before retiring.

“We found the loves of our lives,” said Pamela, 56, general manager at a Napa Valley winery.

She doesn’t regret pursuing online romance but admits to “some bad experiences and some scary experiences” and says a few men “probably needed therapy more than dating.”

The Reuters married in the fall of 2009, three years after discovering each other online.

Their blended family includes five adult kids and three grandchildren.

Kayla Theiller

In pursuit of Mr. Right, 27-year-old Kayla Theiller has enjoyed and endured more than 100 first dates.

The Santa Rosa blogger’s mother first urged her to try it in 2011 after a relationship ended. Since then she has met men from all walks of life, aged 18 to 46, from Lake Tahoe to San Diego and even had a year-long romance before both partners “realized it wasn’t going any further,” but she hasn’t yet found her ideal mate.

“Mr. Right, that’s always my end goal,” Theiller said. “Eventually I want to get married.”

She has tried eHarmony, Match, Tinder, OkCupid and the Coffee Meets Bagel app, all in search of a man with a sense of humor, an adventurous spirit and the same family values as hers.

Along the way she has abandoned her fear of rejection, overcome anxiety and discovered that “guys in this area are much better than guys in Southern California.”

Despite dozens of disappointments, Theiller still searches for love, one first date at a time. She encourages others to give it a try and offers well-earned advice on behappylovelife.com, a blog about her dating experiences.

“Don’t let your nerves get the best of you,” she said. “Always be yourself. Try not to have expectations, just go with the flow. And don’t sleep with someone on a first date.”

Theiller favors the easy navigation of OkCupid and says eHarmony, which provides just a few matches per day, is a good option for getting started or keeping a slower pace. She doesn’t discount Tinder but says it’s “just hookups.”

“I have better luck with OkCupid meeting more guys,” said Theiller, an Analy High School graduate with a bachelor’s degree in marketing from San Francisco State University.

Perhaps most telling: Theiller recently created a Match.com profile for her 52-year-old divorced dad, and he has already had several first dates.

Elizabeth and Nathan Robertson

Elizabeth and Nathan Robertson of Novato tied the knot in January after connecting on OkCupid.com. Before their first date, they spent six hours on the phone, then invested 17 months getting to know each other. That qualified as a whirlwind romance to never-married Elizabeth, 31, an office manager and college music major who had spent a dozen years searching for love online.

Her Prince Charming turned out to be Nathan, 39, a 6-foot-5 automation engineer and the divorced father of a young daughter.

“I didn’t have luck with conventional dating,” Elizabeth said. “I’m a very attractive young woman, but I’m a bigger girl.”

The online profile allowed her to showcase her personality and interests before meeting her suitors in person. Elizabeth says she met “nice” guys and was in a few relationships before falling in love with her husband, but she cautions people about making the one mistake she regrets.

At 18, she met one online match at his home in Berkeley to find a mattress on the bedroom floor surrounded by trash, cobwebs in every corner and “creepy clown pictures” on the wall.

“I got out of there as fast as I could,” she said. “That is a cardinal sin. You meet in public.”

Kait and Ken Bohoman

Santa Rosans Kait and Ken Bohoman can claim one of the oldest computer connections. They met through an AOL chat room in 2004, even before online dating sites were common. Neither was looking for long-term love.

Kait, 39, said she was online “for fun” when she spotted Ken, 37, and reached out to him. She is a customer service manager for a wine company and, at the time, he was working with troubled youth in Stockton.

After spending time in the chat room, they agreed to meet, fell in love and married in 2008. Ken is now a dedicated step-father to his wife’s four adolescent children.

“I would have never thought I’d meet someone I’d want to marry on the computer,” Kait said. “No way.”

Kim Jaggie

Sonoma florist and instructional assistant Kim Jaggie sorted through endless profiles on PlentyofFish.com and dated several men before meeting her current boyfriend of more than two years.

A divorced mother of two teens, Jaggie, 45, said the bar scene just wasn’t for her, but she didn’t want to leave dating to chance. She used online dating as just one opportunity for romance, she says, and acknowledges that it still carries a bit of a stigma, especially among older people.

“This is the way the younger generation is doing it,” Jaggie said. “I felt like it was accepted.”

Her only complaint is the ease of those who dupe others by “ghosting” - dating, dumping and disappearing by removing their profiles, leaving little trace or explanation.

“If you’re gullible, you can really get hurt,” Jaggie said.

Oscar Guajardo

Although he has logged off for now, Santa Rosa Junior College outreach coordinator Oscar Guajardo, 46, found online dating sites to be beneficial for guys like himself who are a bit shy about approaching women.

On various dating sites, the Petaluma resident said he met a few “kooky” women and some only interested in “booty calls” before dating “three great and interesting women” - a therapist, a physician and a paralegal/yoga instructor.

Now that he has a live-in girlfriend, Guajardo said he has left the virtual dating world behind.

Petra Challus

Retired insurance broker Petra Challus, 68, says it’s a “leap of faith” to meet up with someone you have discovered online.

The divorced mother of two from Roseland was looking for a refrigerator on craigslist.com when she clicked on the personal ads. Once there, she was attracted to a “nice man” who said he was a golf pro.

They met, and after a few weeks she discovered otherwise. The budding romance hit a sand trap.

“He wanted his cake and eat it, too,” Challus said.

She didn’t find a refrigerator, either.