IS INTERNET DATING DESTROYING ROMANCE/LOVE? Q. What do you think: IS ONLINE DATING DESTROYING ROMANCE? - Yes? / No?

Online dating: offers the dream of true love but, for many, casual sex is the aim. Photograph: Alamy

'I'm telling you, this is Love Year Zero, the Year of True Love, the Real Thing." So writes cinderella69 (AKA Jennifer – she was born in 1969) in her blog about her online dating experiences. "You couldn't do this until now. You went on waiting and waiting for your Prince, and you still had a long wait ahead of you, because he didn't know you were waiting, poor thing. Now you're on the net, and everyone knows it. It can't fail to work. All you have to do is look."

She's right. Last millennium 72% of us met our partners at school or university, at work or in networks of family or friends. The other 28%, presumably, met the loves of their lives by tripping over them as they lay in their own filth outside a Black Country pub. Or such were mating rites in my day. The internet is revolutionary because it renders it easy for us to make contact with people we don't know and, better yet, those who don't necessarily live within the Dudley travel-to-work area/look like trolls/cite assembling Airfix models as their favourite hobby even though they're 43, etc.

According to a new survey by psychologists at the University of Rochester in the US, online dating is the second most common way of starting a relationship – after meeting through friends. It has become popular in part, says one of the report's authors, Professor Harry Reis, because other methods are widely thought of as grossly inefficient. "The internet holds great promise for helping adults form healthy and supportive romantic partnerships, and those relationships are one of the best predictors of emotional and physical health," he says.

The Guardian, for example, has had its own and very successful online dating site, Soulmates, since 2004 – more than 650,000 have registered. It can put you in touch with Guardian readers – true, that may be some people's worst nightmare, but it does mean you won't get propositioned online by someone whose leisure activities are attending English Defence League demos and you won't have to explain on a date that Marcel Proust wasn't an F1 racing driver.

Online dating offers the dream of removing the historic obstacles to true love (time, space, your dad sitting on the porch with a shotgun across his lap and an expression that says no boy is good enough for my girl). And online dating sites, which in the US are growing at 70% a year, surely make it easier than ever to meet the Prince Charming or the Fairytale Princess of your, frankly, infantile dreams. At least that's what cinderella69 believes.

We'd like to know, what do you think:

Q. IS INTERNET DATING DESTROYING ROMANCE?  - Yes? / No?