Ever feel like the best men in the country must live in another state?  When taking your next vacation, conduct a little internet dating experiment and see if it's true.

I live in Manhattan, where thirtysomethings and their dating trials and tribulations have been documented to death in Sex and the City and various pretenders to the throne.  So much so, that when I travel, I feel like men expect me to be neurotic, superficial, and easy (only sometimes true). 

After my long-distance relationship of two years blew up in my face this fall,  I decided to try to make better choices in terms of who to get into the foxhole with. To improve the range of selecion, I committed to three months of internet dating.  My content and attached girlfriends made me promise to do it full-on, putting as much or more into the process as I would a job or apartment search.  And no wiping out on dates because I was jet-lagged (my main excuse for being anti-social) or felt fat or had a breakout or it was bad weather outside or there was nothing I wanted more than to just stay in and watch the new season of Lost. I had to get it up and keep it up, so to speak, for the whole three months.  Then, and only then, could I definitively say I'd hit internet dating with my best shot.

Nerve.com seemed to be crawling with playas, eHarmony with geeks. I decided Match.com was the lesser evil among Net dating services and paid about $60 for three months. It took me a full week to create my profile, but I tried my best to think of it as fun.  Above all, I strived to balance the heartfelt stuff with a measure of charm.  What I learned from my Craigslist personals experience is that honesty is paramount.  I can't enforce that on others, but I can enforce it on myself.

And actually, in the first two weeks of being on Match, I corresponded with a dozen guys and even went on two dates with men I would have happily seen again.  But then my work schedule picked up and I was off to Virgin Gorda, and their interest faded.  My dating life once again lost momentum.

I knew I'd be leaving the following week for Hawaii, so, I switched gears.  After I was sent an accidental profile from a guy in Hawaii, I decided to change the search preferences on my profile to men within a 50-mile radius of where I would be staying.  First of all, it was so much easier because there were only about two dozen men in total, as opposed to the thousand or so that come up in any search of the NYC metro area.  So I carefully went through the profiles and e-mailed four prospects, explaining that I lived in NYC but was coming to the islands for a week and would love to chat and maybe meet up.  Much to my surprise, all four of them responded to me -- and all four of them sounded kinda cool.

One was a 34-year-old former chef turned arborist.  He was also a single dad though; thus his schedule and mine were hard to coordinate, and we never got to meet up. Another was a 35-year-old real estate developer who had recently moved to Hawaii from San Francisco.  Again, his schedule and mine were hard to mesh, especially with me falling asleep around 7 p.m. (midnight NYC time) every night.

I had about a dozen phone calls with one guy I'll refer to as Mason (not his real name).  At first he seemed like a real sweetheart, offering to pick me up at the airport and even loan me his extra car for the week.  I declined but told him I wanted to meet up for drinks.  He called twice a day, opening with, "Hi beautiful" and closing with, "Goodbye sweetheart."  Perhaps another woman would have found that enticing, but for me it seemed a bit cheesy.  Ditto his request for me to e-mail him a list of all my fantasy ideas for the perfect date.  We had a simple drink one night, and he presented me with a single lavender rose sprinkled with glitter.  He had a degree in spiritual psychology from an institution in Belgium but fixed boats for a living, which explained the grease under his fingernails.  But the fact that he was missing the top third of his left index finger sort of creeped me out.  I mean, MAYBE, logically, he lost it in a mechanical accident.  But Mason had moved to Hawaii from Las Vegas, and I couldn't help but imagine that the mob had taken his fingertip for lack of payment on his excessive gambling debts.  Yes, this is where my mind went.

Dating complete strangers requires a lot of screening and filtering.  And I would say: Don't skip any of the getting-to-know-you steps. E-mail and talk on the phone.  Ask as many questions as you want before you meet up with the guy.  And proceed with caution even then.

But occasionally, if you're lucky, there will be times when someone you meet online seems like someone you already know.  That was sort of the scenario with my fourth Match man, a scientist who had moved to Hawaii four years ago that I'll call Wyeth.  He was polite and a little cautious at first, which I liked because I took that as a sign of sanity.  Our phone conversations were easy and animated, and he was interested and yet never presumptuous.  The magic words, "I'm sorry," came out of his mouth pretty effortlessly the first time we met up and he was running late.  And it was pretty smooth sailing from there.  My instincts were firing and telling me he was a good egg, and it's important to listen to them.  I also had a couple moments where I thought, "Gosh, he's so normal, I wonder if this will be boring?"  And you know what, that's a really good thing to worry about, versus, "Gosh, I wonder if he's going to stab me with his fork at dinner and then give me herpes."

We've had four dates, the last ending on Valentine's Day morning.  They were all far from boring. One night we took a bottle of wine (and a bag of poi) out to Kalapana at sunset.  This is a place where I almost died twice, and also the site of the newest beach on the Big Island.

I think I got really lucky with Wyeth, but who knows what will happen from here.  Long-distance relationships are tough, and I've sworn them off time and time again.  But I can say definitively that these were four more responsive, mature, and lovely men than I've ever been on dates with in Manhattan.