She was waiting for him on the train station platform in Olomouc, north Moravia, on a sunny Wednesday in September three years ago. They spent the cool late afternoon walking and talking, had dinner in a pub, and on the evening ride home Martin Radina's head was heavy with first-date doubts: What, really, could come of this?

Plenty. Dates and dinners continued. A year later, in 2004, Radina and Dagmar Skovranová were engaged. Last November they got married.

It's a sweet love story, with a twist — albeit one more common in the Czech Republic these days. Radina first met his wife through an Internet dating site.

"Such a pretty girl!" Radina, 33, says he thought upon first seeing Skovranová in a sleeveless black-and-beige blouse that afternoon, her eyes an odd swirl of green and blue. "I thought, 'She would never notice me anywhere else.' "

As Czechs increasingly embrace the spirit of Valentine's Day, the Internet is considered just as viable a way to meet someone as, say, singles clubs or blind dates — only with technology vastly improving the odds of a hit.

That attitude speaks to the surge of singles sites online here in recent years. At least a dozen are thriving, offering men and women opportunities to post and respond to ads, create their own Web page or chat online for little or no money. On one of the largest, www.seznamka.cz, 1,100 new ads and 6,000 new responses appear each day, according to Jan Rychnovskě of Tanger Infosystems, which maintains the site.

Another, www.rande.cz, has 100,000 users, with closer to 250,000 paid and registered members in total. Rychnovský estimates that around 1 million Czechs are regular Internet daters — not bad for business, considering that only an estimated 1 million to 2 million residents have Internet access at home.

"Getting to know people via the Internet is definitely normal and as ordinary as going out for dinner nowadays," he says.

One factor behind the numbers is that, as in much of Europe, there are more singles in the Czech Republic than ever before.

Marriages here declined 45 percent between 1989 and 2003, an average of 3 percent each year, according to the Czech Statistical Office. Although some can be explained by increased cohabitation, more recent statistics show the number of single men and women ages 18–40 has increased by a small percentage in each of the past five years.

Of course, some Internet daters are not single and may just be looking to improve on their situation or hoping for an affair, but the sites say, not surprisingly, that they don't track these numbers.

In other countries, notably the United States, where the online dating business is worth an estimated $398 million (9.4 billion Kč) — with predictions it could double in five years — the trend is driven by single men and women with little time to devote to the hit-or-miss trials of meeting The One. Dating agencies and classified ads used to fill the void, but Web sites have streamlined the process to such an extent that now a single can place an ad in 15 minutes and let the computer generate a list of people most likely to be compatible.

Those matches can just as easily produce long-term relationships as flirtatious flings, though it's difficult for sites to keep hard numbers on how many end up as either.

"The Internet is definitely not just about short-term relationships," Rychnovský says.

Most online daters still tend to be male: roughly 65 percent, as opposed to 35 percent women, according to Seznamka estimates. The reasons for each sex turning to the computer differ.

Anastasia, a 26-year-old broadcast journalist in Prague, who does not want her full name used, says she started dating online more than four years ago, when she first arrived here from Russia.

"I had just come to Prague; I spoke no Czech; it was hard to find friends, to find people to talk to," she recalls. "So, for me, it was normal. I had no possibilities."

She estimates that through the years she's gone on 20 dates with men she met online. One relationship lasted two years; others were shorter.

"I think most of my friends have tried it, some a few times, others only once and they say it's not for them," she says. "I think it's quite normal for our generation."

Anastasia says online dating is also about luck: sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't.

Radina had been on a few bad dates with women he'd met online — including one with someone who was "unhealthily jealous" — before Skovranová came around. She sent a two-sentence reply to his ad, and shortly after they began talking he pulled his profiles off of rande.cz and seznamka.cz.

Kristof, 36, met his girlfriend of the past two and a half years, Hana, relatively soon after starting to visit Internet dating sites. His friends had been doing it, and as an information technology specialist, it wasn't a huge leap for him.

Their first date was at a café. Then the relationship moved to dinner and a movie — "Although I wasn't that interested in the movie much during that time," he says.

Kristof says the first date with someone you meet online is nerve-wracking, but that depends on how much back-and-forth, usually over e-mail or instant messenger, occurs beforehand. Such communication can prove more effective than merely chatting someone up at a bar.

Things clicked with Hana. But despite the fact that they are just like any couple, there is a difference: Most of Hana's friends and her family do not know how they met.

"She's ashamed," he says. "She thinks this is different."

Internet dating might be commonplace now, but there still seems to be a stigma attached, as if it still somehow smacks of desperation, or worse, is just plain creepy; several couples contacted for this article admitted success at online dating but did not want their stories told.

Radina says these kinds of preconceptions, and the view of Internet dating as inferior, are nonsense.

"I think when you meet your match, the place, time and way don't matter," he says. "I met Dagmar on the Internet, but it could have been anywhere else. It's all about chance. Everyone has their match out there, and it is usually an unbelievable coincidence when we meet them."