Wired Women: Net Dreams

-- OK, ladies, so who wants to marry a millionaire? Patrick Reynolds, apparently undeterred by the Fox Television fiasco, wants to know.

Reynolds — and yes, that’s Patrick Reynolds of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco family — says he’s sick of the Los Angeles bar scene and is looking for a bride. On the Internet, no less.

Just log on to www.love4two.com. If you fit the profile — aged 27 to 34, Christian/Catholic, average to slender build, at least some college, social drinker, non-smoker (more on that in a minute) — Reynolds wants to hear from you.

He says he’ll read every single e-mail from every single eligible bachelorette. And maybe, just maybe, one of them will be Her.

“All my friends tell me that the woman I’m going to marry isn’t in LA,” he says. “So maybe there’s a chance she’s out there and this will help me find her. Why not? It only takes one woman who’s the right one. And you have to keep hope alive.”

No Smoking, Please

If you’re thinking, OK, so what’s the catch?, join the club. But it’s not the first time Reynolds has followed his heart to places most people wouldn’t go.

After losing his father and brother to smoking-related disease, Reynolds divested himself of his tobacco holdings and established The Foundation for a Smokefree America, a nonprofit organization to fight smoking. He’s devoted the past decade to an anti-tobacco campaign, focused specifically on warning teens about the dangers of tobacco use.

Ask him about the foundation and he launches into a 15-minute diatribe on the unfettered political clout of multinational corporations, including tobacco, and the pressing need for campaign finance reform. Then he pauses, hears the intensity in his voice, and laughs.

“It’s something I’m passionate about,” he says. “There’s a saying that you find your greatest glory in your greatest wound, and my fight against tobacco may be my greatest glory.

“It comes out of being a little boy who hadn’t seen his father in six years, who walked into a room where his father lay dying,” he says. “Every talk I give, whether it’s to university students or children, I start with my memories of my father. It opens up their hearts to what I have to say.”

Again, the Catch?

So, you say again, what’s the catch? Why would an anti-smoking zealot millionaire resort to digital personal ads to find the woman of his dreams?

It was all supposed to be private, he says. He produced the site more than a year ago with the intention of distributing its Web address only to his friends. “Being introduced is the right way to meet somebody,” he says. “All along the idea was supposed to be that I’d send the Web address to my friends, who could give it to women they thought might be interested or a good match.”

For more than a year, the site got almost no traffic. “A couple hits a day sometimes, lots of times a flat zero,” he says, laughing. “And that was fine with me.”

He finally got around to distributing the URL in July. Within weeks, a popular Web site picked up the story and posted the link, and he started to get thousands of hits a day. Reynolds went ballistic. He called the site’s editor and threatened legal action. “I told him it was a gross violation of my privacy,” he says, and the editor removed the link.

Since then, Reynolds has agreed to appear on a morning talk show and to speak to a reporter from a national magazine. The public exposure will give him a chance to promote his foundation, and, he says, he may just find what, or who, he’s looking for.

The Kindness of Strangers

In the meantime, Reynolds is depending upon the kindness of strangers to keep his digital quest from getting out of hand. He’s revised his privacy statement from a rebuke to a plea that visitors who don’t fit the profile refrain from responding.

He’s confident the world’s bride-wannabes will respect his request. And even if they don’t, he can hit the delete button and trade in his current Web address for a new, less-celebrated one.

“If the e-mails start to rise to unmanageable levels, I’ll have to shut down the Web site or move it to a new domain name no one knows about, as it was before,” he says. “But I’m still hoping some miracle will happen and that out of this, I’ll meet the woman who’s right for me.”

A teacher and a journalist, Dianne Lynch is the author of Virtual Ethics. Wired Women appears on alternate Wednesdays.