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Instant messaging and e-mails are replacing love letters. Instead of meeting prospects in singles bars or at parties, many people are pursuing the dating game online. Are there any drawbacks to meeting a future mate this way?

Elle magazine dating columnist E. Jean Carroll, co-founder of the GreatBoyfriends.com Web site, and radio talk-show host Blanquita Cullum stepped into the "Crossfire" on Tuesday to debate the merits of online dating with hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala.

CARLSON: Jean Carroll, I have nothing of course against people going online for dates. I feel sorry for them. But as a general matter, it strikes me that there's something depressing about it because it increases a person's isolation. You know, you stay home, and you order pizza online. You order clothing online. Now you order spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends online.

I mean there's something even lonelier than a singles bar about that, isn't there?

CARROLL: No, no, no, Tucker. For once in your life, you couldn't be more wrong. It is a fabulous way to look at hundreds and thousands of delectable people who you wouldn't have known existed unless you saw them on the Internet.

BEGALA: So Blanquita, that means you're for sleazy, smoking, singles bars, right?

CULLUM: Absolutely not. ...

It's lonely out there for a lot of people, but you don't sit, like Tucker said, in isolation. Get out and get a life. Go out there and join clubs. Go to places where you're going to start meeting people. Get involved with life.

You sit there, and you know, you get on the computer -- you may think you're talking to some big stud, then all of a sudden he shows up, and it's like, "Oh, my." I have friends who have done that and been incredibly disappointed.

CARLSON: Well, Jean Carroll, I want to read you a quote from someone who did just that. [This guy] went to a site called JDate.com, and here's his experience summed up in a couple of pithy sentences. "I went on five, maybe 10 dates," he told The Atlanta Journal Constitution, "and they were bad. But I loved it because I got a good story out of it. There is one woman who smelled like malt balls."

BEGALA: And I guess the bottom line here is -- it's a freak show. And that's a good thing about ...

CARROLL: No, no Tucker. I agree with you a little bit because over the last 10 years I have gotten horror-infested nightmares of letters from young women who have gone out with men from the Internet and found out that they were married. So in order to get around that, my sister and I created GreatBoyfriends.com.

And this is not a bunch of ... blowhards talking about themselves.

CULLUM: You know what the problem is ...

CARROLL: Now wait a minute, these are women recommending their ex- boyfriends or husbands, their brothers and their very good friends to other women. It's women talking to other women and recommending men.

BEGALA: It sounds like the used car lot of dating though, Jean.

CARROLL: But Paul ...

BEGALA: This Malibu is a sweetheart; you've got to buy it off of me.

CARROLL: The problem is now, you know, the feminists hurt the relationship between men and women a little bit because when you and I were at the University of Texas we could flirt. I mean flirting has become a lost art.

You know, part of the problem why women and men aren't dating is [because] they're afraid to look each other in the eye and say, "You look really cute today." I love that.

BEGALA: Where I used to work, you say that, and boy you had to go to the penitentiary.

CARROLL: You know that's really sad because now we have to go get videos to figure out how to communicate with each other. We have to talk to each other about what this really means, when really one of the healthiest forms of vitamin C is somebody looking at you and saying, "You look great." ...

CULLUM: One of the most erotic, exciting things in the entire world is to get a love letter, and that's basically what e-mails are.

CARROLL: ... Why can't people be a little cuter with each other? Why are they afraid to smile at each other on the street? Why can't you talk to people in the airports? Why can't you talk to people that you're in the office with?

Because you know what -- we have these stupid rules that prevent us from acting like men and women, and that's the real chemistry. ...

CULLUM: But the other part of it is, don't you think we've all had these high expectations about ourselves? That we're supposed to be tall and thin and beautiful and perfectly shaped, and we go to the computer because we kind of feel that we're less than perfect.

If people would start looking into the kindness of people's spirits instead and starting to get to know their souls, maybe we wouldn't have to go a computer to try to hide who we are to meet someone we think we're going to meet.

We have life out there. I mean there's a whole audience of people out there who potentially have chemistry to meet some other person just eyeball to eyeball.