Differences Between Dating Sites (Part 1)

This is by no means a scientific run through of the differences between a couple of the dating sites that I've experienced. You don't know how many I've had to sign up for b/c my friends want me to look a profile of this or that girl.

I've signed up for profiles on:
Eharmony
OkCupid
Match
Geek2Geek
Shaadi
The last three were specifically for friends who wanted me to look at profiles so I haven't thoroughly explored those sites.


Some of the tons of online dating sites out there!

Eharmony is one of the two big dating websites along with Match. I think they have the most commercials on tv. Eharmony is known for being particularly expensive, and having a really long personality test you have to take. I've also known people who were rejected by Eharmony after spending like 4 hours taking the test. I'm not sure why they were rejected but it just says, that they are sorry but they are unable to match you, and it's something like 10% of the population that fits into this category? Another chief complaint is that there is no option for GLBT on Eharmony but I've heard a rumor that they are going to add that service to the site or make a sister site?

Anyhow, after you take the giant personality test, you then set up your profile which is similar to a lot of other websites, however, instead of being able to shotgun freely messaging people, you get a certain amount of matches each day that you can review their profile and then decide if you want to contact them. The contact initially is very specific, you can only send certain questions that you chose from a list of maybe 20 different types of questions. In a way it's bad b/c it's limiting, but also good b/c then on the recipient end, you don't have so many messages like, "hey baby, wanna f*ck?" and for people who are shy, they can use their preselected questions as a way to get to know someone without having to expose themselves too much. After you've gone back and forth with someone for a while then you eventually get to the free messaging.

This entire process can take a while, I think if you and the other person checked everyday and went to the next level of communicate each time, then it would probably be a minimum of at least 2 weeks before you get to free communication.

I'm going to share a tip that I learned from a friend who was on Eharmony for a while-- he said when you get to the open ended questions, make an excel spreadsheet and save your answers. If you're on long enough, you'll get asked the same questions over and over and it saves time if you recycle your answers. Recycling isn't just for cans anymore! It's not cheating, it's being practical and odds are, are your answers going to change on a day to day, or week to week basis? No, or they shouldn't, so go and make that spreadsheet.

OkCupid is a free dating website. I refer to their blog a lot b/c they are pulling info from their entire member pool and I'm just one crazy person. They are known for a ton of quizzes which you can just sign up to take those. The way they match people is you have a ton of user generated questions and you answer and answer how you would want the person you match with to answer and then how important is that question is to you. The topics can range from "Do you smoke?" to "Do you believe in the death penalty?" to "Do you think there will be a zombie apocalypse?" The more questions you answer, supposedly the better the matching would work.

I haven't dated anyone from OkCupid but disturbingly I keep getting matched with my friends who are on it and my brother (super gross!) but since I do get along with them, I assume it works decently. I match with my friend Matt 90% Match 77% Friend 9% Enemy and 88% Match 93% Friend 10% Enemy with my brother Ben. My friend's best friend is 90% Match 91% Friend 9% Enemy and I've met him and he is really cool too but waaaaay chatty. So I think that it's a not inaccurate system. The problem here is the free messaging, and that too many people don't take it seriously b/c it's a free service. I think if you're paying for a dating website, it's more likely they're really looking for a relationship and less of a hookup. I got the most messages on OkCupid, but most are really really terrible things like in the examples I used in my post about Writing the First Message.

Post is too long, Match and other services will be up tomorrow! Happy New Year and I hope your 2010 is even better than your 2009!