Dating Sites Reviews Forums

I joined eHarmony a couple years ago and found some key flaws. 1) no way to tell who is a able to respond (paying member) - in fact their incentive is to show you users who aren't subscribed in order to encourage them to do so! 2) the matching system seems bogus and there's no way to know for sure because you can't view the people you weren't matched with, 3) they tease you with just a few people every day in order to keep you hanging on for more, 4) the site isn't very well designed and the ads are annoying, and 4) it's expensive.

So then I joined Plenty Of Fish (POF) and found some flaws there also. namely - the entire site! It's poorly designed, poorly maintained, the pictures are small... it just plain sucks. They're paranoid too. If you mention "okcupid" in your profile or messages, they'll replace it with the word "spam" without telling you!

Then I discovered OkCupid.com. This site is FREE. And it is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. There is a paid option but it's more of a donation than anything because it is certainly not needed to get most of the benefits from this site. There are too many great features to mention, but here's a few...

1) It was founded by a team of Harvard graduates... and their expertise in statistics shines brightly with their matching system. Users enter user-contributed multiple choice questions, for each stating their answer, the answers they prefer their match to choose, and how important it is that their match chooses those questions (from irrelevant to mandatory). It all goes into a calculation engine that results in a % match with every other user that is surprisingly accurate.

2) It's free - so every single user can respond to you. (OkCupid used publicly available data to figure that only 3.75% of eHarmony's registered users are paying members and only 6.9% of match.com users are - see http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/ ) This also leads to additional features you'd never see on a paid web site, such as "date last online" so you can avoid messaging dead accounts.

3) Little niceties such as threaded conversations, ability to hide people you never want to see again, guided profile questions, hi-res photos (unlike POF), etc.

4) The interface is visually appealing and easy to use.

5) tests & public questions allow you to gain additional insight into your matches.

Popular... at any given time I find on average 30 attractive women "online now" within 25KM of me, NOT including the thousands I've "hidden" because I'm not interested (who may or may not be "online now". If you trust the "online now" total posted on the home page of OkCupid and POF, OkCupid is now up to about 1/4 of POF's user count - pretty impressive. It has doubled in size since I subscribed last year, and POF has roughly stayed the same.

So give it a try!