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There has always been a nagging problem lurking in the back of the online dating industry's head: when you've built your business around helping singles find true love, what happens when they find it? On one hand, your marketing department has a lot to brag about. On the other hand, you just lost a customer.

HowAboutWe has answered the question and solved the online dating paradox with an innovative strategy: aim for a whole new market. Co-founders Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout turned the problem into a business advantage by creating a dedicated site for people who are already paired up. The site was christened HowAboutWe for Couples, and a new era of online dating was born.

"We had always focused on bringing online dating offline," Schildkrout told Fast Company. "All the sites are designed to keep users chatting, poking, and endlessly searching profiles online," but HowAboutWe's purpose was "to connect people in the real world." Its original incarnation earned over 1 million users easily, but the dating experience doesn't end at a meet up.

"Couples go on thousands of dates in the course of their relationship," Schildkrout observed. Multiple studies have shown the positive effects of date nights for committed couples. One such study from the National Marriage Project found that married men and women who go on dates at least once a week are 3.5 times more likely to report being "very happy" in their marriages. Consequently, they're also less likely to get divorced than those who do not spend dedicated time with their mates.

To help its couples stay together, and keep them coming back for more, HowAboutWe for Couples curates a list of date ideas culled from existing data on dates, information gleaned from the site's user base, and a team devoted to uncovering the best undiscovered dates. Think dessert tastings, archery lessons, hot air balloon rides, and an aphrodisiac pop-up dinner, whatever that is.

The couples' site operates similarly to the original dating site. Users pay a membership fee ($18 per month) to browse dates, and pay per date based on the ones they choose. Unlike coupon sites like Groupon or LivingSocial, HowAboutWe doesn't extract a percentage from the cost of the date. 100% of the proceeds go to the vendor. Because of this, Schildkrout says, HowAboutWe is able to offer more unique experiences then the daily coupon companies.

So far, HowAboutWe's move seems to be a good one. Though only 12% of users who met through the site are currently using the couples service, Schildkrout reports that it has maintained a 90% month-over-month retention and has over half a million users. To find out more about this dating and couple service you can read our How About We review.

Two is hardly enough to call it a trend, but if online dating sites collaborating with relationship experts does become a thing, I am fully in support of it.

Earlier this fall, one of America's longest-serving advice columnists, E. Jean Carroll, began a new partnership between HowAboutWe and Elle magazine. The arrangement, called Elle dating, is part of HowAboutWe's media partners program. Joining forces with a fashion magazine may not seem like the natural course of action for a dating site, but HowAboutWe believes the alliance could go a long way towards helping people who might otherwise object to finding love on the Web warm up to the idea.

Carroll's Elle column has long been an important fixture for the magazine. A membership to HowAboutWe through Elle will cost $30 per month, and for $500 an Elle reader can get a one-on-one telephone consultation with Carroll and the services of Tawkify, the small matchmaking firm she founded two years ago. Carroll hopes that her influence will bring a sense of serendipity to HowAboutWe that can be lost in other online dating services.

Are You Interested is also jumping on the expert bandwagon. AYI.com recently announced that author and relationship expert Laurel House will join the site as its resident dating coach. Laurel has appeared on numerous television shows, including E! News, Weekend TODAY, and most recently MTV, where she was the ultimate "It Girl" dating and confidence-boosting coach for an episode of the channel's MADE show. She is also the author of QuickieChick's Cheat Sheet to Life, Love, Food, Fitness, Fashion and Finance on a Less than Fabulous Budget and the upcoming book No-Games Guide to Love.

For her collaboration with AYI, House will post written and video content to the site's blog to help guide singles through the online dating experience. She will be available via AYI.com's social platforms to offer personalized dating tips to members, and will act as a face of the AYI brand in media interviews.

SNAP's Chief Executive Officer Clifford Lerner commented, "We believe Laurel's depth of experience and professional expertise is unmatched and will greatly help singles looking to connect online. She is aware of what single men and women are looking for in the online dating experience and her ability to guide them in their search for love will only better the AYI.com experience."

My favorite collaboration between an expert and a dating site remains the inimitable Dr. Helen Fisher, who serves as leading expert on the biology of love and attraction for Chemistry.com, but I'm excited to see more professionals in various dating and relationships fields lend their support to the online dating movement.

Could you fall for someone if you never saw their face?

Yeah, me neither, but the creators of Twine, a new dating app available for iOS and Android, are hoping that daters are ready to move beyond those superficial impulses.

These days, apps like Tinder and Bang with Friends are exploding. Apparently what singles want more than anything is a reason to spend even more time staring at the screens of their smartphones, swiping through photo after photo of potential partners. As convenient as those apps are, you've got to admit they can also feel kind of shallow. And that's where Twine comes in.

In the words of its founder, 35-year-old Rohit Singal, Twine aims to pair users based on a "personality first and looks later" philosophy. Matches are made on the location-based app through interests listed on users' Facebook profiles and - here's the catch - once they connect and start chatting, users can only see blurred-out versions of each other's profile photos.

Think of Twine as Tinder's nicer sibling. Both are used on mobile phones, but Twine eschews the hot-or-not model encouraged by Tinder's rapid-fire photo scrolling. Twine prioritizes quality over quantity, just like a real-life matchmaker, and even limits the number of matches members can receive each day to 3 in an effort to discourage excessive window shopping.

"Every other dating app is trying to show you a photo and pick people who are good looking," Singal says, and that approach has worked because "it expedites behavior in real life-we want to connect with attractive people whether the connection's meaningful or not." Singal, however, is determined to blend the easy access of mobile dating with connections based on a deeper level of compatibility.

But don't freak out - you won't be going into a date completely blind. The app's motto is "Flirt first, reveal later," so rest assured that you will get to see your conversation partners before agreeing to meet in person. When you're matched with someone, based on your Facebook interests and age range, you begin the conversation with a blurred version of their Facebook profile photo. If all goes well, you can choose to reveal your names and photos to each other.

Twine also makes another interesting promise beyond more meaningful matches. The app claims to be the first gender balanced flirting network, to ensure an even ratio of men and women. If the ratio is off at any point, new users are put into a queue and aren't allowed to begin using the app until the ratio is in balance again. New sign-ups can bypass the queue simply by inviting a friend of the opposite gender to join with them.

Twine is certainly taking a risk by taking physical attraction out of the picture, but I, at least, am excited to see where it goes.

Julie Spira has come a long way since she created her first online dating profile nearly 20 years ago. She is now a dating coach and leading online dating expert, as well as the best-selling author of two books: The Perils of Cyber-Dating: Confessions of a Hopeful Romantic Looking for Love Online and The Rules of Netiquette: How to Mind Your Digital Manners.

Each year, Spira and her team curate a list of the latest and greatest mobile dating apps on the market. With the current explosion of mobile dating, it couldn't come at a better time.

Who made it onto this year's Cyber-Dating Expert Top 10 Mobile Dating Apps list? Let's find out.

HowAboutWe is about to take over the world - literally.

The dating service has announced the launch of the first internationalized versions of its iOS application. Though the web-based version of HowAboutWe already had international users, the app was only available in English, significantly limiting its reach. Now it's available in 15 new languages that cover more than 30 countries, including France, Russia, and Japan.

And it gets even better. The company says it's also making all features in the mobile application available for free to international users. (Sorry, America, you still have to pay. Premium features for United States-based users, like unlimited membership, will continue to cost between $8 and $35 per month.) In addition to full access to all of the exclusive features offered to American HowAboutWe members, global users will also enjoy:

• Browsing date ideas suggested by local singles
• Finding people who want to meet in person
• Checking out profiles and full-screen photos
• Posting their favorite nearby places as date ideas - instantly
• Seeing who's online now, nearby

When asked why the company was choosing to offer services entirely for free, HowAboutWe's head of PR, Jade Clark, explained that their primary concern is to extend their reach as a brand and become an established figure in a new market before weighing monetization options.

HowAboutWe isn't just planning to bring its emphasis on real-world activities to the international stage. Half a million members are signed up for HowAboutWe for Couples. When asked about mobile and international plans for the couple's product, Clark adds that the company is working to expand their mobile offerings and plans to make some major announcements in the early parts of 2014.

To celebrate the launch of the app around the world, co-founder and co-CEO Aaron Schildkrout posted a guide to his blog called "10 Things You Need To Know Before Internationalizing Your App." I'll spare you the details, because many of them are quite technical, but Schildkrout did speak of the challenges that come from language barriers and different cultural expectations. His final piece of advice is something we can all understand, regardless of your location: "It will always take 3x longer than you think!"

I'm intrigued by this new development. Just think of all the opportunities for cross-cultural connections that might now be possible. Imagine being an American tourist in a foreign land, connecting with locals (and possible tour guides) using the same dating app you're already familiar with. It could add a whole new dimension to travel.

For more on this service you can read our HowAboutWe review

When Aaron Schildkrout cofounded HowAboutWe.com, he had a vision for online dating, one that didn't rely on complex mathematical calculations to determine whether two people are compatible. He pictured a site where real-life dates were the focus, so users got straight to what really matters: meeting face-to-face.

"We branded ourselves as the offline dating site, as explicitly an alternative to these profile-heavy matching algorithm dating sites," he told The Washington Post. "It's about getting offline, going to the real world and getting chemistry."

It appears to be a smart approach at first glance, but since its founding in 2009, HowAboutWe has evolved to depend more on formulas, not less. As more and more users joined the site, the challenge was no longer to show them as many potential dates as possible, but to show them the right dates. In order to create an experience worth coming back for, HowAboutWe needed to get smarter.

HowAboutWe's two-person data science team created an algorithm that combines a user's profile information (like date ideas and demographics) with data gathered from that person's behavior on the site (e.g. what kind of profiles they looked at and how often).

In contrast to HowAboutWe's focus on casual dating, eHarmony believes its users are looking for long term relationships and its algorithm reflects that. eHarmony members are required to fill out a personality questionnaire with hundreds of parts developed from research of around 50,000 happily married couples. To determine compatibility, historical data is paired with analysis of users' behavior on the site and the constraints, like target age range, people place on their matches.

As expected, predicting love is no easy feat. Match.com president Amarnath Thombre says that what users claim they're looking for is often not the kind of profiles they actually view. How did Match cope with the mixed signals? "We said, 'We're going to base these things way more on actions you take. . . . If you start breaking your rules, we're going to start ignoring your rules,' " Thombre explained.

On AshleyMadison.com, the popular matchmaking site for affair-seekers, matching is driven almost entirely by an algorithm. "At least when it comes to the topic of infidelity, traditional research avenues have been kind of absent," said founder Noel Biderman. "There aren't a lot of universities out there that can give you wholesale data on how unfaithful this population or society is or what triggers this."

Can a mathematical formula ever fully replace the magic of serendipity? It seems unlikely, but if the two can work together, we stand a better chance of finding love than ever before.

For more about Aaron Schildkrout dating site you can read our review on How About We.