Online Dating

Free communication is back! Starting Thursday November 9^th and running to the end of day on Monday November 13^th eHarmony members can communicate with their matches for free in the United States.

To send messages at no cost on eHarmony all you need to do is create an eHarmony account. No credit card is required, just your time to create a profile and fill out the personality questionnaire. This process takes about 30 minutes and when complete you will receive your first batch of matches. On eHarmony you cannot search for members. Instead they send you a number of high quality matches everyday for you to review. If you find one or more you like you can then go ahead and send them a message. The only thing not included during this promotion are profile photos.

For more about this online dating company, please check out our review of eHarmony.

Most everyone in America has heard of Tinder, even if they haven’t used it. Many more swipe-friendly dating apps have followed in its popular wake, but still, singles are finding the dating app scene to be a little daunting, more than a little tiring, and would just like to meet someone more organically.

A new study by YouGov Omnibus found that almost half of American singles would prefer to meet a romantic partner in real life rather than through an app like Tinder. According to the study, even Millennials – the generation that brought online dating into the mainstream – prefer to meet potential dates at a bar, coffee shop, or even being set up by friends and family members over swiping right on a dating app.

Researchers surveyed over 1000 single Americans across the U.S. to find out how many have been set up on a date by friends or family, how many would like to be set up again, and how many would rather meet online.

For information on the science of attraction, few names carry more weight than Eli Finkel.

Finkel is a professor at Northwestern University who studies interpersonal attraction, marriage, conflict resolution, and how social relationships influence goal achievement. In his role as director of Northwestern’s Relationships and Motivation Lab (RAMLAB), he has published 130+ scientific papers and is a regular contributor to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. He’s also the author of a best-selling book, The All-Or-Nothing Marriage, and was called "one of the leading lights in the realm of relationship psychology” by The Economist.

So when Finkel makes a pronouncement about dating, we listen. His most recent research has looked into dating services and matching algorithms, in hopes of answering the most important question of all: do they actually work?

PositiveSingles recently acquired PozMatch.com a HIV positive community designed to match their members together. PozMatch.com has been online since 1998.

Of the 1.2 million members PositiveSingles has over 200 thousand members who are HIV positive. This makes it a good fit to take over the PozMatch community. PositiveSingles was founded in 2002 and has become the largest dating service for singles who have an STD. The service can be accessed via the website at PositiveSingles.com and by using iOS and Android apps (found on their respective stores).

For more information you can read the press release or check out our review of PositiveSingles.

Cheating. Adultery. Stepping out. Having an affair. Two-timing. Infidelity. Extracurricular activities.

We have a number of words for it, and an equally plentiful number of excuses for doing it. A new survey from Ashley Madison, the infamous online dating service that caters to extramarital encounters and claims more than 56 million members worldwide, has uncovered the most common reasons people cheat on their partners.

Ashley Madison teamed up with YourTango to ask 1,300 male and female respondents about how and why they partake in their illicit affairs. You may think the answer is simple - one too many drinks, and suddenly otherwise-attached strangers are hooking up in a grungy bar bathroom - but in fact, the act is often more premeditated than that.

Match Group LLC stock got a boost in early October, thanks to the success of Tinder Gold. The new premium app was among the top apps in the Apple Store, not just among dating apps, but alongside Netflix and Pandora. Match shares were up 3.6% Wednesday October 11, and the stock has jumped more than 50% since the start of the year.

But one question on investors’ minds is: what should we expect from Match Group’s other dating apps?

Match Group owns four of the five most popular dating sites, including Match, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish and Tinder, along with several niche dating sites. The problem for investors despite the good news is that these older sites have gotten less attention in Match Group’s overall valuation, because they aren’t generating the users or attention that Tinder does on an ongoing basis, despite their longevity in the online dating market.