Dating Services

To our knowledge Christian Café currently are not offering any coupon codes. This is not a real issue though, since one great perk at Christian Café is all new members automatically get a 10 day free trial. This allows you to try out all aspects of the dating service including sending and receiving emails. They have been offering this deal for over 20 years now, and no other site that we know of does without requiring a credit card.

ChristianCafe.com Current and Upcoming Coupons and Sales

We have not been notified of any new sales or coupons for the award winning dating service Christian Cafe. The best place to find out about any deals is the Christian Cafe subscription upgrade page when you create your free account.

We will update this page when Christian Cafe lets us know of any new sales or discounts. To find out more about this popular Christian online dating site, you can take a look at our Christian Café review.

This Wednesday, June 8th, 2016 at 7pm EST (4pm PST) the dating service OurTime will be hosting a 1 hour live chat session with Dr. Terri Orbuch who is know as "The Love Doctor". She will be answering as many questions she can about relationships and love in the online dating world. If you want to join in on the conversation be sure to ask your question using the hashtag #OurTimeChat on OurTime's Facebook page.

Dr. Terri is a professor at Oakland University, a therapist, and an author of 6 relationship books. She has been featured in many national publications including USA Today, Time magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. She also has appeared on CNN, The Today Show, and many other well known TV shows. She is also currently the relationship expert for the dating site OurTime.

Use it or lose it. That’s the motto men on Bumble will have to live by from now on. The dating app just announced that male users are now required to reply to women's messages within 24 hours or they lose the match.

Bumble has always been unique. At first glance, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for Tinder 2.0 - but look closer and you’ll notice the key difference that has made the app a hit in its own right. Once a pair is matched on Bumble, only the woman can send a message. If she doesn’t do it within 24 hours, her match buzzes off into cyberspace, never to be seen again.

By requiring women to make the first move, Bumble takes a feminist stance and places power firmly in female users’ hands. The new update levels the playing field between the sexes even further by requiring men to respond within the same timeframe.

Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe told Mashable that the goal was to make it an “even keel” experience. "She was held to 24 hours to reach out to you,” Wolfe said. “We feel it's only fair you're confined to the same rules." Previously, men had unlimited time to answer messages.

"I know the whole idea is that it's empowering women, but it also just puts the ball in the guy's court and starts a 'wait and see' game," New Yorker Lauren Drell told Mashable. "It means we need to rush but then a guy can take their time in replying back and vetting options."

Wolfe also says that by applying the 24-hour restriction to all users, they can't "rack up" their number of matches anymore - a common practice on other platforms. "It's helping objectify women less," she explained.

A final goal for the new rule is to prevent ghosting, an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in online dating. According to data from Fortune magazine, 80% of Millennials have been ghosted at some point. Bumble has found that the number of messages sent and chats initiated has significantly increased since the introduction of the time limit.

Male responses to female-initiated chats have gone up 18%, and a chat is 70% more likely to continue once there is a reply. The app has also witnessed a 9% increase in women sending the first message since men are replying to their initial message.

Bumble is confident that the good news will keep coming. Along with being the most frequently requested feature, says Wolfe, testing in the UK found that the male 24-hour timer increased response rate by 20%.

Tinder has just released an update to its app. Now, Tinder users in New York City (where the new feature is being tested) can play "matchmaker" with other users by sharing profiles in their social networks outside of Tinder.

WIth the new feature, these users can share profiles of other users on messaging apps like Slack, Evernote, and Gmail, or social platforms like Linked In, Tumblr, GroupMe, and Wunderlist. Tinder users however are not able to share profiles over Facebook.

In theory, a matchmaking feature on Tinder makes sense because of the sheer volume of users - it expands your network and opportunities even more. The downside of this latest update is that other people on Tinder can take your profile, post and share it wherever they want, and you have no control.

People post their profiles on Tinder knowing that other users of the app can swipe and accept or reject them, but like with online dating sites where users don't necessarily want their work colleagues or family members to know they are signed up - swiping and matching has always been done within the confines of the app. Even though you sign up on Tinder with your Facebook account, and photos are pulled from your Facebook page, your activity on Tinder isn’t posted to your Facebook account for all to see. The two are kept separate for privacy. 

Our work and love lives have generally been kept separate for good reason. Let’s say you have a business meeting with some important clients, who are connected through your boss (and to you) on a platform like Slack or LinkedIn. You probably wouldn’t want them to know how you present yourself on a dating app – as it could be very different from your professional persona. In Slack, you can send a Tinder profile you received to your entire work team if you want. In LinkedIn, you can share the Tinder profile with the general LinkedIn public. (This might make for a good revenge plot if you are upset with a co-worker or an ex girlfriend.)

If you share over Wunderlist, you can essentially make the profile you are sharing part of your “to-do” list. If you want to save and read someone’s profile later, you can do this when you share with Pocket.

Once you share a profile, the recipient gets a link to open the profile in Tinder. If they don’t have an account, they are prompted to join in order to view. (The shared links expire after 72 hours or five clicks, so at least there is a limit on sharing one profile.)

New York is a testing ground for this app feature, so it might be tweaked before it’s launched to other cities.

Will this new feature work for Tinder users? It's hard to tell, but it definitely will make online dating not only more interconnected, but more complicated. When you blur the lines between public and personal and don't give people the capacity to maintain some control over their own profiles, chances are, they won't stick around.

Tinder’s simple swipe functionality has long made it a target of criticism. Detractors claim the dating app is a magnet for promiscuous singles hoping for hook-ups, while defenders say meaningful relationships are also part of the package. A new study suggests the latter may be right.

Researchers at Webster Vienna Private University in Austria asked 75 users of Tinder and other dating services to complete questionnaires about their motivation for online dating. They were also asked to rate their sociability, self-esteem, and sexual permissiveness. They shared their findings in a paper entitled 'On the differences between Tinder versus online dating agencies.'

“To date there has been little scientific research exploring the characteristics and motivations of those who use online dating agencies and social dating apps,” said lead author Dr. Kathleen Hodkinson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. “We were interested in understanding whether users of these two types of services differ from each other, and from those who do not use any form of online dating. What the research has essentially highlighted is that they don’t appear to.”

The study concluded that Tinder users have the same motivations as users of other sites, and that they do not significantly differ from traditional daters in their behavior or what they’re looking for. Those results are in line with a broader body of research that has found that online daters strongly resemble those who do not use online dating. “It is likely,” Hodkinson explained, “that as online dating continues to grow in popularity, its users are becoming increasingly diverse and therefore more reflective of the general population.”

Early studies of online dating drew completely different conclusions. They found a positive correlation between time spent on the internet, loneliness, and anxiety. Further studies failed to replicate that finding, and with the stigma surrounding online dating almost completely gone, Hodkinson’s study feels closer to the truth - at least the truth as we experience it in 2016.

What Hodkinson’s team did find is increased sexual permissiveness in Tinder users, which they chalked up to the younger age of the app’s userbase. They also found they men are more likely than women to use dating services to find casual sex partners, a finding that is consistent with other studies that show similar behavior patterns among males both online and offline.

The study hopes to inspire more in-depth research to further test the assumptions made, in particular taking other variables such as religious beliefs, income, and marital status into account. For now, it provides a starting point for evaluating how dating services are used today and how it may evolve in the future. For more on this dating app for which the study is about please read our review of Tinder

eHarmony is offering free communication from Wednesday May 25th to Monday May 30th, 2016. This long weekend event is available in the United States and celebrates Memorial Day.

eHarmony is the perfect online dating service for singles looking for long-term relationships. You can join via their website or dating apps which are found on iTunes and Android. Once you have created a free memberships all you need to do is then take the personality questionnaire before you can receive your matches. This takes most people between 30 and 40 minutes to complete. The questionnaire doesn't all have to be completed at once since you can save the questions you have answered and come back later to finish. Most questions are of the multiple choice variety.

After the questionnaire is finished you will receive your first set of matches. You can then go ahead and review your matches and start the communication process (which includes emails) with the ones you like. The great thing with free communication weekends is you know everyone can reply to your messages. These events also do not require a credit card so their is no cost or obligation to start a subscription. Every day or so you can expect a new batch of matches to arrive to your eHarmony account. Free communication events do not include photos, skipping the guided communication process or secure call (a phone feature). For access to these features you will need to purchase an eHarmony subscription.

For more about this popular online matchmaking service, you can read our eHarmony review.