It's one of the first questions you answer when joining an online dating site: What's your occupation? It's also one of the first questions you're asked when meeting someone: So what do you do for a living?

We all want to know how our dates pay the bills, and eHarmony knows why.

An eHarmony study looked into how career impacts romance, finding that what you do for a living has - no surprise here - a major impact on what you look for in a partner.

Last year a different study found that the worst careers for romance were personal finance, law enforcement, interactive technology, healthcare, publishing, mental health, optometry, education administration, fitness, aviation, journalism, business ownership, real estate, and law. The trend was clear: the more hours spent at a high-intensity job, the greater negative impact the career has on your love life.

Career addicts striving to achieve work-life balance should look for partners who have very different professions, says the new eHarmony study. Some of the most successful match-ups are:

• Self-employed women with engineers, female business executives with barbers or hair stylists, stay at home moms with dentists, and female doctors with bankers
• Unemployed men with personal trainers, male personal trainers with advertisers, male pilots with beauticians, and soldiers with female business executives

Some professions are willing to communicate with matches from all walks of life, while others are more choosy about who they chat with. The most picky daters are:

• Men who are engineers, analysts, lawyers, web developers, and bankers
• Women who are marketers, business executives, analysts, lawyers, and teachers

The most flexible daters are:

• Men who are soldiers, retired, skilled tradesmen, and students
• Women who are students, skilled tradeswomen, in the food service industry, and in retail sales

The eHarmony study also found that some job combinations are more likely to lead to a date than others. The most successful professional pairings are:

• Male and female business executives dating each other
• Male marketers with female business executives
• Male engineers with female business executives
• Policemen and firemen with female teachers

The least successful professional pairings are:

• Retired men with female administrative assistants
• Male artists with female students
• Male bankers with female administrative assistants
• Male doctors with female students

"When it comes to who's talking to who, most people are looking to talk to someone who does something different than themselves," an eHarmony spokesperson told the Daily Mail.

So I guess that's further proof that office romances aren't the way to go.

To find out more about this online matchmaking site you can check out our eHarmony.com review.

OkCupid seems to be more and more popular with every year that goes by.

It's young, it's fun, it's hip. It doesn't feel stuffy or impersonal like many of its competitors. It has everything that the tech-savvy, younger generation is looking for in an online dating site.

Sam Yagan, CEO and Co-Founder of the site, says that OkCupid has a strong social media strategy to thank for its success. But unlike other websites, Yagan isn't talking about Facebook or Twitter when he attributes OkCupid's popularity to social media - he's talking about OkTrends, the OkCupid blog.

Readers of this site will be familiar with the OkTrends blog. I used to cover every new post, because they were informative, witty, and visually engaging. Much to my dismay, the blog hasn't been updated since April 19, 2011 - not too long after Match purchased OkCupid - but the posts are still relevant, funny, and surprisingly enlightening.

Yagan told Business Insider that the now-defunct blog contributed to OkCupid's success by producing "great, sharable content." The blog used eye-catching graphs and interesting, sometimes provocative topics to draw in readers. OkTrends always walked the fine line between entertaining and educational, and wasn't afraid of the potentially-controversial topics ("Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex," "How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get," "The Case For An Older Woman") that made their readers so eager to pass the articles on.

"If you read any of our blog posts you'll see almost immediately why this concept would be interesting not just to a single person but really to anyone," says Yagan. OkTrends mastered the art of "producing content that was widely, broadly interesting."

Though it was at the forefront of OkCupid's social media strategy, it wasn't just the blog that made OkCupid a hit. The team behind the site has always been conscious of building a wide audience and targeting potential subscribers who don't initially seem to be likely online daters.

"We target people between the ages of 18 and 80 on OkCupid," Yagan explains. "Because dating is an inherently social process, it's very important to also influence the influencers.... That's why it turned out to be a really great thing for our blog to not just target the single people but also the single people's friends and families."

OkCupid has focused significantly less on the major social networking sites - Facebook and Twitter - than its competitors in the industry. As of September 27th this year, OkCupid had only 18,083 Twitter followers and 12,860 Facebook page likes. Compare that to the OkTrends blog, where each post got upwards of 10,000 (and sometimes over 100,000!) likes or shares on Facebook.

So OkCupid...don't you think it's time to bring the blog back? Please? Pretty please?

For more information on this free dating site you can check out our OkCupid review.

We have added a new review to the free dating sites category for the popular Latin site Amor en Linea. This dating site is available in English and Spanish and seems to have at least 12,000 members logged in at any one time.

This dating site is extremely easy to use. While this is a benefit for those of you new to online dating, the service does sacrifice functionality because of this. Still, it has all the basics needed by Latin singles who want to find, communicate and meet up with other singles online. One of the main reasons why this site is so popular in its niche is because it is completely free. Unlike other “free dating sites” there are no paid upgrades since everything the site offers is included in the membership.

To find out more about this popular free Latin dating site please read our new Amor en Linea review now.

You have your own personal list of what you can do without and what you can't deal with in a relationship...but have you ever wondered how it compares to other daters' lists?

eHarmony collected data from over 700,000 singles to reveal the top 10 qualities people value most in a lover and the 10 qualities that are least important when searching for your match.

The overwhelming majority voted friendship into the top spot on the must-haves list (92% for women and 82% for men). No surprise there...as much as we are all occasionally guilty of being blinded by a nice smile or a pretty pair of eyes, it's no secret that a strong friendship is at the root of every enduring relationship.

Good chemistry was rated the second most important trait in a mate, followed by "Enjoying the way my partner makes me feel." Interestingly, "physical closeness" made it into the top 10 but "sexual compatibility" did not - with one notable exception. Sexual compatibility was more important for respondents aged between 35 and 39. Perhaps we reach our sexual peak later than we think we do?

"Men still tend to rank physical appearance and intimacy higher than women, but overall less than half of all respondents think physical appearance is an important quality in their partner," said eHarmony's Sarah Mason.

Other matters that seemed as though they should be important turned out to be trivial. A person's smoking and drinking habits, age, personal beliefs, and education proved to be relatively insignificant when looking for a potential partner.

In order, eHarmony found that the 10 most important qualities when looking for love are:

1. Friendship
2. Chemistry
3. Enjoying the way I feel around my partner
4. Being open about how he/she feels towards me
5. Personality
6. Kindness
7. Romantic attraction
8. Being able to talk about personal problems
9. Being able to discuss how I feel about him/her
10. Physical closeness

And then 10 least important qualities are:

1. My partner's beliefs
2. The amount they smoke
3. Age
4. The amount they drink
5. Ethnicity
6. Height
7. Education
8. Income
9. Religion
10. Knowing they are to blame when things go wrong

"(These results show) we're seeking true compatibility and personal connections," explained Sarah Mason, "and that despite what we may think and agonise over, habits and physical traits really don't account for much when it comes to finding a long term partner."

To find out more about the dating service which calculated the top 10 qualities people value most, please read our eHarmony review.

IAC which owns Match.com, Chemistry, Meetic and People Media acquired OKCupid.com in February of 2011 for $50 million (see Story). The CEO and co-founder of OkCupid, Sam Yagan continued to run OKCupid after the acquisition. Last week IAC announced management changes. It looks like the IAC board liked how Sam continued to operate OKCupid since they have now put him in charge of IAC’s Match segment. This comprises all of IAC's online dating and related operations, internationally and domestically.

Other changes included making Mandy Ginsberg CEO of their core dating site, Match.com and moving Josh Meyers from People Media to focus on creating new businesses at IAC.

You can find out more about the changes at IAC by reading the press release. To find out more about IAC’s core dating site you can check out our Match.com review.

If first-date nerves make you come across as a totally different person than you'd like, then maybe it's time to try something different. Instead of making awkward small-talk and trying not to trip over yourself, would having a couple of friends around put you more at ease?

New York-based social site Grouper seems to think so. Now they've expanded their service to other cities, and have expanded their friendship-finding capabilities to the dating arena.

It works like this: when you go the the Grouper website, it links you back to your Facebook page to pull information about you - what your interests are, your photos, etc. (Don't worry, your Facebook friends won't find out you joined - that information is kept private unless you want to share.) At this point, you choose two friends to be your wingmen (or wingwomen). Then you are asked some basic questions, to rate on a silding scale. For example, would you rather go to a dive bar or a fancy club or some place between those two? Would you rather talk about "Jersey Shore" or philosophy or something in the middle?

Then comes the interesting part: Grouper uses its technology to match you, but you have to wait a couple of weeks because they also say their staff personally oversees matches as well. And they do the heavy-lifting to coordinate the meeting between all six of you. They throw out a few dates and times, pick a central location to meet, and voila - the group date is set. (I like that Grouper tells you where to meet because it takes the pressure off of planning the first date.)

Michael Waxman, the site's founder, claims Grouper is more effective because "when you're with your friends, you're going to behave more comfortably and naturally. There aren't any labels or expectations."

Group dates are an interesting concept. In my experience, it's an indication that one or both parties want to keep things casual, with no expectations. It's less about dating and more about hanging out, no strings attached. But for people who are new to dating, haven't done it in a while, or just get too nervous to act comfortably one-on-one with a date, this provides an interesting alternative, and one that could work out very well. (Besides, your friends could vouch for you, too.)

If you've been looking for something different, or if you want to work up to trying online dating, this might be a good way to begin. After all, your friends are there to help you, even with your love life.