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It seems like a no-brainer: the more you say "thank you" to your partner the more likely you are to stay together. But when you're in the middle of a fight or you've been together a while, it's easy to just expect things from your partner, rather than appreciating what you do for each other on a regular basis.

A new study was released from University of California, Berkley, that found couples who did appreciate each other were more likely to increase commitment to their relationships, and those who didn't were more likely to split. Researchers examined 50 couples who had been in relationships for about fifteen months, asking them to complete questionnaires nightly for about a week, documenting how appreciated they felt and how appreciative they were towards their partners.

On days where participants felt appreciated by their partners, they were more likely to express and return feelings of appreciation the following day. Also, they were less likely to have broken up nine months later, and were more committed to the relationship.

Researchers also brought participants into the lab so they could study how the couples interacted: how often they touched each other, how they spoke to each other, how engaged each was in the conversation and how often they made eye contact. They discovered that, the more understanding, validating, and caring participants were towards their partners, the more appreciated the partner felt and the happier both were in the relationship. The physical gestures - making eye contact and touching your partner - were seen as ways partners show gratitude.

"When you are appreciative and you notice the value in your partner," said researcher Amie Gordon in an interview with LiveScience, "it helps you realize what you have and makes you want to hold on to it. You have something good and you think, 'I want to keep it.'

It makes sense; when we take our significant others for granted it leads to feelings of insecurity, doubt and frustration. This can also be the cause of miscommunication, especially when couples are together for a long time. Instead of really listening to what each other says, it's sometimes easier to make assumptions which aren't correct. This is why it's so important to communicate well in any relationship, no matter how long you've been together or how well you think you know the other person.

Couples in the study ranged in age from 18 to 60, and about half of them lived together at the time of the study.

Would you pay to have your status updates highlighted on Facebook?

For online daters, this system is old news. Many online dating websites offer the option of having a profile highlighted or ranked at the top in search results in exchange for a small additional fee. But for social networking sites, this is a new approach to interacting online.

Apparently only a measly 12% of your Facebook friends actually see your status updates on average. Facebook is now toying with the idea of adding Highlight, a feature that lets users pay a few bucks to have their posts appear to more friends. Facebook is currently testing the new feature out, offering a paid version to a small percentage of its user base. A free version is also available, designed to determine if Facebookers are at all interested in the Highlight option.

It might be a nifty new way to make sure your voice is heard by more people, but let's face it - Facebook's real motivation is the money. Facebook's worth is based on its potential for earning money, not actual money it earns, and the company needs to turn that around if it's going to continue receiving funds from investors.

It's likely that Facebook will now pursue more aggressive strategies for making money, a plan that could easily backfire for a service that members are used to using for free. Although there are no known plans to charge for all use of Facebook, pay-for-popularity features - and other paid features - could be major turn offs for users who were initially drawn to the site because it's free. Younger users - which make up a huge portion of Facebook's user base - may also be resistant to the inclusion of paid features, as they're less likely to have the financial resources to pay for them.

Facebook's diplomatic statement on the matter reveals very little:

"We're constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people's interest in this method of sharing with their friends."

The Highlight feature could prove useful, but it also poses potential problems. Highlighted posts could easily compromise the relevance of the news feed, which currently uses a sorting algorithm to display posts by a user's closest friends and posts that have received a significant number of Likes and comments. Highlight could distort that, and may turn your news feed into a marketing scheme from club promoters, small businesses, and anyone else who would benefit from increased attention.

I'm going to stay skeptical for now, but perhaps Facebook will surprise me. I'll do my best to keep an open mind.

To find out more about what makes this social networking site a good place to meet singles (or not) you can read our Facebook review.

Not a day goes by that I don't mourn the loss of OkCupid's fabulous, informative, fascinating, controversial Labs posts. Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration...but I do miss the crazy questions, bright infographics, and provocative food-for-thought they provided.

The days of those posts may be long gone, but thankfully an amateur data analyst named Jon Millward has performed an experiment that picked up where OkCupid left off. He called the project "OkCupid on Trial: A 4-month Online Dating Experiment Using 10 Fictional Singletons," and decided to test the widely-held theory that women have it easier than men in the online dating world.

Millward put the theory to the test by making ten fake profiles and observing the responses he received to each, based purely off superficial notions of "attractiveness." To choose which ten pictures would participate in the experiment, Millward polled three separate people who rated the attractiveness of the pictures by what they thought members of OkCupid were most likely to be attracted to.

It turns out they were pretty good judges. Within 24 hours of the profiles being online:

• Only 1 man received a message.
• But every woman received at least one.
• And the 2 most attractive women received 581% more messages than the other three combined.

Seven days into the experiment, Millward found the following results:

• The most-contacted woman received nearly 17 times more messages in 1 week than the most-contacted man.
• Three men received no messages at all, even though their profiles had been viewed 25 times between them.
• The women's messages outnumbered the men's 17 to 1 (largely due to the 2 most attractive women).
• The 2 men ranked most attractive received 5 fewer messages than the women who were voted 3rd and 4th most attractive.

And just in case you want to write off his results as a fluke, Millward expanded the project to England and replicated the experiment. His findings were exactly the same: the two most attractive women received 83% of all messages. The most popular woman's inbox filled at 2 months, 13 days - but it would take 2.3 years for the most popular man's inbox to max out.

If attracting attention is the goal, then yes - Millward's experiment has shown a bias in favor of women on dating sites. But that also comes with a downside: the wider selection capabilities means a signal to noise ratio that makes the selection process a nearly-insurmountable challenge.

Men on dating sites face challenges of their own, largely due to the extreme competition from other male members. The best way for men to stand out online is to write unique, intriguing messages, which Millward suggests doing by:

• Demonstrating creativity, intelligence, and humor.
• Forgoing "cut-and-paste" style messages for unique notes that show you've read her profile.
• Not being needy.

Conclusion: men may have it a little harder than women, but if all it takes to bridge that gap is write more thoughtful messages, guys don't have it so bad after all.

To find out more about the dating site mentioned you can read our OkCupid review.

From Friday July 20 2012, to Sunday July 22, 2012 members of Chemistry will be able to communicate for free.

If you are interested in online dating and are looking for a dating service to evaluate, then Chemistry’s 3 day free weekend is an ideal time to try out this dating site. Chemistry was brought to you by the creators of Match.com. The main difference between the 2 dating sites is that Chemistry relies on their in-depth personality test and complex matching algorithm to supply their members with quality matches. The matches provided are the ones Chemistry has determined are best suited for your personality and have the best chance of creating for you a long-term relationship.

To take advantage of the Chemistry 3 day free weekend all you need to do is create a user account and answer the profile questions. Once completed you will then receive your matches. Then, starting Friday July 20 and for 72 hours you will be able to communicate by flirting (chemistry starters) and sending emails for free. No credit card is required and this promotion is available for new and existing members.

Chemistry had their last free communication weekend in May. To find out more about this matchmaking service designed to find members long-term relationships please read our review of Chemistry.

The pressure's on for singles in Shanghai. The Chinese capital's fertility rate has dropped to just 0.79 children per woman, and now the city is desperate to encourage more young people to meet, marry, and raise a family.

The center of the city's dating scene is Shanghai Expo Park, where thousands of eligible young men and women gather in hopes of meeting their matches. 38,000 singles and parents attended a June 1st matchmaking event in the park, hoping to revive a marriage rate that is expected to fall 17% this year.

Shanghai is China's richest city, largest port, and a leading financial center in the country. It is also the center of waves of social changes that are sweeping the nation. An urban shift is shrinking the pool of factory workers who sustain economic growth in the country, while the ranks of the elderly - who increase healthcare and pension costs - are on the rise. City-dwelling citizens with higher education levels and a greater focus on their careers are marrying later and having fewer children, causing the Shanghai birth rate to drop to half the national level.

These shifts have caused major changes for Chinese women, who have become a larger, and increasingly educated, percentage of the population. "In the past, women were match-made by their parents," says Juemin Zhou, director of the Shanghai Matchmaking Trade Association. "Then, it didn't matter how old you were, or if your partner was blind in one eye, you still had to get married. Now, if you don't find someone suitable, you just don't settle."

Gong Haiyan, co-chief executive officer of Jiayuan.com, China's largest online dating agency, reports that women's expectations of potential partners - like owning a house - have now skyrocketed. "The first thing they look for," said Hansen Huang, a male attendee at the matchmaking fair, "is if you have a decent job, what is your salary like, if you have an apartment. Women are looking for a partner who can provide so they can live relatively comfortably."

In spite of these shifts, many Chinese citizens remain traditional. A young bride is still considered ideal, and women who wait too long to settle down many be considered "leftovers." "Women can be very picky when they're young," said Huang. "But if you don't sell when it commands the highest value, you may miss the golden opportunity."

The pressure to wed may be high, but Shanghai is doing its best to respond: about 2,000 couples were successfully matched at last year's event, a figure that bodes well for this year's fair.

We found some interesting statistics for OkCupid from the CEO Sam Yagan who did a presentation recently at the Digiday Data Marketing Summit.

Did you know that as of 2012 OkCupid has 10 million plus registered users who send more than 500 million messages each year. Last year they also had 68.3 million visits with which 13.3 million are unique. On average these visitors view 14.18 pages for an average time of 27 minutes and 59 seconds.

With the profiles and tests OkCupid keeps track of a lot of data. This data gives them information on their members demographics, psychographic, lifestyle and consumption habits which is ideal for advertisers who want to zero in on their target market. Like with Facebook, OkCupid is a free service that uses advertisers to pay the bills.

Lastly OkCupid says they have 3 key elements that define their success and they all revolve around their members. They are:

• Distribution of messages
• Recipient’s interest in message
• Keeping reply rates high

For more on this post you can check out the full slide show. To find out what makes this dating site one of the more recommended on the internet, please read our OkCupid review.