General News

Though online dating is now mainstream for singles, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Major sites like Match.com and eHarmony seem to have cornered the market and have large subscriber bases, but many online daters aren't satisfied with the process. As a result, niche dating sites are popping up to capitalize on the need for something new; a dating site that speaks to their particular needs.

I recently sat down with CEO Brad Boyd to talk about SetforMarriage.com, the dating website he founded that cuts to the chase: the people who join are only interested in marriage. We discussed why his approach to online dating is different from the major players, and why he thinks it will work.

How did you get the idea to start SetforMarriage.com? My best friend was on eHarmony for a year and was ready to marry. He kept meeting girls who were matched to him based on what they had in common, but it never seemed to work for him. I thought a site specifically for marriage-minded people would be better for him.

Do you think most people using online dating sites are just looking to hook up, or are they looking for partners? When people see eHarmony's commercials, they have an expectation that if they use site, they will find the perfect person. This is an unreasonable expectation. Also, when people join larger dating sites, they meet a lot of people who are casual daters or looking to hook up. Our site eliminates ambiguity by calling ourselves a dating site specifically for marriage-minded people. We have a smaller number of people, but we are successful.

What makes you different from other marriage sites? The screening and matching process. Some people want to be matched, some don't. My friend didn't want a computer algorithm to tell him who was perfect for him, like another marriage site does. We are completely profile-based. You can search through everyone in our database rather than going through a long questionnaire and hoping to be matched appropriately.

Is your client base mainly Christian? Mostly religious? I would say it's pretty evenly spread out. There are many on our site who aren't religious, but I would say most of those who are religious are Christian.

How many subscribers/ members do you have now? About 2,000 people are on the site right now. We've only been around since August 2009.

Are you married? Or do you online date? I'm busy going to school---my life consists of school, work, and managing the website. I don't have time to invest in relationship. I'm not marriage-minded now, but I do have a profile so I can monitor the site.

Here is an UK eHarmony voucher code for one of their popular promotions. This voucher code expires on November 31, 2010.

eHarmony UK Voucher

The coupon code listed above is valid on eHarmony in the United Kingdom (eHarmony.co.uk).

For US singles, go here for our eHarmony USA (eHarmony.com) coupons.

For Canadian singles, go here for our eHarmony Canada (eHarmony.ca) coupons.

Read our review of eHarmony for more information about this online matchmaking service.

In June of this year Zoosk reported that they had surpassed the 1 million Facebook fans milestone. Well, it is five months later and now they have doubled the amount of Facebook fans they have, to over 2,244,000. Here is a video Zoosk put together to celebrate the achievement:



You can find the Zoosk Facebook page here. To find out more about this dating site, you can read our Zoosk review.

For a limited time the UK dating site, Friends Reunited Dating, is offering new members a 20 percent discount off of their normal subscription prices. This allows members to save almost £10 on a six month membership. All you need to do is use the following discount code when you upgrade your membership:

Coupon Code: D8TE

This code is valid until Tuesday November 2, 2010. To find out what this popular dating service is all about, check out our review of Friends Reunited Dating.

If asked to describe your personality, what would you say? Do you consider yourself adventurous, dorky, and a little bit kinky? Are you introverted, artsy, and into politics?

Perhaps you're compassionate but also aggressive, or ambitious but also polite.

These characteristics are several of the 20+ personality traits examined by Christian Rudder in the OkTrends blog's latest study: "Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex." Using the match questions answered by OkCupid members, the site collected more than 669 million responses and created a straight/gay comparison chart for personality categories like "Confident," "Literary," Religious," and "Romantic."

Straight men, as it turns out, live up to the clichéd image of the "bullying jock." Based on their answers, they were rated more aggressive, more confident, more violent, more horny, more competitive, and more into sports than gay men. Their hyper-masculinity was tempered, however, by being rated more dorky, more religious, and more romantic than their gay counterparts.

Stereotypes appeared on the opposite side of the t-chart as well: gay men were ranked higher on personality traits that are often considered feminine, like "Compassionate," "Trusting," "Literary," "Artsy," and "Generous," though they are apparently also more ambitious, spontaneous, and political.

Gay women scored higher then straight women on almost every characteristic, with particularly strong leads in the categories of "Adventurous," "Artsy," "Into Drugs," and "Kinky." The only personality traits that were stronger in straight women were "Ambitious," "Into Sports" (at least the women managed to defy a stereotype!), "Optimistic," "Polite," and "Religious."

Rudder's next move is a return to OkCupid's "The REAL 'Stuff White People Like'" study (my reviews of the study can be found here, here, and here), this time using members' descriptions of themselves to measure traits based on gender and sexuality. The words and phrases that appeared most frequently in gay men's profiles were: "The Devil Wears Prada," "Britney Spears," "Mean Girls," "Kelly Clarkson," and "The Color Purple." With only a few exceptions, the terms were all related to films, books, theatre, and music. Gay women overwhelmingly placed "The L Word" in the top spot (so much so that Rudder had to shrink the size of the text to fit the site's template), followed by "Tegan and Sara," "Ani DiFranco," "Piercings," and, again in the 5^th spot, "The Color Purple."

Straight men define themselves by traditionally masculine interests, like cars, war movies, sports, beer, and fixing things. Straight women consider their girlfriends very important and are searching for Mr. Right, but are also determined to prove that they are "Independent" and "Self-Sufficient." They also enjoy make up, romantic movies and books, and careers in the medical field.

Rudder's final analysis of the data measures "the frequencies of all one-, two-, and three-word phrases against the site-wide rates." According to his chart, gay users are significantly less "mainstream" than straight users, with bi users predictably falling in between. "In fact," Rudder notes, "what these numbers are saying is that the average gay person has only about 30% in common with the average American." Before anyone writes an angry letter to OkCupid about discrimination, however, consider Rudder's closing comments: "Adding an ethnic group to the plot helps put it in perspective." When Indian users are added to the graph, they are ranked even less "mainstream" than gay members.

So what can we take away from this?

Defining "normality" is an impossible task, and "no one's saying that Indians shouldn't get married or shouldn't be allowed to adopt children....We hope gay people can expect the same treatment very soon."

Have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?

The 252,900 straight people OkCupid polled in their newest study, "Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex," provided surprising results: nearly a quarter responded that they had participated in a same-sex experience, and an additional 11% reported that they had not but would like to.

Writer Christian Rudder then broke down the replies to the inquiry geographically, creating a color-coded map of the "straight people who either have had or would like to have a same-sex experience in the continental U.S. and lower Canada." Most of the results are predictable - the West Coast and the North East are more gay curious, while the Southern states are significantly less so - but some are unexpected. Even in the states that reported being less interested in exploring same-sex experiences, pockets of gay curiosity, in cities like Austin and Madison, can be found. And perhaps most interestingly of all, Canada is entirely orange and red, the colors that indicate the highest level of gay curiosity, from coast to coast.

In a brief aside, Rudder discusses the "many awful things our elected officials have said about gay people" that he encountered while writing his post, mentioning in particular a quote from Jim Demint: "If a person is a practicing homosexual, they should not be teaching in our schools." Rudder facetiously notes that "a fun game to play with stuff like this is to replace the words 'homosexual' and 'gay' with 'politician,'" because "then you have something that's actually true," and then proceeds to attempt to discredit Demint's claim by searching through the answers to match questions. What he finds is "one question with a surprising disparity, not between orientations, but between genders."

The question is straightforward - "Which is bigger: the earth or the sun?" You'd think that anyone who passed the 4^th grade would be able to answer this simple astronomy query with ease, but it appears that was not the case - over 10% of straight women incorrectly answered that the earth is larger than the sun, and just under 10% of gay women answered similarly. The men fared much better: only 5% of gay men, and fewer than 5% of straight men, got the question wrong.

Rudder's results can be summed up in one word: Yikes. Perhaps we'd all be better off abandoning our academic pursuits in favor of moving to Canada and exploring our same-sex inclinations.

Stick around for a review of the final findings of OkCupid's "Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex" study, in which Rudder evaluates the personality traits that are most associated with each orientation, revisits the fun of the "The REAL 'Stuff White People Like'" study, and attempts to define "the norm."