Religion

Online dating can be tough to begin with, but what if your religion (or lack thereof) isn't very popular? Everyone deserves to find their special someone, no matter if you are atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Pagan, Wiccan, or even a Jedi.

Set Up Custom Searches

You may find that the standard searches set up by your dating site of choice do not give you exactly the kind of people you'd like to meet. You'll want to make a custom search that includes your normal search criteria (age, distance from you, etc.) as well as their religious beliefs.

If It's Hard To Find Matches...

If you're looking for someone who shares your beliefs (or non-belief!), sometimes you get very, very few search results. Your first step is to expand your search radius a bit - add another 20-50 miles and see if you can snag a few more matches in your search net. You could also loosen up on some of your other criteria. Maybe tweak the age limit a bit or the body type. Play with your other criteria and see if more people show up for the party.

If your faith is important to you, then you want to date people who share in it. You want someone you can take with you to church or to temple, someone to celebrate the holy days with, someone who you can pray with daily. It can sometimes seem difficult on the mainstream dating sites to tell whether or not someone selects "Christian" or "Jewish" because they are practicing or just because they grew up in that faith.

On Mainstream Sites

On mainstream sites like Match.com, it's hard to tell sometimes how serious someone is about their religion. (At least with OkCupid.com, they can select "and serious about it" after their religion choice!) This leaves you in the position of having to tell from their profile text if they are as serious about their faith as you are. Some people make this very easy! I see profiles every day where people say, "God is the most important thing in my life" or "My match should share my faith."

But what if you don't see anything like that? Then, you'll have to send them an email. Don't word it like an interrogation about their religious practices - that will put anyone on the defensive! - but add the question on the end of your email:

Spark Networks Jewish dating site called JDate got a nice bit of publicity in The New York Times last week. The paper publish an article about a JDater's success story in their Fashion & Style section.

After a 13 year marriage, a 48 year old man named Ron James decided to get right back into dating. In the same month as his divorce he joined JDate.com. In the beginning months, every night for 2 or 3 hours he searched for woman between the ages of 30 and 50, and who lived within 50 miles of his apartment. He kept his profile full of energy but not head strong. In 18 months Ron emailed between 500 and 600 women, in which he dated almost 50 of them. This many dates was expense since, he had to pay for the date and usually commute an hour into New York City. This was all done on a modest salary. What Ron ended up doing to save money was stacking first meet dates. Every other Sunday he would have dates with as many as 3 women. He kept the date times spread apart and at different locations so he could "retain some sense of integrity".

Surprisingly over 2 percent of users on JDate are not Jewish. This doesn't mean 2 percent of users have lied on JDate, they have just answered profile questions like Do you attend synagogue? or Do you keep kosher? with the options "I will tell you later" or "Never". They usually also select “Willing to convert” under religious background as well. Anonymous non-Jewish JDaters have noted a number of reasons for using a dating site designed just for Jews. Reasons include having a number of Jewish friends and knowing a lot of the religion, to hearing about other single's success on the dating service.

Some of the Jewish members have complained about allowing non-Jews on JDate. They use the site specifically to meet other single Jews, and do not want to deal with any members who are not. I understand were these members are coming from but I do not see the harm in allowing non-Jewish members from joining if they are serious about meeting someone. All members, who don't want to see non-Jewish profiles, have to do is update there search preferences and deselect "Willing to convert" and "Will tell you later" from the Religion preference. Once the preferences are saved these members will never come up in a search again.

I don't think JDate.com will ever not allow non-Jewish members from joining. The percentage who do join is small and if they ever did prevent them then, JDate may get slapped with a legal suit by a unhappy member like eHarmony was in a similar case were they did not allowing same-sex relationships (see Story).

For more details on this Jewish dating community, read our JDate review.

Here is the gender ratios of members at ChristianCafe.com grouped by age range for January 2009:

Age Range	% of Males	% of Females
18 - 20	50.7%	49.3%
21 - 30	42.8%	57.2%
31 - 40	40.8%	59.2%
41 - 50	37.5%	62.5%
51 - 60	33%	67%
61+	31.9%	68.1%
Avg. Overall	39.9%	60.1%

Source: Online Personals Watch

Except for members who are 18 - 20 years old, females make up the greater percentage of members at Christian Cafe. As you move up in each age range segment, females gain a few more percentage points over the previous segment. By the 51 - 60 age rage there are twice as many females as males. Does this mean older males are less likely to consider Religion as an important factor in dating or do just more older females join dating sites in general compared to men of similar age?

For more information on this award winning dating site, read our ChristianCafe.com review.

The Philadelphia Jewish Voice has an article about the Jewish dating service JDate. In it the author Gabrielle Loeb, talks about the problems of intermarriage in the Jewish community. Intermarried couples usually raise Jewish children but, by the next generation only 13 percent of the grandchildren identify themselves as Jews (according to the NJPS 2001 study). Also, a Jewish Population Survey reported that Jews who married between the years of 1996 and 2001, 47 percent of them did so outside the Jewish faith. As a comparison, in 1970 only 13 percent of Jews intermarried. It seems that intermarriage is resulting in a decrease of the over all growth rate of the Jewish population in North America.

Part of the reason the founders of JDate decided to create a dating service in 1997 was to combat this problem. They realized Jewish singles needed another way to meet someone of the same faith. Since then, this site has become very popular. Even Rabbi's have been promoting this service (see story Rabbis Helping Single Jews with Subscriptions to JDate). The media seems to love JDate as well. There are a ton of articles on this Jewish dating site and it has been mentioned in several TV shows over the last few years which also has helped it popularity.