A JDater's Success Story in the New York Times

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".

The woman Ron met on JDate and with whom he fell in love with was named Sheryl Daija. She has a different type of JDate success story. She was on JDate for a total of 3 months. Her plan was to go JDating at least once a month. Sheryl (who is 44) was surprised at how many 20 something men contacted her. On her third date, in her third month of using the dating service she met up with Ron. It was love for both of them at first sight. By the fifth date, they knew they would marry and that is exactly what they did in January of 2009.

Ron took the more business and economy of scale approach to online dating while Sheryl used the slow and steady philosophy. It is interesting to find that two people who took opposite approaches to online dating met and fell in love with each other.

A few points we learned about JDate in the article is, it is Spark Networks oldest of it's 32 dating sites and one quarter of all members are baby boomers. The service also offers group discounts for Rabbis who are buying memberships in bulk.

The complete article can be found at The New York Times. For more information about this Jewish dating community, read our review of JDate.