Having dated online from Jan. 2007 to Nov. 2011 (almost 5 years), I'd like to share my experience. Maybe it will be useful to others. I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of online and traditional dating, and then compare the online services I used, namely Match.com, eHarmony, pof.com and okcupid.com.
I did a lot of reading online while I was dating (especially in the beginning). I remember reading somewhere that online dating is only slightly better than traditional forms of dating. Since I didn't really date much traditionally, I wasn't sure what that really meant. But now, after almost 5 years of dating online, I think I get it.
Online dating vs. traditional dating
Here are a few points to consider how online dating compares to traditional dating:
- You can know the field of daters online. A strength of online dating is that the legitimate people who are actively using a dating site all want to be dating (or at least you can assume that!). Compare this to the people you meet in a bar or a social setting. Some are just socializing and have no interest in dating. A weakness of online dating is that many profiles you'll find can be inactive. For example, a profile might have been set up by a trial user who never registered after the 3-day time limit, or it's a profile of someone who already found a match and left the site without deleting it. In a worse (but pretty rare) case, profiles are put up by dating scammers. All the sites I used provide ways to denounce the scammers, but many sites do nothing about inactive profiles. This has even been the subject of class-action lawsuits.
- You can search efficiently online. Thanks to sophisticated search engines, you can search for people in a database of online profiles according to many criteria. For example, you might want to find people between the ages of 30-38 who have at least graduated from university and have no children. Now, try doing this efficiently at a night club with 200 people. On the other hand, not all users are honest about these facts when they put them in their profile. The system will find you matches based on what you're looking for, but you shouldn't trust profiles to be accurate. Most profiles will mostly be accurate, at least that has been my experience. People can tell you they're single (when they're married), so it's also a problem in traditional dating.
- You can control the pace of contact online. Dating activity (including communication) takes place on your schedule. When you start online, you can search and communicate anonymously, choosing when to allow more contact, etc. To increase your chances to meet someone in traditional dating means you have to participate in real-world activities, which might take place at a precise location at a precise time. One reason people prefer online dating is that it might seem to provide some advantages for people with busy schedules. However, after doing it seriously for some time, I realized that once initial contact is made, there's a need to spend time with potential partners to get to know each other. In hindsight, I wonder if time spent reading online profiles and doing searches could have been spent meeting people (in person) someplace, maybe at a cooking or dance class, at the same time learning something practical! Online searching can be done at any time, any place.
Subjective comparison of dating sites
Context of my perspective: I'm a 40-something post-university graduate, divorced (no kids), living in the downtown (densest) part of a North American city of over 1m population. Since 2007, I have met in person (e.g., for a chat over a coffee) more than 50 women. This means that the "matching" part of things went well enough that we had a face-to-face chat.
I met what I considered quality matches from all of the sites I used, although the pay sites were more consistent. My theory about this is that people who are serious about dating will tend to sacrifice some money for a service. This is not to say that a person who uses a free site is not serious, nor that all pay-site users are serious.
| Site | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| match.com This site is a pay site, and has been around the longest of the ones I used. Match allows you to search its entire database for people, with all kinds of criteria (too many to list). In my city, I met a lot of people through match.com, although I'm not sure it was the most efficient use of my time. |
Lots of users; flexible and powerful searching; ability to exclude profiles from search results; ability to see when a person was last online (to identify stale profiles). |
many inactive profiles show up in searches; management doesn't always take down profiles with fake photos |
| eHarmony This site is a pay site, and has been heavily advertised on TV. eHarmony uses a patented algorithm to match people based on a personality assessment that you undergo when you sign up. eHarmony thinks it's omnipotent about your matches. That is, you do NOT get to participate directly in the search. The system identifies the matches and sends them to you, a few at a time (5-10 a day). There's a guided communication process in which you're encouraged to progressively get to know your matches by choosing questions to ask them according to what you think might be important issues. All the time you can "close" a match, "archive" it for later, or choose to bypass the process and just send a direct email. | The Cartesian approach of assessing compatibility, asking important questions, etc. encourages people to take dating seriously and maturely; ability to see when a person was last online (to identify stale profiles); no time spent searching; few scammers or fake profiles (I saw none that I remember in 4+ years). | Many users don't like the guided approach (the questionnaire is long, the guided questions and answers take long, etc.); there are lots of inactive profiles; compatibility algorithm does not consider body types; the main web site requires a lot of clicking to manage your matches. |
| POF.com POF.com (formerly known as PlentyOfFish.com) is a free dating site that boasts the most users. It functions mostly like Match.com (you actively search for users with criteria), although since it's free, the revenue is generated by advertisements (whenever someone clicks on an ad shown on a POF page). POF.com is a one-hit wonder in terms of its founder. Because of this and because of its revenue model, it hasn't evolved as much as the other sites. For example, when I first started using POF in 2007, education level wasn't part of the profile data. It wasn't possible to search on that criterion, which was very frustrating for me, given that I have a post-graduate degree. It took a lot of complaining in the forums by users to finally get the site owner (a one-man show) to make this change. He sees value-added features to the site as those that generate him more ad revenue, not those that make users happier. Despite the huge revenues the site has made the owner, very little has been put back into the site design in terms of usability, for example. As such, the site has a Web 0.9 feel to it. | It's a free site; there are a lot of users in its database; ability to see when a user was last online (identify stale profiles); management acts quickly to remove fake profiles (although it's not intuitive how to report them); artificial intelligence detects and blocks scam emails; active community forum for discussing lots of things. | Navigating the site is tedious; searching is clunky (executing the same query consecutively can give differing results); you can't remove (uninteresting) profiles from search results; ads can sometimes be unethical; many inactive or unmotivated profiles; customer support equates to asking your question in the online forum; site is transitioning towards a pay model (more and more options migrating to paying members only). |
| OKCupid This site is the most creative and innovative, as it strives to match people based on their database of thousands of questions, which are optional. There's an interesting blog about the data collected on the site. Of all the sites I used, this one had very few contacts that led to meeting in person. | compatibility is based on answers to questions; the site has a modern, intuitive interface, with cool features like allowing feedback on your profile, My Best Face, etc. | I didn't make a lot of matches (this might be because there are too few people on the site); you can spend an awful lot of time browsing questions and searching (although I admit it is entertaining); it feels more like a social networking site than a dating site (but maybe that's a trend?). |
Face-to-face successes
Here are some rough numbers of matches I met face-to-face per site (from memory).
Match.com: more than 20
eHarmony: more than 20
POF.com: about 6
OkCupid.com: 1
Conclusion
All four sites were useful to me over the 4+ years I used them. Match.com and eHarmony were the most effective in terms of numbers. I preferred match.com, as I felt more involved in determining my matches. That involvement comes at the cost of time to actively search and filter.
However, just because eHarmony does the matching for you, it doesn't mean you spend less time. I'm sure that the majority of the matches eHarmony proposed to me were a waste of my time (incomplete profile, overweight, didn't reply to my communications after many days), etc. Add to the fact that eHarmony's site requires so many clicks to do things, the "screen time per match" is probably as high as match.com's (these are purely anecdotal guesses).
