Posted on March 12th, 2010 by Brad
Category: promotions
It’s time for another Free Communication Weekend at eHarmony. Starting on March 18th and running March 21st 2010, eHarmony users can communicate with all of their matches for free. This is actually 4 days of free communicating so it’s more of a Free Communication Long Weekend. The Free Communication Weekend officially begins at 12:01AM on Thursday, March 18th and ends on Sunday, March 21st at 11:59PM. This promotion is available for both the eHarmony in the United States and also eHarmony.ca for singles in Canada.
Remember that the communication process at eHarmony generally takes longer than at other free services so to give yourself the best opportunity you will want to start communicating on Thursday. Even sending out some communication requests Thursday morning before you head off for work could give you a big head-start on moving the communication along.
For those interested in making the most of this free weekend, check out my recent post where I discuss making the most of a free trial. I discuss Chemistry’s Free Trial in this article but the same rules apply for the eHarmony Free Events.
If you want to learn more about other free dating events, I keep a list of all the free events at popular dating services that I’ve discussed on this site . Good luck to all those who will be participating in the free weekend!
Posted on March 11th, 2010 by Brad
Category: dating links
Have I mentioned that your dating profile photo is pretty important? Yeah…apparently these folks didn’t get the memo: 25 Weird Dating Site Pictures
Referring to these photos as “weird” is being nice in my opinion. I’m not actually convinced that all of these photos are real. Even if only a few of them are legit that still means there are people out there who think these kinds of photos will work (or there are people creating profiles as a joke). Your photo is one of the most important parts of your profile…if you play games with your photo or get “weird” don’t be surprised if you don’t have much communication.
Hopefully everyone reading this is capable of recognizing when their photo has crossed into the twilight zone but if you’re not sure, be sure have a friend review your pictures!
Below is a chart listing online dating site prices. This table has been created to be used as a reference and to give singles an idea of how much each dating service might cost. These prices may change at any time so be sure to verify the actual cost before you subscribe to any service.
Notes on Pricing
Keep in mind that services that charge more often have earned the right to do so. For example, even though eHarmony prices are some of the most expensive, it had more visits in 2009 than any other dating service. This doesn’t make the cheaper services bad but it does mean that the more expensive services are most often worth the extra price. If you decide to use a cheaper service it may mean fewer members or less features but this isn’t always a problem. A site like CatholicMatch has less members but the members it does have are exactly what its users are looking for. In this case, less is actually better.
All prices are broken down by what you would pay per month. For example, 3 months at Yahoo! Personals is $19.99 per month so the total for the 3 month plan ends up costing $59.97.
Credit based system between 100 credits for $49 to 1000 credits for
$249. Credits used when contacting people.
Why Are Some Services “Recommended”?
The services I include in my Recommended section are those that I feel could lead to a success (in other words, the creation of a serious relationship). I do believe that the specialized dating services (niche sites) also lead to success but I can’t recommend them universally as they are specialized toward specific individuals. Finally, my “other dating services” section is the sites that I wouldn’t recommend for those looking for a strong relationship. For example, Established Men is a service that runs on trading beauty for wealth. I don’t see that as a wrong thing but I also don’t see that as the best way to find the right person for you. Not everyone is looking for a long-term relationship though so I include them here.
Why List Only One Free Dating Site?
I’ve thrown my hat in with OKCupid primarily because of how much I dislike Plenty of Fish. I think that OKCupid is leaps and bounds better than this “most popular” free service. I promote them because I like their service, I believe they actually enable people to find dating success (unlike their previously mentioned competitor), and I want to see some free service become popular enough to force Plenty of Fish to actually have to put an effort into their service. You can seem my complaints about Plenty of Fish directly here and more indirectly here.
Promotion Codes
If signing up for a service in the list that has a promotion code, be sure to enter that code. If the code isn’t entered, the discounted price will not be given.
Am I Missing A Dating Service?
If I’m missing a dating service that you really like or if my prices are incorrect, please contact me.
I’ve looked at my fair share of online dating profiles and I wanted to talk about one of the bad habits I see in many profiles: the plea for contact. There are many examples of this; some good examples but honestly most of the time when I see someone trying to encourage communication it isn’t done in a good way. Here are some of the more common ways people will attempt this:
If you decide to contact me, I’m very flattered.
Please contact me if you would like to chat.
I hope you decide to send me an email!
There are a few reasons this approach is a bad idea.
Reason 1: You Don’t Want to Appear Desperate
You might not be desperate but often your words will tell another story. Perhaps the wrong story but they still say something. I talk about this in my post Does You Online Dating Profile Say What You Think It Does? In some cases, asking (or even begging) people to contact you might not hurt your profile. However, remember that you are always fighting the bad impressions the people who have come before you have created. If a woman has had to deal with a weird guy or three, she’s going to be on the lookout for anything out of place. If a man earned himself an online stalker he’s going to start taking the same precautions. Having dated online actively, my experience has shown that there are far more normal people than weird. That said, it only takes one bad experience to open our eyes to what could happen on these online dates. After that point, I can guarantee you’ll be under the microscope. Read more »
There are some online dating sites that will automatically assign you a user name but most of the popular dating service (including Match and eHarmony) will require that you create your own user name. I recently had some traffic coming to my site where the people were obviously looking for the answer to that question so I wanted to briefly speak to this.
First, you need to keep in mind that your user name is not going to be very important in the grand scheme of things. Because of that, please don’t over-think this! No one is going to pick or reject you based on your user id and I personally can’t remember any user ids that have really jumped out at me. Generally speaking, you should make your user id whatever you want it to be. That said, I would say there are a few rules on what you shouldn’t make your user id.
Second, you should not reveal too much about yourself with it as others will see it. As an example, your first and last name or your home address would be bad ideas for your user name. Not that most people are going to use their home address but some people might enter their full name…make sure that person isn’t you. Read more »
How Do I Hide My Profile on Match.com?
As someone who signs up for services to review or test them, I’m very familiar with this process! To hide your profile:
1. Click on Profile at the top of the screen
2. On the left, you should see a section labeled Visibility Options. Simply click Hide Profile.
What Happens When I Hide My Profile?
There several things hiding your profile do but primarily it removes you from search results. You can still contact people when your profile is hidden but they won’t be able to look at your profile so that sort of defeats the purpose (so remember to make yourself visible if you start contacting people). Additionally, you will not be shown in people’s “Who’s Viewed Me” section. However, if you unhide your profile you will appear in this section for anyone you viewed. Keep this in mind if for some reason you’re hiding your profile in an attempt to not let people know you were looking at them! Read more »
Posted on March 5th, 2010 by Brad
Category: dating advice
Recently I’ve received quite a few questions from women on winks so I wanted to take the time to answer a few of those questions here. I’ve discussed my thoughts on winks in great detail but I wanted to cover these specific questions as well. I would recommend you read that article first as I cover the dynamics of winking in detail there. On to the questions:
Should I Wink at a Guy I Find Attractive?
My opinion on this one is simple: absolutely. I believe that women should also feel free to write emails as well but I recommend you stay within your comfort zone. If that means winking, then that’s what you should do.
Do Guys Like Winks on Match
I’ve never heard of a man who doesn’t like that a woman would flirt with him, and that includes online dating. Keep in mind that just because men like receiving winks it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to want to go on a date with you. You have to take a chance with online dating and as a woman if you want to contact a man but aren’t sure you want to write an email a wink is 100% appropriate.
How Should I Respond to a Guy’s Wink on Match?
My advice to men is that they not wink at women and that they should be writing emails. Men who wink first may be shy, timid, or they may just not understand how online dating works. As long as you’re okay with any of those possibilities, I would recommend you wink back and allow him the opportunity to email you. If he’s contacting you, I think the man should drive the conversation so I recommend giving him the chance to do just that. An exception to this is if you’re an assertive woman who doesn’t mind taking control. In that case, you should do whatever you want. I suspect not too many women of that temperament are asking this question in the first place, though.
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A few months ago I reviewed The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman and as I mentioned in that post, I thought the book was great. I know that my relationship with my wife has been improved because of it.
Recently, I was contacted the publisher of this book and they wanted to let me know about their online test. This will allow anyone to quickly discover which love language is their most dominant. Discovering your love language is interesting but remember that learning the love language of your partner is at least as important! I remember that I wasn’t surprised by my love language but I was surprised by my wife’s.
This test will ask questions about you “husband” or your “wife” but just fill that in with “the person you are dating” or “when you are married…”. I know most of my visitors are still single but the test will still work fine! The test requests your email but you can take it without giving it. I provided my email when taking the test and all they’ve sent me so far is my results so I think it’s pretty safe to provide it. That said, you can get your results without doing so.
Posted on March 3rd, 2010 by Brad
Category: dating links
Funny or Die has a hilarious parody of speed dating. Not sure how they decided on Werner Herzog (whom I wasn’t familiar with) and Bjork but I thought it was great.
I’m really learning to love OKCupid more every day. As I’ve written here in the past, it is my recommended free dating service. Aside from offering a great free dating option, they’re the only service that offers substantial statistics on the dating habits of their members.
In some ways I believe these statistics aren’t going to tell the whole story as I believe the type of clientele will differ from service to service. As an example, this article I’m about to discuss shows how online dating drops off at older ages…at OKCupid. Sites like eHarmony have been seeing a boom in older age groups so I’m not sure the stats are universal. Still, they’re providing more information in a week than any other dating service provides in a year. In some ways, they’re writing the book on online dating statistics. Most articles I’ve seen in the last 6 months, whether it’s a major publication or a blog like mine, ends up pointing back to OKCupid. Read more »
In my last post I discussed some of the good and the bad regarding the usefulness of Chemistry’s 14-day trial. This time I wanted to offer tips to those who do decided to take advantage of this offer. My hope is to provide advice that will help make the most of the dating service while it’s free.
1. Mention You’re Trying the Free Trial
One part that is difficult with any online dating service trial is that the people you contact don’t realize you may be gone soon. I would recommend briefly mentioning this in your profile, but in a way that works. Something like “I’ve always been interested in online dating and since I saw the free trial here, I thought I would try it for a few weeks”. This way, those who you contact realize there is an expiration date on how long you’ll be around to chat.
Note: Don’t complain or make some comment that you can’t believe you’ve signed up. This is a very popular thing to say in dating profiles but don’t be one of the people doing it. First, it comes off as insecure. Second, it adds nothing of substance to your profile. Third, others have signed up and may not have had any problem doing so. If you claim that signing up requires desperation, you’re saying that they must be desperate. It’s not going to win you any points no matter how you look at it. Simply state that you thought it sounded interesting so you’re giving the trial a try.
As of today, Chemistry offers a 14 day trial to try out their service for free. Recently I received the question: Is the Chemistry.com free trial worth it? At first, I thought this was an odd question. If it’s free, how could it not be worth it? However, the more I thought about it the more I realized the real answer is “it depends”.
Can I Have Success with Chemisty.com in the 14-Day Trial?
This is the question that was actually being asked and I suspect this is what many people mean when they ask if it is worth it. They’re really asking: Is it possible to use Chemistry.com for 14 days, meet that special someone, and then be done with online dating altogether? To these people, a free trial to a dating service that doesn’t end in relationship success won’t be worth it. With that in mind, to those people I say, no it probably isn’t worth it to you. Anything is possible (see my example at the bottom) but honestly, if this is how you’re measuring the worth of the free trial then it’s likely not going to be what you’re looking for.
The issue with services like Chemistry.com is that they limit the number of people you’ll be able to contact. eHarmony does the same exact thing. This is a part of the service and it’s actually a selling-point for using a service like this. Quality over quantity is what these services are selling and that’s great, you just need to understand what you’ll be looking at using a service like this.
The limitations of these services is why they are the most common to give away free weekends. The free weekend is great (and they really don’t have to do it) but because you are limited by both time and matches very few people are going to be able to line up a substantial number of dates in a 3-day period. Yes, a 14-day period does give you more opportunity and I’m sure there are people who have found great relationships using the free trial…it’s just not easy. Even at a site like Match.com where you can contact whoever you want, it takes most people a substantial amount of time to meet someone great for them. Read more »
Writing your online dating profile can be a tricky thing. Many of us feel fine discussing ourselves in conversation but put us in front of a computer screen with a few text boxes to fill and we freeze up. I believe that writing a profile from the heart is the best option as it will better show who you are. However, I also know that this can be a difficult process. In this article, I’m going to go step-by-step to creating a basic online dating profile with the goal that even though I’m writing this guide it will still be personal enough to reveal to your potential dates who you are.
Before I begin, I was to recap very briefly the rules I lay out in my online dating guide for creating your profile. I go into great detail into each of these areas there so I’ll just recap here:
Online Dating Guide Profile Recap
Rule
Description
Avoiding Elimination
Don’t feel that you have to reveal every last detail about yourself.
Brevity
Your profile should only take a minute or two to read. If your profile contains screens full of text you’ll want to think about slimming it down.
Avoid Confusing Jokes
Don’t obsess with trying being funny. You’ll have plenty of time to win them over when you’re communicating. Trying to be funny hurts far more profiles than it helps.
Stay Positive
Being negative in your profile can give people the wrong impression of your personality. Remember: your profile is their first impression of you.
What You Aren’t Looking For
Don’t list everything you don’t want. Profiles written like drive away contacts. Again, be concerned with the first impression you’re providing.
Be Honest
Don’t use pictures that are 5 years old, don’t lie about your appearance or height or whatever. You will meet some of these people and their first thought when they meet you if you do this will be that you lied to them.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of what you should be keeping in mind as you write, let’s begin looking into a simple way to create your profile. Read more »
This article asks the question: Can Twitter replace online dating sites? My first thought to this prior to reading the article was: weren’t people asking this same question about MySpace a few years ago? As I had mentioned back then, people also meet in grocery stores but that doesn’t mean grocery stores are going to replace bars, clubs or singles events. And so my first thought to this question was a resounding “No”.
However, after reading the article I’ll say that the author makes some good points. The argument seems to be that heavy users of Twitter (referred to as Twitter addicts in the article) will be better served by meeting people on Twitter itself and I can agree with that. However, that’s a lot different than suggesting Twitter would replace online dating altogether. That would be like saying World of Warcraft is going to replace online dating. Sure, there are millions of people playing and, sure, I have actual friends who have married after meeting in-game but it hardly has the reach to suggest it’s going to replace online dating…or even dent it.
And my opinion is that Twitter is exactly the same. The casual Twitter user will be better served by a real dating service but the Twitter “addict” will likely be better served by Twitter itself. If the question had been phrased something like “Can Twitter replace online dating sites for its most faithful users?”, the article makes a good argument that the answer to that is “Yes”.
On that note, if you love Twitter be sure to check out the article – it might give you some great ideas. On the other hand, if you’re a casual Twitter user like me, don’t expect much to change in the online dating world for you.
Update:LemonDrop has an article with more thoughts regarding dating and Twitter (apparently it’s called Flittering?).
Posted on February 25th, 2010 by Brad
Category: rambling
I’m not a big fan on relationship quizzes but the geek in me couldn’t pass up the super-hero relationship quiz at ComicVine.com. I matched 100% with Batgirl which I’m not so sure is a good thing based on the description! Actually, I think if my wife sees that description she might not like it either!
Posted on February 24th, 2010 by Brad
Category: dating advice
YourTango has a good article on Twitter Top 10: Who To Follow For Dating Advice. I thought this was a pretty good list and I guess more and more people will be looking to collect advice, dating or otherwise, using Twitter. Of course, you can always follow me too! Honestly, though, I’m not the best tweeter and generally only tweet my new posts so the list above would probably be more useful.
A recent article shows how online dating is gaining ever more acceptance. As someone who has been defending online dating for five years, I think this news is great:
If you spent Valentine’s Day looking for love online then you are among the one in three Internet users who regard the web as a good place to find a relationship, according to a new study.
The BBC World Service global poll showed that 30 percent of web users regard the Internet as a good place to find a boyfriend or girlfriend.
I’ve been able to watch these changes over the last few years and while I believed acceptance was growing. It’s good to see statistics that back it up. As a personal example, when I was dating online I always felt like I had to hide it. Eventually I decide that was rediculous and started sharing my experiences…and it didn’t always go over well. Later when I was dating Kate (who would become my wife) when we explained that we had met online we were actually met with silent stares a few times. I still talk to people about online dating and over the years I’ve found this type of response to slowly disappear. Years ago when I started this blog talking about online dating was often met with confusion or discomfort but today it’s met with interest and lots of questions (especially from singles). Read more »
How To Sleep Alone
The Dating Papers offers some general advice on how to sleep alone. I’ll admit that when I was single I had a bad habit of staying up as late as possible…sleeping alone just isn’t fun. Still, you’ve got to do it sometime. This article offers some advice for this.
Co-Sleeping
This article discusses a rather…humorous…part of sharing the bed with someone and asks how to handle a potentially awkward situation while spooning.
The Cuddling Kama Sutra
While we’re on the topic of cuddling, I wanted to share a hilarious video that also has some pretty good advice hidden in it. I found this video extremely entertaining:
Posted on February 21st, 2010 by Brad
Category: rambling
Here in Pittsburgh it seems like we’ve been under several feet of snow for several months now. Not only that, I actually managed to be in Philadelphia last December when they were covered with the blizzard that happened then (little did we know it would only be the start of all the snow they’d be seeing!). Today the snow is starting to melt and I hope that trend continues. Parking on my street is a real nightmare! Fortunately, Pittsburgh residents (well, most of them) respect the chair rule which I think helps us avoid a lot of fights.
Our miniature wiener dog who wasn’t sure what to make of things either! He’s just as happy as we are to see the snow piles melting a bit…especially considering every time he has to do his “business” it’s a chilling experience. He’s too low to the ground even when we clear him a spot!
Here’s a few of Brownie (we keep him warm as best we can):
Over at Mashable, there was a poll that asked users which was better: Match.com or Plenty of Fish. Their results showed that, at least among their readers, that Plenty of Fish is the better service. I find this rather disturbing: I look at (or read about) dating services almost every day and I have to say that Plenty of Fish is absolutely my least favorite dating service. My article on 5 Signs Your Dating Service Might Suck was actually based in large part from my experience using and testing Plenty of Fish.
My assumption is that those who voted (which is a much, much lower number than their normal poll results) have little or no experience with these dating services and were voting on the idea that free offers more value since the cost is….well, zero. And yeah, if an online dating service is free and offers nearly the same results as a pay service than it absolutely has more value. However, I feel that Plenty of Fish takes away value for those who use the service. I’ve never heard of any who has had real relationship success with it and it bombards its users with questionable advertising: to me, it’s a big waste of time. I think it gives people who have never dated online previously the very wrong impression as to what online dating is all about and it has convinced a few of my friends online dating doesn’t work at all. In other words, I think that people are worse off after having used the service than before which means, to me, that if Match.com offers any value at all it would have to be considered better. Read more »
