Free trial $1 per match (usually 4 matches per week)
Quality of Prospects
Ease of Use
Features & Extras
This dating site takes a more "scientific" approach than most others. When you join, you fill out a questionnaire with many types of preferences, rating each one in terms of importance in a love relationship. For instance, you may prefer tall people, but it's not terribly important to you; you may absolutely require your partners to be animal lovers, and so forth. In the profile, there are only three lines total allotted for your personal "essay," which in my opinion is way too little. But the idea here is that we aren't as good at picking compatible partners as the computer is, so by that criteria, the essay is the least important bit. They also say that singles are "screened," but I'm not sure what that means.
After you fill out the questionnaire, you wait two days for them to email you your first two or three matches. (Rather than purchasing a membership, you purchase a certain number of matches, which they mail to you every so often.) You can't browse or search profiles; you can only see the profiles they send to you as matches. There is no email system, IM system, chatroom, or anything else on the site. You email the matches you like from the site, and the site forwards the emails to the guy or girl's personal email address. When you receive a response, it goes to your personal email address. I gave it high points for "ease of use" because there really isn’t anything here you could possibly screw up. Likewise, "features and extras" gets a 1, because there really are no features or extras. But not everyone would find such things necessary.
You get four free matches when you fill out your free profile.
The bottom line is whether or not you're getting matched up with the right kind of prospects. In my time there, I've was matched up with 17 men, only two of which included a photo, and only perhaps five of which merited contact. After I emailed them, only one responded.
M.H., a 36-year-old hetero man from MA, felt that the matching system needed improvement. "Not that the matches were not nice and interesting persons. but compatibility certainly could be better, especially considering that this is what they consider their forte. Some of the suggested matches were several thousands of miles away."
M.H. was mostly happy with the ease of use, but noted that "login requires both a user name and a password which are assigned (not chosen) and cannot be changed by the user. Photos take several days before they are posted."
He agreed with me that the site design was no-frills. "They don’t let users browse profiles, there’s no chat or IM, and the space they allow for free essay writing is ridiculously small."
M.H. remains ambivalent. "The basic setup is very well thought out: users get to not only choose their own criteria, but also to determine how they are weighted in matching. The results did, however, not live up to my expectations. After the first few matches, compatibility decreased significantly. Only 1 in 4 women answered after I initiated contact."
This site is only set up for straight folks. In practice, I think it's much more like using a matchmaker than a dating site--and not a very astute matchmaker, at that. The system has potential, but I think OK Cupid does a better job of the same thing.
