Bravo.
Aaaaaand you win the thread. 
The more you have to pay to join the site, and the more hoops the site makes you jump through to talk to someone, the more serious the people on it will be. OKCupid has a lot of people on it who are seriously looking for quality companionship, but it also has a lot of people looking for hookups. Match.com, which makes you pay but not answer a ton of questions, has a lot of people looking for recreational dating. eHarmony, which makes you pay AND answer a back-load of questions, has people who are looking for serious relationships. It’s up to you what you want.
I met my husband on eHarmony.
Okcupid had an article on how dating sites work. Read it first before you get your hopes up.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/
I met my husband on Match.com three years ago. I liked it, and it worked well. There will be dud dates. It took me six months, a few bad dates, and a bunch of e-mails that never got returned. But I found him. And now we’re married.
It works. Just be patient… and willing to face a lot of rejection.
Nice. I enjoyed this.
I tried both Match and eHarmony back when I was still in the dating scene. Was then-31 year old male (still male, just no longer 31 ;)).
They’re both paid, but it’s not a lot of money, not really a concern on my part.
eHarmony, I hated. A very restrictive interface, too structured, you have hard character limits on very specific questions. The “survey” that they are so proud of is very generic and can be easily gamed to produce the results you are looking for. The matching system they use is quite random and set me up with people who clearly and explicitly (per my own survey!) were incompatible with my interests.
Worst of all, eHarmony caters to the brand of “I’m a special flower” online daters, i.e. those people who feel that they are so perfectly described in their profile as to not require photos in their description.
First, that description is again too generic to be useful-- like horoscopes, the stock answers can apply to anyone, and the limited short sentences you can actually type are just that-- limited and short.
Second, I admit, I’m shallow enough to want to know before I waste anyone’s time what my prospective date looks like. Physical attraction isn’t the only thing I look for, but it’s important (and I’m comfortable with it being equally as important to my date).
Match.com I liked much better. It’s far more freestyle, like most other dating sites, but that was a positive for me. I could write more about myself, and put some specifics in about me and who I was looking for. Plus, photos are the norm there, for men and women.
Yeah, it was a bit more of a “meat market” atmosphere, but careful reading was enough to sort out the flakes.
Anyway, I’ve been with my GF for four years now, a true Match.com success story, methinks. But YMMV.
Good luck!
I hate the layout of POF and Match. Ick. Loved, loved, loved OKCupid, and am now madly in love with someone I met there.
That really is a fascinating read. I’d be interested in seeing a response letter from Match or eHarmony.
That’s a really interesting read, and kind of confirmed what I’ve been thinking, but couldn’t articulate.
Actually, I didn’t find any of the dating sites helpful, not even the free ones. All my serious relationships I found “in real life”.
I’m a long-time OKCupid member who also hates the PoF interface: I tried PoF a few months ago, and quit within a week of joining. In the distant past I belonged to Match.com, and also tried Yahoo Personals at one point, but I’m not serious enough about dating to belong to anything other than OKC right now.
I miss the old The Onion Personals, though (Springstreet, IIRC). The company that took them over – FastCupid – changed the interface and implemented a stupid credits system that drove me away. I just looked, and apparently now they use something called Zoosk.
I didn’t spend a lot of mental energy following any of the math in this article, because I’m inclined to agree with them, but then I got to the part where they quoted Match.com as saying that “12 couples got married or engaged today thanks to Match.com.” And they said:
Um, what? Couples don’t typically get married and engaged on the same day, so they didn’t double-count anything.
At that point, I stopped reading.
12 couples got married or engaged this year due to match. Let’s assume, it was 6 and 6 and that each engagement lasted one year. What they are saying is that 6 couples got engaged last year and married this year. So they were counted in with the 12 from last year (as one of the engaged couples) and the 12 from this year (as one of the married couples). That’s what they mean by each couple being double counted. What the article is implying is that it should say 6 couples were married this year as a result of Match.
But, Joey P, Match didn’t claim that 12 couples got married or engaged “this year”: they specifically said today.
I didn’t notice that, but the point (that OKC is trying to make) remains. The people, included in that count, that got married today, were also part of the count the day they got engaged. That’s all.
Sure, but the point is that the portion of that 12 who got married that day was also counted in their statistics for couples that got engaged earlier. It’s a general across-the-board bolstering of their stats by grouping people who got married and people who got engaged together.
I suppose you could argue that those who get engaged don’t always go on to get married, but since those who get married almost always have gotten engaged in the past, it is somewhat misleading at the very least.
ETA: Also keep in mind that Match’s claim is an average, similar to “a baby is born every 3 minutes.” Obviously a baby isn’t born every 3 minutes on the dot, but the statistics can be broken down that way. So if Match.com finds that 4380 couples over the last year got married or engaged, that’s sufficient to say 12 couples per day. The fact that some couples would have gotten engaged in February and married in August inflates that number a bit. Maybe not so much that you could write it off as a full double-counting, but it’s still notable.
A different way of looking at this would be to think of a man trying to sell his chicken farm. He could say 100 eggs are laid or chickens hatch each day. But it would make more sense and be less misleading to day 50 chickens hatch each day. It’s farm whose end product is chickens and that’s what the numbers should reflect.
Match’s end product is, in theory, marriages and that’s what it should be counting.
Thats how I took it as well.
You can extend their claim to point out the bullshit. If they said “582 people at match.com started dating, got engaged or married today”, their inflation would be patiently obvious.
Take the credit, but dont take it repeatedly.
“4567 people at match.com met, started dating, got engaged or married today.”
Ooooh. I see. Thanks.
Is there where I defensively state that math is stupid and I was an English major and no one said there would be logic on this test? 
I could have told you that. As someone who tried online dating for precisely two seconds, I had to quit due to the unending deluge of idiotic messages, particularly from guys who had clearly not read my profile. I kept it brief on purpose, and it was still obvious that many were psycho-mailing everything with tits that wasn’t ugly. Guys are bad enough in person; guys with the shield of the internet are unbearable.
High-five, Sistah! I have emboldened what my single friends don’t seem to comprehend is the pervasive reality most single women experience. (And being a large-breasted woman, the shear numbers of psycho-babble I received was mind-numbing…