So a few days ago I tried a dating site for the first time in my life.
Here's my initial and still developing view.
The site I tried is OkCupid.
Here's my review:
It's free - it's cost nothing unless you want "special features" which are really just irrelevant bells and whistles and are not necessary at all.
It has a huge member data base - this is obviously important if you hope to find someone. The bigger the sea, the more potential fish there are. This is especially true if you don't live in a large city.
The profiles - I largely like the way the profiles are set up. The site encourages you to write down various things and answer a few basic questions and a few questions which encourage more creativity.
The match questions - Besides the standerd profiles, the site encourages the members to answer at least a few of the many match questions made by either site makers or members. These are questions over a wide range of important topics, from questions about ethics, religion, relationships, and personal history, to those regarding intelligence, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Some questions are leud or just plain stupid, but you can always skip a question if you want. Then, when you search for people, their profile picture comes up and 3 percentages come up - % match, % friend and % enemy. I'm not sure exactly how they come up with the 3 percentages, but it's obvious that 2 people who answer questions similarly will have a high percent match. So when I see a girl who looks cute who has a high percent match, I'll click on their profile. From there I can also see the exact questions they answered and how their answers relate to mine. So a question many people answer regards abortion - a topic hugely important to me - which is good, so right away I'll know this person's stance on abortion and any number of other issues. In my opinion this feature is probably the best on the site. None of the questions are mandatory, and so the site users have a lot of control, which I also really like.
In 3 days I've sent about 9 girls messages (some of which I did put quite a lot of thought into). I've really looked closely at their profiles and they seemed to share a lot of my interests, morals and they all are Christian. I've only recieved one reply. This makes me think that girls - especially the ones that have a lot going for them - rarely respond to guy's messages. That's a bit disheartening as a guy, but understandable since they're likely recieving a lot of messages in a day.
Overall I'd say that a OkCupid is a good complement to finding people the old fashion way. I did chat with a girl there who said that she had used OkCupid and other dating sites for 2 years with little success. She said she found nice people that way, but no one she wanted to date. She's now dating someone she just randomely bumped into one day - not someone she met online. So I think the moral of her story is that online dating should be used as one of a few avenues a person might persue in finding a significant other, and should not be used as the sole method. For guys especially, I can imagine it is tough sending messages to girls who rarely send one back. I wasn't feeling good when, after I had sent messages to 9 different girls, I hadn't heard back from one (one finally did reply later). It's a tough feeling. So I'd also add that if you take part in an online dating website, it's good to have thick skin, because you'll probably experience failure before you find success, if you ever do.
Hope this helps.
