Online Dating Blog

I’ve been bothered lately by Plenty of Fish. I don’t mind that the site has been successful but I do hate when I talk to someone and they say, “Yeah, I tried online dating at Plenty of Fish. I guess internet dating just isn’t for me. The problems were [insert a list of issues here]”.

Here’s the thing: in my opinion Plenty of Fish is a far better example of successful internet marketing than it is of online dating. If I knew someone looking to make money on the internet, I imagine Plenty of Fish would come up in our conversation. However, if someone were looking for finding love online this site would not be a part of the conversation, not from my end anyway. I believe that the motivation of Plenty of Fish becomes very clear after spending a few minutes on the site (that motivation is not providing its users with a good chance of finding love, by the way).

So if this service isn’t good, what free dating service is? If you’ve read the title of this post you already know where I’m going. As you’ll see, I really love OKCupid.

Why? To be honest, I didn’t even look at the service seriously until a few months ago. Regrettably, when people would ask me about a free dating site I would recommend Plenty of Fish because it was the only one I knew of. I also assumed all the free services would basically be the same and since Plenty of Fish had the most members, I thought I was giving good advice. After looking into OKCupid because of their repeated release of dating statistics, I realized not all free dating services are the same (not even close).

So what makes OKCupid so great? When using OKCupid I feel that their goal really is to help singles meet each other (as opposed to the goal of getting advertisements in your face). The site is well-designed and has many excellent features that even the pay sites don’t have. Here are some of the features I love:

• The fact that you determine what is important to you within the matching system is brilliant. Instead of a predefined list of questions to answer to define your personality, you answer as few or as many from a list of thousands and you determine how important each of those questions are in regards to providing you with matches.
• The site creates a community of singles that are looking to date but are also having fun (when using the site, see the Journals section for examples of this).
• They actually give you an indication of how often people respond to emails. This is brilliant. So many times when I was dating online I would become depressed when I didn’t receive as many responses as I thought I should. I now believe not receiving responses is just another part of online dating and this feature helps prove that.
• When viewing a profile, you will be shown similar matches but with an explanation on how they differ from the current profile. Some examples include things like “more compassionate”, “more selfish”, “less interested in sex” and so on.
  
• The Tests help lighten the mood and encourage people to open up. They’re fun too.
• Interaction is encouraged. You can even buy a monthly subscription for other people. I’m not sure why one would want to do this but when even the subscription page includes interaction with other people, it’s hard to deny their commitment to interaction.
• You can save notes about other people. This would have been a wonderful feature for me when I was dating many women simultaneously. Fortunately, I never had one of those embarrassing moments where I confused one woman for another but I was always paranoid I would.
• You can link your OKCupid account with your Facebook account.

There are a few down-sides to the site:

• They don’t have as many members as other services (Plenty of Fish has more). This doesn’t matter much in my opinion. You reach a point where enough is enough. The fact that a service has 5 million members versus another with 10 million really doesn’t matter that much.
• The service is only free up to a point. There are limits on the number of emails you can have in your inbox and some of the features, such as giving other user’s prizes, are limited to paid accounts. You’ll also see advertisements unless you pay for the service. The good side is the monthly service fee is $10 which is a third the price of some monthly fees…and one-sixth the price of some of the more expensive sites.

Using OKCupid – Four Simple Steps

Signing up for and using OKCupid is a painless process. If you’ve been using one of the other free sites or if you’re just looking to give online dating a try, take the following steps. Each of these steps will be described in greater detail below.

1. Fill in your profile which is straight-forward. Be sure to include photos. This is one of the most important things you can do to improve your success.
2. Once you have your profile created, it’s time to start answering questions. The more the better!
3. After answering some questions you could now take some tests. These are more fun than anything else and not required by any means.
4. Start contacting people!

More Details on Using OKCupid

Creating Your Profile
The profile questions are fairly standard. Some stand out such as “You should message me if”. A few profiles answered this question in such a way that would have affected my decision to contact them (were I single, obviously). Other sections are unique such as “I am good at” and “The six things I could never do without”. The heading for the profiles is also a nice change of pace from other dating sites. Instead of creating your own heading they have you enter three words to describe yourself. This removes some of the pressure of trying to have a heading that stands out (which I think is difficult to do sometimes). Again, include a photo if you’re serious about meeting people!

Answering Some OKCupid Questions
OKCupid’s matching system is unique and in my opinion quite good. Where services like eHarmony and Chemistry.com have pre-defined personality questions they use to decide who to match you with, at OKCupid you can choose which questions to answer and how much they should matter when being matched to others. The basic process is as follows:

1. You’re presented with a question that you will answer via multiple choice answers.
2. You then answer the same question as you would want an ideal match to answer the question.
3. Finally, you rank how important it is to you that your matches meet your requirements for them. You choices here range from irrelevant (how they answer won’t affect your matching score) to mandatory.

As you answer more questions, you will be provided with a score for your highest possible match. I answered questions until I got to the high 90s. Obviously the more questions you answer the better your matches will be. After answering 40 questions I had many women ranking in the high 90 percentages for matching me but I think I still needed to answer more questions after viewing a few of these profiles. Also, you should answer the questions honestly. Don’t mark everything as irrelevant just because you want to be as inclusive as possible. There are a ton of people using the service and you’ll do yourself a favor if you’re actually finding the people with the traits you want. After you fill in a significant number of questions you can do a Match Search and see who you’re matching well with.

You will also notice that some people will have an Enemy score for you. I didn’t see any clear definition on what raises the Enemy score but I have a pretty good guess. When you mark a Question answer as being mandatory but they answer the question differently, your enemy score will go up. It may only go up when you both mark the question mandatory but with different answers. I believe this also will be the case, to a lesser degree, when your potential match marks a particular answer to a question as having high importance but you answer differently. When you see someone with a high Enemy score this means that there will definitely be conflict between the two of you on some areas that you both consider important. For example, if you want children and mark this as mandatory but they don’t want children and also mark that as mandatory, you’re enemy score will go up. As you can see, having a higher Enemy score doesn’t mean you wouldn’t get along but it could mean big problems once you’re in a relationship together.

Here are some sample questions I answered:

• How Important is Honesty?
• What has been your primary motivation in life to this point?
• Do you, which adjective best describes hopeless, unrequited love?
• Do you generally smile at little kids who cross your path?
• If you were to die, would whoever goes through your personal belongings be shocked by what they find?
• Would you date someone if you knew they were a current drug user?

There are over 3,000 questions to answer. If you can answer a hundred honestly I think you’ll find some very strong matches. How you answer the questions defines your “Personality Traits” which are another fun feature that also reveal more about you and your matches. You can see a full list of the personality traits here. The more questions you answer, the more personality traits you’ll be assigned.

OKCupid Tests

From what I can see, Tests don’t help finding a match much. OKCupid is more than just a dating site…it’s something of a social community. You’ll find people who love taking these tests and many of these tests can reveal things about them (even if that might be how obsessed they are with a particular movie). Taking tests isn’t very important to getting better matches but they can help others know more about you once they’re viewing your profile.

Contacting Someone
Again, this is fairly standard. As I mentioned above, one feature I love is that as you start to write a message you’re a shown the frequency at which the person replies to emails. This is really helpful in my opinion. The site also has winks which I’ve discussed in great detail in my online dating guide.

Final Thoughts
I think that pay sites will always have an advantage in the clients that use them. I believe that at a strictly pay site you will find people far more serious about a relationship. Sites like eHarmony have a much, much higher percentage of like-minded individuals committed to finding a relationship. As great as OKCupid is, the women there still get bombarded with “Want sex wit you…?” emails where men seemed convinced that the inability to use the English language and the ability to get laid are tightly linked. These women then get de-sensitized to being contacted which in turn hurts the men who are serious about relationships. In some ways, a free service can never fully get away from the fact that many of its members will not take things seriously and will adversely affect other members. Still, for the things which are in OKCupid’s control, I think they do a fantastic job.

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