Online Dating Blog

Here’s an interesting article over at The Hill that discusses how the recession has affected online dating. There are many interesting facts in this article such as Match.com has 56% male members and that when the economy suffers a blow, such as a day where the stock market is down, activity on dating sites goes up. From the article:

A December 2008 national study conducted by eHarmony and Opinion Research Corp. found that, of more than 1,000 adults polled, 19 percent of unmarried men and 25 percent of unmarried women wanted to be in a long-term relationship more as a result of the current economic climate.

In November 2008, Match.com experienced its largest membership growth in the last seven years, with men accounting for 56 percent of subscribers.

During the same period, eHarmony discovered that page views went up nearly 2 percent on days when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 100 points or more, compared with days when the Dow increased by the same amount.

As the article points out, people are still dating but instead of dinner and a movie they are going for coffee. My experience dating online actually let me to coffee shops even while the economy was still good: if you’re going on 2 or 3 first dates a week anything more than this starts to hurt your wallet.

Some people believe they must have “exciting” dates to have a chance but the dates are really what you make of them. On my best dates, I know we could have been anywhere and had a good time just because there was such a great connection. Likewise, on the bad dates even spending our evening at the nicest restaurant in town would matter little if we weren’t connecting. So while the economy does provide even more reason to keep the first dates simple, it’s been my rule ever since I started having serious success. Also, don’t feel like you need to spend excessive amounts of money to have success online! Start an OKCupid account, start having coffee and see where it takes you!