Social Experiment - Dating Sites

I don’t know if I would have been considered “ahead of the game” but I used to use online dating sites several years before they were the widely accepted and mostly legitimate social networking gems they are today. This was in my single L.A. days, from 1999-2000. Back then being on one of those sites was really a source of embarrassment if any of your friends found out, so you simply did not tell people that you were doing it. The general consensus at the time was that those sites were full of perverts and dirty old men looking for quick and easy sex hookups. (Make no mistake, there was that element on there, but it was very much in the minority.) I actually created entirely separate email accounts and was very guarded about my identity whenever somebody emailed me. Not out of fear of my own safety, but out of fear that some wiseass friend had found me and was trying to play a trick on me. Even though I was mildly successful at the whole online dating thing – went on a couple of dates with some nice girls and ended up meeting one of my closest and most special friends in the world – I never told anybody what I was doing until well after I had stopped with the whole thing.

These days it’s kind of different. While people may not be announcing it to the world that they’re looking for love on the internet, for the most part they aren’t ashamed to admit to it. Online dating these days is kind of like voting for George W. Bush. Some people will admit to it proudly while others will do it sheepishly and with a long explanation.

I started down this train of thought last Friday night when a friend of mine was asking for help composing their profile for Match.com. Curious, I went over to the site and a couple others to look around and see what has changed since my last foray into the personals scene. All I have to say is, “Wow!” It’s obvious that what used to be a closely-guarded subculture has become quite legitimized. I mean, you can tell just from the plethora of dating site ads you see on just about every website out there. But when you click over, you realize that the trend has become so legitimate that the sites are actually charging for their services… and charging substantially for them. Pretty much every legit site I looked up charges anywhere from twenty to almost seventy dollars per month depending on the type of membership you have. Oh sure they say you can sign up for free, but if you actually want to be able to do anything beyond posting a profile, you have to pony up.

I can still remember when the dating sites were free. And I mean free free. Free to sign up. Free to view profiles. Free to post pictures. Free to communicate back and forth. FREE. I honestly don’t even remember what sites I used back then. They’re probably all gone now. I think MSN had a site as well as Yahoo and I had profiles on them. And they were both free. I think the dating sections were merely extensions of their regular email service. They didn’t have all the bells and whistles of today’s sites with 40-point personality compatibility comparisons and whatnot. You put in basic info like body-type, religion, height, and zip code, wrote a few paragraphs about yourself and posted a couple of pictures. But really, having looked at all those bells and whistles on the dating sites today, I can’t imagine ever using them, much less why they’ve caused the prices to skyrocket from nothing to obscene.

Actually, I did use a pay site one time. And it’s one that’s still around today. Friendfinder.com. In fact, looking at them now, they don’t seem like their prices have gone up that much. I think back in my day, a single month “silver” membership was something like fifteen bucks and then it went down from there depending on how long you signed up. Today a one-month silver membership is only twenty-two dollars – and it’s less than ten dollars a month if you sign up for a whole year. But I never paid for my time at Friendfinder. Even with a free bare bones membership you could accomplish a thing or two. Sure they limited you to the number of profiles you could look at in a single day and I think you were also limited to a single email per day. But that just meant you had to be judicious about who you clicked on and who you sent mail to. You managed your bookmarks carefully so you could send out your daily token email to your selected ladies and then you kept the rest in store for future days. And you made sure to frontload that lone daily email with all essential information. You gave them your email address and anything else they could use to contact you off the Friendfinder site.

Well those days are over. You can’t send any messages anymore from any site, as near as I can tell, if you ain’t paying. The reason I know this is because I’ve decided to conduct a little “social experiment.” I’ve posted a free profile on several dating sites. I’ll get into the specifics of the experiment in future blogs, but here’s what I’ve learned in the first 72 hours or so. To reiterate… if you don’t want to pay, sure you can spend your time creating a profile, and paying members might even be able to send you mail, but you will not be able to contact them back without coughing up the cash to do it. True.com will allow you a free three-day trial that allows you to send email, but you can’t actually send any contact information. Email addresses, websites, even the word “Google” gets caught and filtered so that all communication has to take place via the site… and once your trial ends, so does the communication. Match.com on the other hand doesn’t even give you that much. Within a half-hour of my profile being approved I received notification at my regular email address that I had a message waiting for me. But in order to read it, I had to sign up for a six-month membership (which costs over $120). Just to read the message. Oh, I also couldn’t even see who had sent me the message without paying. Now, can anybody else smell the scam all over this one? You know I would have signed up, paid my money and clicked on my email only to find out it was probably either a welcome message from Match.com or else a shill profile from some non-existent person designed to pique my interest so I would pay the membership fee.

Wow. It was a simpler time back then when people merely thought you were an online pervert. Certainly a less-expensive time. Anyway, over the next few… days… weeks… however long until I get bored with it, I’ll be filling you all in on this little “social experiment” I’m conducting on these dating sites. And just so you know, yes my wife is fully aware of what I’m doing. I’m showing her everything I post, every email I receive and every one I (attempt to) send out.

In my next blog (that pertains to this experiment) I’ll lay out my plan and why I thought it would be an interesting idea.