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Which Dating Site?
The Internet is packed with a dazzling array of dating and sites
services. Some of these are of fantastic quality, offering exciting
and often mildly addictive methods for contacting and meeting people
you almost certainly would never reach in the normal scheme of things,
some are run on a much smaller scale, offering little more than a
"post-your-picture-and-see-what-happens" service. There are also those
services (which are exclusively free) which are little more than yet
another way of getting your details so that they or their commercial
partners can attempt to sell you products. Let's be clear here;
there's nothing wrong with these "fun" sites, some of them are
appealing and a great diversion, but if you're looking for a life long
spouse, you're probably going to search on long time if you limit
yourself to this last type of site.
Do's
And Don'ts When Choosing A Dating Site
Do
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Post a profile - if you're a heterosexual woman, you'll get a
large number of responses, especially initially. It's worth doing
this whether you're a man or a woman, because even if you've
contacted someone yourself, the person you've contacted will
probably want to find out a little about you before going any
further and the easiest way of doing this is to be able to be able
to click on your profile.
-
Be prepared to contact other members, ESPECIALLY if you're a
heterosexual man. Men outnumber women significantly on internet
dating sites, so if you are male and choose only to post a profile,
you may not get a large number of responses. Take the initiative and
contact the people you like, but check out the site's database to be
sure there is a sufficient number of high quality contacts to be
worth your while before shelling out money.
-
Try to find out as much as possible about member statistics
before you commit yourself. We've found that some sites are more
than a little liberal in their interpretation of how many members or
users they have. Calculations can include the number of members that
have ever subscribed to the site or even the number of "hits" the
site has had. What you're interested in is the number of active
members on the site; that is, the number of people who are actually
using the site on a regular basis - a common rule of thumb for
defining "active" is those who've visited the site at least once in
the last 30 days. Many sites don't lay this information out for you
(they are especially cagey about their male:female ratio), but you
can get an idea by doing a search for the type of people you're
looking for, then checking out individual profiles for information
about when they became members or when they last visited the site.
Dont
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Turn your nose up at smaller specialist sites e.g Latino, asian
sites. These are often good value for money, sometimes have special
features (e.g Spanish/English real time chat translation), and if
you're looking for someone with particular characteristics, these
sites may do the job better than the more generalist sites.
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