Have you ever run across one of those dating service review websites? I don't know about you, but I just don't get much from them. Oh sure, they give you a run down on all the features of the sites and so on, but they're all pretty much the same and I am left wondering which one to pick. What do I do? Flip a coin?
So I decided to run a very unscientific test. After much persuasion I was able to arrange for my two sisters (Amy and Beth), my brother (Robert), and my aunt (Debbie) to join me in a 4-week round-robin extravaganza of Christian dating.
Each of us was to join the following 5 Christian dating websites for 1 month: Big Church, Christian Cafe, Christian Mingle, Metrodate, and Matchmaker. We were each to go on 3 dates per dating site and score the date (1 - 10) according to a single criterion: would we want to continue dating that person?
This seemed like the ultimate question. I mean who cares how cool the chat room is or how many activities the site organizes or any of that stuff. The whole purpose for using a dating site is to meet fun and attractive new people. People we'd actually like to go on dating regularly.
My siblings and I are aged 20 - 25. My aunt Debbie is 41.
Finding dates at the various sites was not a problem at all. And so it began, 15 dates in 4 weeks.
I could probably write a book about our experiences. Each date had it's elements of humor, confusion, misunderstanding, irritation, and surprise. Some were boring. Some bordered on exhilarating. All of us (except for Beth - who is very discriminating and very hard to please) met someone who we continue to date to this day. That surprised me.
The candidates were all generally well-mannered, presentable, attractive, and polite. As the dating continued throughout the month I knew how my own scoring was going and that one site in particular seemed to be dominating. This also surprised me because as I said, all the sites looked the same to me and all the candidates seemed the same
at first blush. I expected a fairly even distribution but I was not getting that.
When the month was over we met at the kitchen table to tally our
results:
Big Church 73
Christian Cafe 58
Christian Mingle 117
Metrodate 62
Matchmaker 68
Why did the results end up this way? I have no freaking idea.
This is obviously a relatively small sample size. But as I said, I was not expecting to see this. I am certain that there are people every day who do find what they're looking for at each and every one of these sites. This was just my small real-world test and all of us are happy that we went through with it (except for Beth who remains - very hard to please).
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