Today, there is growing public concern over personal privacy on the internet. A problem with the majority of online dating sites is they require members to create a searchable public profile. By doing so, members effectively surrender control of their personal information. I am sensitive to the privacy issue, but there is also something disturbing about sharing a public profile with strangers who tend to superficially and subjectively evaluate its content. My disenchantment and preference for protecting my personal privacy are shared by a significant percentage of the 100 million single adults in the U.S. who currently avoid online dating.

For many single “professionals” exposing their personal lives on the public internet can be quite embarrassing or even career jeopardizing. For example: a lawyer avoids online dating because his colleagues will ridicule him if they find him on a dating site; a teacher is reluctant because students and parents can easily search and find information which could compromise her authority. For individuals who require an online dating experience with privacy, there is an alternative that embraces truly private online dating.

Sparkbliss helps discover meaningful companionship through your private circle of friends. It works like this: each member decides who can view his/her bio and thus makes romantic introductions on their behalf; members have complete control over whom they invite into their network. In an era where the online dating market appears largely satisfied, Sparkbliss is remarkable by using a private social network to bring together individuals of similar interests, backgrounds and values.

I would love it if you would send me your story, and YAY for happy endings.

I had incredible success using the online dating service that is attached to TheOnion.com. I believe it’s called Spring Street Personals and is accessible through other popular websites as well. It is very similar, from what I’m given to understand, to match.com. It’s worth checking out, I think!

Judie, if you still want to hear my story, I’ll email it to you! It’s a good one with a happy ending, I promise.

Man! I had that eHarmony was Hetero-only and it must have got dumped in one of my draft revisions. I’ll re-ad. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Congrats on finding a match! If you want to send more details for one of the next installments, I would love to hear more about your story.

I signed up for match.com just to give it a shot because I liked the ads and thought I’d give it a shot. Bear in mind that I am a woman and was looking for other women so it made my scope more narrow. I’d tried gay-only personals, but you saw the same 10 people everywhere, and I wasn’t impressed.

Match.com was ok, but I got a wink one day from someone. And to make a rather long story short, 7 months later we’re still going strong. And while I dont necessarily credit match’s methods, I think the accessibility and “hip and young” factor of their website is what made me sign up.

One other thing: Don’t forget that in addition to being anti-separated people, eharmony also won’t deal in same-sex pairings. For most people I recognize this is not a deal breaker but it should be known. Also, the founder of eharmony is a strong proponent of no sex before marriage. (I thumbed through his book back when I was a bookstore slave).

I think a few things have changed on eHarmony about the process…you’ll see. But I totally agree with you on the odd matching and lack of disclosure on some items (not just children).

I know there is lots more good stuff to come.

A couple things that I’ve really found annoying about the sites you mentioned:

eHarmony – It’s been a while since I was a subscriber – and I only used it for a little while. But when I was on it (complete waste of time and money imho) I think you could not see the other person’s pictures unless you were a paid member.

eHarmony also have a VERY lengthy process of what is essentially sending question and answer multiple choice quizzes to your matches. You go through several rounds of this until you get to “open communication” where you can freely email. I found the whole process exhausting. And my estimate of a week to get to open communication is an optimistic one – many people take weeks to fill out the questions. ZZZZZ.

For anyone shy about writing a profile , eHarmony is a pretty good choice. It’s just soooo damn generic. You cannot get any type of feeling about what the people like to do or who they are.

As an example of generic:
On eHarmony there is NO indication of whether the other person has children. I have two. They’re age 8. Do you think I’d match up with someone who had kids in the middle of high school (My experience: No). On eHarmony it can take you easily a week to get to the stage where you email each other (and ask some of these more detailed questions that their checklists doesn’t cover). Too long in my opinion. Also a big fat waste of time.

Reading eHarmony profile after profile (which are almost entirely bullet point listings with very little free form text) about how the person loves their family, likes to go to the gym, can stay in or go out. Well jeepers why don’t these profiles just say they like to breath. I mean they’re so generic and full of “me too” words that I found the profile text nearly useless.

What eHarmony is great for is the folks who are terrorized that their next door neighbor might be browsing a site and see their photo. Since eHarmony only exposes your photo to those you match with – there is very little risk of someone discovering that you’re online dating. It is also good for people who “don’t know what to write” in a profile (Tip: Write about anything that other people don’t – this makes you stand out).

When your profile text is generic (as I feel it is with eHarmony) you are in what I call (and you talk about) as the “Match beauty contest”. I would tell people that if they don’t have a good profile text that the only thing anyone would be able to go on is their photos (which most people choose poorly and ignore the “standard set of 3″ must have photos – head, body, candid).

Match – There are a lot of annoying things about Match. The biggest pet peeve I had back when I did OLD is that you could not view other profiles without having a membership yourself.

Now that membership doesn’t have to be paid – but you have to create a user name and login. And unless you hide it – the profile is viewable to everyone. I hated when a site required you to join just to view – which most of them do.

And one of Match’s features (which a user who is browsing cannot opt out of) is that your profile shows up on anyone’s page that you looked at in the “who’s viewed me”. For women I think this could cause unwanted attention if you’re looking at a profile out of shock or because it’s funny (in a bad way).

To me it isn’t anyone’s business if I’m looking at their profile.

(Note: On Match there is ONE way around showing up in the “who viewed me” and that’s to make your own profile “invisible”. But as soon as you make it visible again I think it shows up retroactively).

So after a while I fought back. When I was OLD I didn’t think it was anyone’s business if I was looking at their profile. And I did a LOT of profile reviews for people and didn’t want to be showing up as looking at their profile several times as if I were a creepy stalker.

Instead of logging in as myself, what I would do on Match was create an extra profile. But because I found profile writing fun – I was at least creative.

Here’s the guy that I used to use for browsing only (Note: This was a non-paying account and I NEVER contacted or did anything but browse with it).

http://tinyurl.com/44aldg

A couple other sites that deserve mention:

Plenty of Fish – plentyoffish.com – free (and freewheeling) – lots of casual daters. To me it seemed that 80% (or more) were there just to email or chat. The site also has some bizarre restrictions on what you can write in your profile and should you break the rules they’ll delete your profile without any warning or recourse.

Craigslist – craigslist.com – free and only a good spot for those very experienced with OLD. Almost all the profiles are pictureless — so you need to be experienced and know how to ferret out the creepy from the just plain weird from the potential matches.