So you’ve decided to try online dating, only to discover that the field is saturated with special offers, membership deals, free trials and glamorous advertisements. How do you go about choosing which dating sites you want to join?
There’s a pretty simple method you can use to decide which free dating websites are right for you. The first thing you should do, before going anywhere near your credit card, is to join one of the free dating sites that are floating around.
Choose carefully, but use this as an opportunity to get a feel for how to approach people and communicate with them on a platform solely reserved for the purpose of matchmaking. This is not another social network, so you’ll find people are often more direct. Still, some adherence to social norms is necessary, so you need to figure out where these boundaries are.
Next, scope out some of the premium free dating available, and sign up to two or three (not more, or your inbox will be filled daily with emails and notifications and you won’t know which way to turn). Take their free trials to see what kind of functionality and member base the sites have.
Immediately you’ll notice that you can’t use all of the functionality straight away – things that allow you to communicate directly with other members are usually disabled.
What you want to look for in this case are dating sites that have only one or at most two levels of membership. That means you get access to everything with one payment, and you don’t keep getting suckered into paying for more and more upgrades.
If they want to give you read receipts on messages for an extra $5 a month, and live chat for another $5 a month, go elsewhere – plenty of other sites will offer these free with a basic membership.