People devote billions of hours every year looking for love online, yet almost no one understands how online dating sites are rigged to keep you looking for love as long as possible so they can wring every possible dollar from your wallet. I have some things to say about this subject that you won't hear from anyone else. Even if you have years of experience in online dating and think that you know everything you need to know about it, trust me, you don't. Ready for an eye opener?

The basic process of online dating seems so simple and straightforward that you may think that you are wasting your time reading about it. However, it is obvious to me that very few people truly know as much about it as they should. I won't bother telling you about the well-known drawbacks of online dating, such as how often people lie about their height, weight, or income level. Instead, I will focus on how people seem utterly oblivious to the games played by the online dating sites that decimate your chance of finding love online.

How do I know that people are oblivious to those games? Because many sites would go out of business in a heartbeat if people understood them! Those sites owe their continued existence to their ability to keep people in the dark about how they really work. If people understood how the cards are intentionally stacked against them, they wouldn't waste their time.

Almost universally, the paid dating sites work like this: It's free to post a profile, but only paid members can contact others. Simple and straightforward, right? No! It's what they don't tell you that makes it deceptive. Yes, as a paid member you can write to others, but all too often the recipients cannot respond or even read what you wrote unless they are also paid members. The vast majority of posted profiles are from free members, not paid ones, so as much as 95% of the messages you send on various sites are doomed from the get-go!

Sure, the recipients could pay to read the message or respond, but that happens once in a blue moon (1). For example, I placed a personals ad on one of the big-name dating sites several years ago, and a few times per year that site notifies me that I have a new message. I can't see the message unless I pay, nor can I even see their profile text or picture. So why should I pay to read a message from someone who could be a 400-pound scammer who lives in Nigeria? A customer service rep from that site explained that, as a paying member, I could write to others. Duh! Of course, but 95+% of the women receiving those messages can't see what I wrote, my profile, or my picture. Why? Because 95+% of their profiles are from free members! Why should those women pay to read what I wrote? They don't know if I am a doctor and a nice guy or a semi-illiterate inmate on death row.

Frustrated by that site, I joined others and discovered other gotchas (2) after I wasted inordinate amounts of time and money, just as millions of others have done and continue to do. Rather than just complain about the games played by the online dating sites, I decided to do something about it and created two free sites that are a dream come true for online daters and a nightmare for the online dating sites because it threatens to kill their cash cow. Most dating sites generate income by forcing users to pay to contact others—or to try to contact others, as I mentioned above. I invented various ways that enable you to contact people that you've noticed on personals sites and other Internet pages without the need to pay those sites or to create an account with them—thus saving you time, since it usually takes from 15 minutes to 2 hours or more to create a profile on one site.

Interestingly, if you have a profile posted on any site, you may already have messages waiting for you on one of my sites (www.ContactMeFree.com), written by people who wish to meet you. Huh? How can someone send a message to you on a site that you never have seen before? I created technology that allows people to send messages even if the intended recipient does not yet have a ContactMeFree account. Messages waiting for you are stored on my server and are released to you only if you create an account. If you do that, those messages instantly appear in your inbox. Nifty, isn't it?

ContactMeFree can help you meet more people, too. People who pay fees to personals sites usually assume that a paid membership allows them to reap the full potential of a site. That's not true, because online dating is a two-way street: you contacting others, and others contacting you. If you are a paid member of a personals site, you can almost always contact other paid members. However, you cannot always contact free members, nor can they contact you. Only a fraction of the members at any given site are paid members, so most of them can't contact you. According to one source, less than 5% of the people who post profiles pay for a membership.

Paying for a personals site membership also does nothing to help you connect with the nonmembers who see your profile while surfing. What if a great match saw your profile and would love to contact you, but she is a free member or surfer (that is, someone with no profile on that site) and doesn't want to pay to become a member, or perhaps not even post a profile so you might eventually spot her? You might never meet that perfect person unless you post your profile on ContactMeFree. There are now almost 1000 personals sites, and some of these sites have millions of members and countless visitors. Therefore, it is obvious that becoming a paid member of a personals site does not maximize your odds of meeting the perfect match. Plenty of people will see your profile that you will never see, so you can't contact them. If you make it easy for them to contact you by creating a ContactMeFree profile, you can multiply your chances of meeting your best possible match.

Let's say that you are a free member of a paid personals site. Can you contact paid members? No. Can you contact free members? No. Can free members or surfers contact you? No, again. If you use ContactMeFree in conjunction with that site, you can contact paid and free members, and people who see your profile while surfing can contact you.

ContactMeFree can also be independently used as a free dating site. You can search by specifying the usual criteria such as age or location, but you can also search for people who include certain key words or key phrases in their profile. For example, if you want a partner with great legs, type great legs or I have great legs into the search box. The text searching tools on ContactMeFree are great for finding people whose interests or attributes may not fall into one of the checkbox categories on typical dating sites.

ContactMeFree isn't just for online daters. You can also use it to contact former classmates and co-workers, friends you've lost touch with, and old flames. If you meet someone at a party, and wish to allow that person to contact you without revealing your phone number or e-mail address, ContactMeFree can do that, too. It's also useful if you post text on an Internet newsgroup or some web page, and wish to receive replies without divulging your e-mail address or other contact information in your posting. In fact, ContactMeFree is an alternative to e-mail that allows you to receive personal messages but no spam.

Speaking of spam, I developed another site (www.myspamsponge.com) that can stop all of your spam and help you meet people online and offline, too. MySpamSponge is a new way to communicate via the Internet that's free, easy to use, protects your privacy, and blocks all spam but never any legitimate messages. It also permits you to do certain things that you might think are impossible, such as giving you the ability to leave your contact info in places where it would be foolish to leave your e-mail address, such as in chat rooms, blogs, forums, guest books, discussion lists, and more. Legitimate users can contact you just as easily as if they were using e-mail, but spammers cannot.

How is that possible? With MySpamSponge, you communicate using handles instead of e-mail addresses. A handle is essentially a contact code that gives people a way to contact you via e-mail without you having to reveal your e-mail address. Similarly, you can send a message by using the recipient's handle as the address (mine is doctor, by the way). It's a simple yet powerful concept. If everyone follows my two-step plan to wipe out spam, the spam problem will be solved forever. If you follow my two-step plan to wipe out spam, your spam problem will be solved today.

MySpamSponge also solves a problem that affects almost everyone who is looking for a partner: You're out in public someplace, and see a person that you want to meet. What do you do? Well, if you're like most people, you say nothing, walk away, and later regret being so timid. The person you passed up might have otherwise become your spouse, or just a great friend.

Here's my solution: hand that person your MySpamSponge intro card (see below):

Card front (3)

Card back

Your intro card allows you to communicate with that person without the need for either of you to reveal your e-mail address or other personal information to one another. That makes the person more likely to respond, if he or she is interested.

You can read more about MySpamSponge intro cards on this page (www.myspamsponge.com/introcards.php), and learn more ways to meet offline here: www.myspamsponge.com/meet_offline.php. I strongly encourage you to also read the FAQ page: www.myspamsponge.com/faq.php.

Incidentally, ContactMeFree has similar intro card functionality, which is described on this page: www.contactmefree.com/intro2.php.

I created another site (www.myprofilewriter.com) that makes it easy to do two things that most online daters find difficult: create a catchy headline, and write a good profile that will attract more people. In fact, you can compose a profile without typing, just by clicking.

The Truth about Online Dating

The February/March 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind (4) contained an interesting article entitled “The Truth about Online Dating (5),” by Robert Epstein, Ph.D., a researcher, professor, and current West Coast editor of Psychology Today. Professor Epstein did something that is rare: criticize one of the major online dating sites. Specifically, he put eHarmony.com in his sights and blasted them with both barrels.

This article included some interesting statistics from an online white paper (6) coauthored by three Ph.D.s, one of whom was Philip Zimbardo, who once served as president of the American Psychological Association. According to this paper, how likely are you to marry someone who eHarmony recommends as a compatible match? If you've seen or heard any of the countless slick eHarmony ads, you might think the odds are pretty good. After all, that's what they want you to believe, and they've spent piles of money trying to inculcate that message. Forget the hype, and try to guess the odds. One in ten? One in twenty? One in fifty? Dream on! Try one in 500!

How many eHarmony matches will you receive in an average month? According to that white paper, it is about 1½—more about that in a minute. If you were to date all of them, the article said it would take 19 years and 346 dates before you had even a 50% probability of marrying one (7).

Now, about those 1½ matches per month . . . . I found that difficult to believe, so I called eHarmony. One of their reps confirmed that is indeed their average, but she repeatedly reminded me that is just an average, stressing that I might receive more matches some months. Yes, but during some months I am bound to receive fewer matches, too, especially in view of the fact that I live in a dating hinterland where intelligent and attractive single middle-aged women are as rare as Democrats who want to lower your taxes. No matter how you slice it, 1½ matches per month is downright pathetic, particularly when you consider what those matches might be. One of my friends from Michigan joined eHarmony and said that she received matches from Alaska, Australia, and other far-away places. She recalls receiving only one match who was reasonably close to her. She said, “They should be ashamed of themselves for that sort of crap!” Indeed. In my opinion, taking $59.95 per month (their current (8) monthly fee) for such “matches” is at least a rip-off and something that other folks might call a scam. If they cannot deliver any reasonable matches, the only ethical thing to do would be to automatically refund your money. “Sorry, we did our best to find you a match this month that you could realistically date, but we could not, so we credited the $59.95 back to your credit card.” Don't hold your breath waiting for the refund. (9)

1½ matches per month who may live near you, or may live on the other side of the world, is bad enough, but wait, it gets worse. According to what I have heard and read from multiple sources, and confirmed by one of their reps, eHarmony doesn't ask about body type. The rep told me something along the lines of, “We leave that up to you,” when it comes to determining if you are attracted to that person. Fine, but if I am only going to receive an average of 1½ matches per month, why waste them on people who are overweight or obese—ones that I would not be attracted to? Given the prevalence of overweight and obese people in the United States, and especially in my area, it would likely take years and thousands of dollars to find someone reasonably attractive. Including one more of my “must have” criteria—intelligence—makes finding someone on eHarmony even less likely.

I typed “eHarmony” into Google and found countless people with a venomous hatred of that dating site. One of their many complaints was that some of their matches were from non-paying members—hence, people who could not respond. An eHarmony rep told me that I could indeed be matched with non-paying members, and that there is no way for a user to differentiate paying from non-paying members. That is technically feasible (a no-brainer, in fact), so in my opinion there is no excuse for its omission. HotOrNot.com charges one-tenth what eHarmony does, yet even they make it easy to see who their paying members are by appending one or more stars to their profiles. (Update: HotOrNot is now a free site.)

For years, I've heard many people complain about how eHarmony parcels out their matches. The consensus opinion is that matches are too slowly doled out, but you may receive a flurry of them if you cancel your paid membership. Users with psychology training have opined that they felt as if they were intentionally being manipulated by their system, using psychological principles of behavioral reinforcement. Do you think it is a coincidence that eHarmony was founded by a psychologist? Is eHarmony playing mind games with its users to maximize its profits? My above-mentioned friend who thinks that eHarmony should be ashamed of themselves is also a psychologist, and she thinks they are.

eHarmony loves to boast about the number of marriages it produces. Currently, they claim that 90 people per day get married who met through eHarmony. eHarmony also claims to now have over 14 million registered users. Let's do the math:

(90 marriages/day) x (365 days/year) = 32,850 marriages/year

(32,850 marriages/year) ÷ 14,000,000 registered users = 0.00234 marriages/year/registered user

My last class in statistics was decades ago, so I don't know which statistic is more dismal: the 19 years one source said it would take to have a 50% chance of becoming one of those eHarmony marriages, or the figures I came up with. Regardless, it's nothing that I would brag about.

If all of their registered users paid their current monthly fee of $59.95 (10), in one year those users would pay over $10 billion dollars:

($59.95/month) x (12 months/year) = $719.40/year

($719.40/year) x (14,000,000 registered users) = $10,071,600.000.00

If that were true, users would, on average, pay $306,593.60 per marriage. However, it cannot be true because eHarmony doesn't make nearly that much money. I spent months researching the online dating industry, and every source I saw said the entire online dating industry takes in almost $600,000,000 per year. That's still a lot of money, and a darned good reason to use my ContactMeFree.com site. If online daters used my site, they could keep that $600,000,000 in their pockets, save time, and be more likely to meet someone.

I don't know eHarmony's yearly income. Of the approximately 1000 dating sites in existence, let's assume that eHarmony's slice of the pie is one-sixth, or about $100,000,000. Let's assume that their average user pays $36.95 per month (see footnote #10), or $443.40 per year. If my figures are correct, they may have 14,000,000 registered users but they have far fewer paid members:

$100,000,000 ÷ ($443.40/year/user) = 225,530 paid members

According to my guesstimate, if they have 225,530 paid members and 14,000,000 registered users, only about 1.6% of their users are paid members! An eHarmony rep confirmed that only paid members can contact others and respond to messages (11), so if my analysis is correct, approximately 98.4% of their registered users are not paid members and thus cannot contact others or respond to messages! These figures assume that my guesses and math are correct. I quadruple-checked my math, and my guesses are probably close to the true figures. If I were off by a factor of three so they had three times as many paid members as I think they do (12), even that is bound to engender a lot of frustration on the part of their users. My friend the psychologist was so frustrated by their site that she quit using it in disgust and now, years later, her face still contorts in anger whenever the subject of eHarmony comes up. I would love to see the Federal Trade Commission mandate that people pictured on a site must represent its typical users. I don't doubt that some happy couples met on eHarmony, but I'd wager that far more people would love to give Dr. Neil Clark Warren (eHarmony's founder) a tongue-lashing, or worse.

Ah, but eHarmony is not the only online dating site whose membership figures are intentionally (I think) stated to lead you to exaggerate your chances of meeting your future spouse. All of the major sites I've seen that flaunt their membership figures try to cleverly gloss over how few of their members are currently active with paid subscriptions. I called another site numerous times over the course of a year, and they always refused to tell me how many paying customers they have—as if they don't know! Of course they know, but they aren't divulging that information for obvious reasons: if people knew their dismal chances, they wouldn't waste their time, nor would they be so willing to spend so much.

When I did the math, I was surprised by how few marriages result from eHarmony. However, I think that number would be even fewer if more people realized how the typical human response to sunk costs (one fueled by loss aversion) were more rational. Dr. Neil Clark Warren is a very smart man, and I bet that he knows all about the relevance of sunk costs to human behavior. As a psychologist, he doesn't need to manipulate you with that tool, because most people do a good job of doing that themselves. What on Earth am I talking about? I'll explain.

First, what are sunk costs? You will usually hear that term used in economics in regard to business decision-making. Sunk costs are costs that have already been incurred and which cannot be recouped to any significant degree, if at all. However, this principle is broadly applicable not just to money, but also to other investments, such as time or emotional energy. Here is what I wrote about sunk costs on my www.ERbook.net site in response to a person training to become an ER doctor who regretted his career choice but felt that he had already invested too much time to switch to another specialty:

One of the main ways that people ruin their lives both personally and professionally is by ignoring the axiom of sunk costs. Sunk costs means that you've invested time or money or both into something (an investment, a project, some research, an education, dating someone, fixing up a house that may be beyond repair, etc.), and once that investment is made, the time or money spent cannot be recovered. Here's the mistake most people make: not wanting to “waste” what they've already spent, they continue on in the endeavor. This often leads to greater losses. An example: me. After my first year of college, I regretted my decision to go into medicine. Had I not spent that year taking science classes that were targeted toward that end, I would have happily and easily walked away from medicine and chosen another career. However, I felt that I'd already invested too much time into this career path, which I did not want to waste. So rather than waste it, I continued on. Mistake! From my current perspective, throwing away one year of college is no big deal, and certainly a lot better than throwing away the next decade in more training just so that one year would not be wasted. As illogical as this behavioral pattern is, people do such things all the time. For example, people continue on in bad relationships because they feel they've invested too much time with their partners. Or investors hang on to bad stocks too long, because they can't bear to sell them and sustain a loss. As a result, they often lose even more when the stock really plummets.

Whether it means walking away from a bad marriage or walking away from a poor career choice, people are better off if they accept the loss and move on, rather than pouring more time, energy, or money into an attempt to save their original investment. Rather than saving anything, this often just compounds the loss. Hence, you should reconsider your decision to continue your ER career. (There's more about this subject and a thousand other topics on my ERbook.net site.)

Because people don't want to waste a prior investment, they often perpetuate it even when doing that is not rational, rather than walk away and accept the loss. Let's say that a friend—not Dr. Neil Clark Warren—sets you up on a blind date in which you plan to meet a woman in the company cafeteria for lunch. You're eating there anyway, so your investment is nil. If she is overweight and does not appeal to you, what's the chance of you dating her? Slim.

Now imagine that you've spent weeks or months getting to know her online. Are you still willing to end the relationship? Some people would, but others—not wanting to waste the time they've already committed—will continue the relationship. I like to think that I am rational, but even I have done it.

According to people I know, it takes a greater investment of time and energy (and money!) to meet someone through eHarmony than more typical dating sites. Might that encourage eHarmony users to continue dating people they otherwise would not? This is just speculation, but I think the answer is yes, given that human nature is what it is. Dr. Neil Clark Warren obviously knows psychology and probably knows how people try to minimize losses from sunk costs, so might he have designed his site to make meeting intentionally not so easy, so when people do meet, they are willing to expend more effort and not be so quick to throw in the towel? After all, relationships take effort, and too often online daters flit from one person to another for trivial reasons, from eye color to their shoes or automobile choice. Perhaps Dr. Warren thought that his process would make people less likely to be so superficial and, in the process, be more willing to invest the time that it takes to really get to know someone.

I may have found some substantiation for my speculation when I logged onto eHarmony today and saw pictures of several couples who met on that site. One thing that struck me about those pictures was that the women were noticeably more attractive than the men. Hot women and average-looking guys? What might account for that? Was it simply a fluke? Or were those women perpetuating their sunk costs and dating guys they otherwise would not? Or were those women settling for less because there are fewer men on eHarmony than women (from what I've heard)? Put a man on an island with a bunch of beautiful women, and his chances of dating a gorgeous one will naturally skyrocket. eHarmony isn't geographically insular, but some people confine all of their efforts at finding someone into the personals site they joined. Thus it is foreseeable how average-looking men hoping to date stunning women might fare better on eHarmony than on other sites. (I hate to admit it, but I probably just encouraged a boatload of eager new men to join eHarmony.) On sites where men outnumber the women, a woman could be a Plain Jane and yet have many men chasing her. It's a simple consequence of the laws of supply and demand.

Update: The July 17, 2007 issue of PC Magazine (page 12) contained two juxtaposed photographs of the same eHarmony couple. One photo said their names were Scott and Cindy, who matched 6/11/2004 and were engaged 5/21/2005. In the adjacent photo, "Scott and Cindy" were now called Todd and Dawn, who married 9/19/2004. Ahem. So Scott changed his name to Todd, and Cindy changed her name to Dawn? And they married before they were engaged? Kinda makes you question eHarmony's truthfulness, doesn't it? Now I wonder if their couples are truly "eHarmony couples" or if they are just paid models with made-up names.

I think the online dating world needs an extreme makeover. I think most dating sites are rigged to maximize the profits of their owners, not to maximize your chance of meeting your true love. There is nothing inherently evil about maximizing profits, but I think that right needs to be tempered with the rights of the site users to not fritter away their money and time on what is often a wild-goose chase. Isn't it reasonable for a user to know what percent of a site's users are paid members, given how many sites intentionally hamstring free “members” and even paid members interacting with them? Of course, but many sites make that information all but impossible to find. How many people will do the math as I did for eHarmony in an attempt to guess their percentage of paid members? Very few, I'm sure. The need to find someone to love is so strong that it compels people to do irrational things, including joining dating sites where your odds of getting what you want are far closer to zero than you probably imagine, unless you do the math.

I thought that spreading the word about ContactMeFree would be easy. I thought that people would enthusiastically welcome a free site that gave them a miraculous ability to contact people on personals sites without the hassles of registering with those sites or paying them. I wrote to numerous sites that I thought would like to know about that new service, but I met tremendous resistance, even from sites that are purportedly independent reviewers of dating sites—including ones filled with thousands of postings explaining why “I hate Match.com/eHarmony/Yahoo/etc.” Based on how often I had the door figuratively slammed in my face, you might think that I was telling little children how to poison Santa Claus with tainted cookies! Then it dawned on me: these sites have a vested interest in the success of online dating sites. They receive affiliate fees for referring customers to those sites, and they can make a lot of money doing that. For example, one woman quit a lucrative career to become a paid shill for online dating sites, and she made about $440,000 in 2005. How eager will she be to help popularize my site? Not very!

Most of the Internet's major sites are either directly involved with online dating, or are an affiliated “partner.” All of those sites want to preserve the status quo—the old way of doing things in which they think that you must pay to contact others. Those sites don't want you to know about ContactMeFree because that gives Internet users essentially a free pass to any such site. Isn't it Google who says that it wants to empower Internet users to easily access the world's information, or some such rhetoric? Wouldn't it be neat if the Google Toolbar could allow you to send a message to any person on any dating site? I thought of a way to do that, yet do you think that Google would respond to me? Hardly. Either they must think that only they can innovate, or that the interests of their corporate partners surpass the needs of their users.

If you have any ideas for spreading the word about ContactMeFree, please contact me. People aren't stupid. (OK, you aren't stupid. In fact, if you've read this far, you're probably a genius!) Almost universally, they want to save money whenever possible. They always want better results, especially in regard to dating when a “better result” is finding their best possible match and finding that person sooner, not later. People also love innovations that empower them to do things that were once impossible. Therefore, it is not a question of if ContactMeFree will succeed, but when. There's an obvious need for it now.

I've encountered many personal ads in which people try to slyly embed their contact info, such as an e-mail address, for an obvious reason: they want to increase the response to their ad. Most of those attempts are foiled by site censors who screen profiles before posting them. Furthermore, it is reasonably easy to write a program that automatically erases e-mail addresses in profiles, even if they are somewhat cloaked. In response to their countermeasures, people sometimes try to disguise their address by saying something such as, “I'm superrhottfoxxychickyy4u at y's competition,” leaving some people wondering who that is. Microsoft's Hotmail? Google's Gmail? AOL maybe?

In contrast, you don't have to specifically embed any contact info in a profile if you use ContactMeFree, MySpamSponge, or one of my pending (13) sites that are functionally identical to MySpamSponge but with a different domain name that makes it easier for people to clue others in about how to reach them (for example, contactmevia.com, contactusvia.com, myhandleis.com, and ucontactme.com). To contact you, someone could simply paste in the first sentence or two of your profile. Alternatively, they could use your MySpamSponge handle (contact code) or your ContactMeFree ID number. Believe it or not, but this is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the ways I've developed to permit people to contact others without paying the personals sites.

A note to the nervous CEOs and investors of those sites: Can you do anything to combat my techniques? Sure! Just delete every bit of information in every profile! That would put you out of business, of course. Don't despair, because my ultimate goal is not to destroy your business. In fact, I know how to make online dating better yet less expensive for your customers while boosting your profits beyond your wildest dreams. Intrigued? Contact me. Every epochal change in business doesn't have to be an “I win, you lose” situation. In this case, it can be a win for me, you, and every online dater.