Choosing the Best Online Dating Service for You

Picking the right dating site can be overwhelming. There are of thousands to compare and choose from, and each one wants you to believe they are "it". This article offers tips on how to choose the best online dating service for you.

The best online dating service is the one that bests fits your particular needs. This means your personality as well as interests. In order to narrow down the field, and make your choice easier, here are a few points to consider:

1. Relationship Type: First decide on the type of relationship you want. You probably know this already. Among things to consider is the level of seriousness or commitment. For someone seeking a long-term relationship or marriage, a matchmaking service might be what you need. For casual dating, or dating that may eventually get serious, you might want to go with a popular dating service. For encounters, fantasies, fetishes and escapades, you want an adult dating site.

2. Cost: Unless you are truly broke, avoid free dating services. Why? Well, practical jokers, twisted personalities, and people who are generally not serious target this type of service. After all, why pay to pull pranks when you can do it for free? Matchmaking services typically cost a little more than other dating services, but they also offer more features for matching up singles.

3. Database: Needless to say, your chances of finding a soul mate, or just a date, increase with the numbers. Popular dating and matchmaking sites are usually the safest in this respect as they have huge databases of active members.

4. Get Recommendations: recommendations from friends may be trusted, they can be erroneous too. You are unique, and what's good for your friend, or even twin sibling, may not necessarily be good for you. Researching dating services can take hours. An easier way is to read objective dating service reviews.

4. Target age-group: This is especially important for the older single seeking a relationship within his/her own age-group. Older singles often find it uncomfortable to post personal ads in the same site as their children or grandchildren. Their interests may be better served at a senior dating service. Most senior dating services' minimum age is 40 or 50.

5. Interests: If you have a passion that you simply cannot live without, you might want to consider a specialty dating site. This is especially so if you want someone who shares your passion. Specialty dating sites exist for just about every interest and hobby including bike lovers, dog lovers, animal lovers, golf lovers, and more.

6. Religion/Ethnicity: Religion is often a big factor for people of faith. For others it's ethnicity. It can also be a mixture of both religion and ethnicity, as the two sometimes go hand-in-hand. In this case, you can either go for a popular site and list faith/ethnicity as one of your criteria or go to a specialty faith/ethnicity based dating site.

7. Distance: Especially important for someone seeking a mate not too far from their own area. Do a search on the site and see if it has a large enough number of singles in your area.

8. Features: Look for must-have features such as private email, instant messaging, advanced search, and easy navigation. A good dating service should have all these and then some. They should demonstrate effort to make your experience as convenient and easy as possible.

9. Free Trial: How do you know if the site will be a good fit once you've signed up? The answer is a free trial. A free trial will let you test-drive the site and get a feel of its features, as well as the quality of singles in their database. Just be aware that most sites will not let you make contact while on free trial.

10. Customer Service: While on free trial (see No.9 above) you should shoot an email (or instant message) to customer service and see how fast you get a response. You may not get a response instantly (except for instant messaging), but if you don't hear from them within 24 hours, something may not be right. Just be sure your query makes sense, please.

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