Match.com - Online Matchmaking Service
Match.com is one of the world’s best known dating website, and for good reason. With a gigantic user base and many proven success stories, it isn’t rare to find someone amazing on the site. A visit to the front page shows a sample member and allows you to either sign in or create a profile – just inputting your desires and local area will show you a sampling of local users on the site. From there you’re given the option to go ahead and start creating a profile – provide a username, password, email address, and your birthday, and you’re on your way to finding your perfect Match.
While you can start out by looking at the matches in your local area, it is generally encouraged to go ahead and create your profile. It’s a painless and quick process with just three sections – “Me”, “My Match”, and “In My Own Words”. The “Me” section centers on what brought you to Match.com, your relationship status, gender, what you’re looking for and where, as well as how tall you are, your body type, and astrological sign. The appearance section under “Me” asks for eye and hair color, and what body art you have, as well as what you think your best feature is.
There are of course the requisite areas of interests and lifestyle, covering tastes in music and movies as well as what habits you have. The lifestyle subsection also features a few questions about your income, social background, etc, but as with any other question on the site, you can opt to not answer them if you don’t feel comfortable sharing the information. Rounding out the “Me” section are the subheadings for your background and values, as well as an ‘Express Yourself’ section with a few random questions like your favorite color or whether you’re an early bird or a night owl.
The “My Match” section is just one page, but it’s a doozy – it contains all the options that you went through for your own profile creation and then asks you to rate them on how important they are. This is part of the complicated process by which Match.com delivers its namesake to you – the more honest and accurate you are in your answers, the better the likelihood that the site will find someone just for you.
After filling out all of the information on that page it’s on to the last section: “In My Own Words”. The intro page asks for a self-description and a dating headline, both as text box forms. When you finish that page, your profile is sent off for approval and then you’re taken to the photo uploader. You can browse your computer for any photo you like, and Match.com will take care of formatting for your profile.
Searches on Match.com can be done a few ways. There’s a mutual match system for people “looking for each other”, a reverse match lookup to find people who would find you interesting, a standard quick search using location, gender, and age, as well as a new Smart Search which finds people based on interests and other profile settings based on keywords or phrases that you enter. As a free member you can search for any match, and you can send winks to people you think might be interesting. Full fledged members can contact other singles, use the onsite email service, see who’s viewed them, as well as use the proprietary instant message system.
Match.com has earned its place as one of the greatest and oldest dating websites on the Web. With a variety of services at various levels for whoever is interested, and a great trial period for any free user trying to see if Match.com has something for them, it’s worth signing up today and seeing who’s looking for you just down the road.
