Free Cool Dating Site-Well maybe cool…

Posted by blainegarrett

September 4, 2007

I discovered PlentyOfFish.com today. It is a free dating site. Their motto is “Put the credit cards away”. In the Gratis Vs Libre sense, I’m still not 100% sure of the value of the site.

Around Christmas last year I signed up on Yahoo Personals. After wading through a sea of people that didn’t seem to interest me, I did find a few people that seemed cool. I went on some dates and even had a short term relationship with someone I am still good friends with. Personally, I recently came to the realization that I am not going to settle for someone that doesn’t perfectly mesh well with me. My friend Sarah puts it “You deserve someone that when asked how the date went you can reply ‘AWESOME’, versus ‘Eh, it was alright’”.

So where do I find this magical person? Well I used to meet people through class, work, etc. However, my awesome job leaves me at home during the day and I have been out of school for a while. I don’t want to date people through my organization as that just makes things awkward. So I have been trolling online for the last year. I was originally weary of online dating, but my brother who just got married to a wonderful lady last week met on Match.com a few years ago. I think he summed it up well in his little spiel at the reception, “I was so amazed to find something on the internet that was a scam, junk, or absolute crap”. Indeed.

The problem is that pay dating sites don’t guarantee you will find someone magical. At most, I think eHarmony’s commercial claims that if you don’t, they will give you 6 months free to keep browsing through people that didn’t match in the first place. Neat.

So then there is PlentyOfFish.com. Aside from a ugly design, it appears to be as feature filled as the pay sites. You can send roses, see people in your area, search by a big list of criteria, filter out people trolling for one night stands, etc. They even have a pretty extensive personality test that seems better than the Yahoo and Match.com one. All in all, it seems like a great concept.

However, when you get right down to it, it is the people on there that matter. This is where I am not sure if this site has much value. Granted, I only spent a few hours on there, but there wasn’t many women that caught my eye. This is also true of Yahoo, but perhaps there is something to be said about the type of people that are willing to overcome the pay “barrier of entry”.

Anyway, as an aside, someone that did catch my eye messaged me on Yahoo and I broke down and paid their damn fee. After a nice little instant messenger chat to verify she wasn’t lame, we are going out for drinks later this week. I’m stoked. Hurray for me.