We all know that when making an online dating profile, or heck, even just making a Facebook profile, we tend to use the most attractive photos of ourselves we can find. Why wouldn’t we? However, according to a new study, men who do this with their dating profiles may be doing it in vain, because some research claims women can pick out an attractive man just based on how he describes himself in his written profile!

Psychologist and Villanova University Associate Professor Rebecca J. Brand asked 50 women to judge 100 online dating profiles for men between the ages of 22 and 25 from an online dating site. The catch? The women were shown the men’s photos and written profiles separately, then asked to judge the profile’s author or the man in the photo on traits like confidence, sense of humor, masculinity and overall attractiveness.

Interestingly, the women didn’t even need the photos to figure out who were the attractive guys! The researchers believe this has to do with the amount of confidence that attractive men have over average-looking guys. This confidence, the researchers say, may be the trait that draws women to them in the first place!

However, it leads me to wonder which came first: the confidence or the looks? Are women drawn to looks that inspire confidence, or vice versa? The most likely answer is that our society values looks over any other personality trait and therefore those who are good-looking find it easier to be confident in themselves, but I do wonder if it’s possible to have enough confidence that women are, erm… “tricked” into believing you are better looking than you are!

What do you think? Are attractive people just more confident, naturally? Or can enough confidence be the attractive trait in itself?

However, with OnlineBootyCall’s new weekly blog feature “Tuesday TestiMOANials,” they take a different approach to dating site success stories, by compiling their ex-member’s reasons for leaving the site.

Although OBC may not be your average storybook romance type of dating site, their testimonials are some of the most genuine we’ve seen in a long time. And, surprise! Most of them end with a booty call becoming a good old fashioned love story.

Check out all of the pages of testimonials here, and let us know what you think!

A British dating site is coming under fire recently, for supposedly misleading its members into believing they were on an all-vegetarian dating site, when really the site shared a database with a regular dating site full of flesh-eating monsters (or should I say, non-vegetarians).

VeggieDates.com, a site that is admittedly brights green and plastered with photos of people eating salads, claims that they never explicitly stated the site was only for vegetarians, just “healthy singles.” From Gawker and the NY Post:

Veggiedates “acknowledged” that the site shared a common database [with other dating sites], and that “meat eaters comprised a majority of its users.”

Incredibly, the site contends it never implied membership was restricted “only” to vegetarians.

“A member could indicate they were vegetarian or not by ticking a box in their dating profile,” the site said in a statement.

Apparently VeggieDates.com forgot one important detail: any vegetarian who would sign up SPECIFICALLY for a vegetarian dating site, is PROBABLY pretty staunch in their beliefs. Like, throw blood on a lady wearing fur staunch, or ‘freak the hell out if they went on a date with an omnivore’ staunch. Your bad, VeggieDates. Maybe next time use a stock image of someone having a salmon and quinoa dinner if you’re looking for healthy, well-adjusted members.

Getting back into the dating game after divorcing can be just as difficult as the divorce itself. You feel uncomfortable, nervous, and vulnerable, not to mention rusty at meeting people! However, a new website aims to lessen the pain of post-divorce dating by allowing much of the initial interaction to remain online. Via NewsJunkyJournal:

“When I design a concept for a client, a portion of my inspiration comes from the type of person they are, their personality and style. With NewlyDivorcedDating.com, the message and design of the site has a very personable, genuine and caring nature. In my experience, this tells you a lot about the intentions of who is running the website. The owners of NewlyDivorcedDating.com have an incredible passion to assist divorcees in finding meaningful relationships – to find love. ” Ronnie Roper, Senior Designer at I-Tul.

Seems like a good idea to us – we know that online dating as a never-married can be tough, let ALONE online dating with a fresh wound of divorce on your heart. And by keeping the dating online and casual, we expect many divorced singles to flock to the website, especially if they have children.

We haven’t seen a dating site with this much potential in a long while, and look forward to its success.

College students registering for an online dating profile on WhatsYourPrice.com using their college issued dot-EDU email address will automatically enjoy the benefits of a free premium membership upgrade (a $30 a month value) and profile certification.

Well, I suppose it’s a good idea… college students are all in the market for love but tend not to have the extra cash laying around to throw at a dating site that might not work for them. However, we’re hesitant to believe that college students wouldn’t try for a dating site that has more than a meager 250,000 members, like the tried-and-true OKCupid, OnlineBootyCall, or PlentyOfFish (yes, it pains me to say that). Furthermore,

A certified college coed profile will be marked with a unique stamp, allowing other members to know the profile belongs to a real college student. A free premium upgrade will allow college students to receive more first date offers from potential suitors, and provide them access to features such as “name your price” dating, premium profile placements and advanced search. Premium profiles on WhatsYourPrice.com receive an average of over 3 times more first date offers than free profiles.

We look forward to hearing how this development works out.

What do you think – would you join a website because they offered you a free membership? Or – would you be more likely to go on a date with someone if they were in college? Let us know in the comments!

OkCupid has always been at the forefront of online dating trends (hence OkTrends, their jealousy-inducing blog), so it’s no surprise that they’ve added location-based services to their mobile app before many other sites. According to Mashable, the hip dating site has added three different services to their Android and iPhone apps

1) Broadcasts. This allows you to let your best matches know that you’re free now and suggest activities. You can even include photos. Other users can browse your Broadcasts — and vice-versa — and reply to those they find interesting.

2). Locals. This shows you matches nearby (this is handy, considering OKCupid only lets you search for matches within a 25- to 500-mile radius). One can then indicate that they would like to meet those locals, and chosen folks will get a notification.

3). Notifications. OKCupid will let you know when a good match is nearby.

There is always the question of how these types of apps will be used, for good or evil. The example used in the screenshot above, for example, could go either way. Someone might come by, say hi, and trade you a flyer for their number, but on the other hand, someone could come by, awkwardly hover around you while you’re trying to do your job, and then try and follow you home afterwards.

We hope that location-based dating apps will be successful, because one of the most difficult parts of online dating is transitioning to an offline relationship after meeting over the internet. Knowing that a potential date is just minutes away and looking to meet up might be a way to get past the first date jitters. We just hope that people are safe and smart when using them.

Have you used OkCupid’s new location app features? What did you think? Or do you think location services are a little shady?

Just kidding. Not really. It’s more of a publicity stunt than anything else by Dr. Neil Clark Warren, the man behind eHarmony and “compatibility”-based matching. According to his new article at The Huffington Post, On Second Thought, Don’t Get Married, he shares his thought about the increased divorce rate around the country and what we can do to put a stop to it:

Of course, no one intends to be in an unhappy marriage. Bad marriages don’t just happen to bad people. They mostly happen to good people who are not good for each other… [But] when two people have a relationship which is predicated upon broad-based compatibility, there is every reason to be optimistic about their long term prospects. A marriage of this type has virtually no chance of becoming “obsolete.” If all of us together can focus on the challenge of getting the right persons married to each other, it just might change our society more than anything else we could do. Goodness knows, when marriage is right, little else matters nearly so much.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with an expert (Warren is a clinical psychologist) in the field giving his own business a little plug in an educational article, but we have to think that a man of his age and belief system (eHarmony was founded on Christian principles) might not be the best person to be offering unbiased advice.

What do you think? Do you think Dr. Warren is correct in believing that finding a compatible mate will ensure you don’t get divorced?

Via BlissTree

Combating the spread of sexually transmitted infections is an effort everyone should be a part of. However, there is a fine line between working to educate people on how to protect themselves and stigmatizing those who may already be infected.

In the case of a Canadian Syphillis PSA, many believe they have crossed that line. The PSA, which comes in the form of a “dating site” called “PLentyOfSyph,” (which is hilarious in and of itself), which shows young men and women covered in sores with profile headlines basically declaring their promiscuity.

The site is currently coming under fire for their poor tactics, and for burying the most necessary information deep into the website instead of plainly stating their intentions. Furthermore, Canadians are curious as to why they would choose syphilis to battle, when it is fairly uncommon and largely treatable.

Seems like a good idea executed poorly to us, but what to you think?

I remember once seeing a comedian who talked about the unfortunate name of female genitalia, saying it sounds more like a disease than the body part that gives and receives so much pleasure. That’s exactly what I thought of when I came across this new UK dating site called DoggingDirect.com.

What does that bring to mind for you? To me it sounds like some sort of dog-fighting or beastiality or anal rape or something, when in reality, “dogging” is just the term for frisky couples who like to get in on in public or semi-public places. Perhaps I am just clueless to UK slang, but I feel like there are a hundred other names that could convey a sexy site for those who have a public sex fetish. Then again, the site claims that more people know the term “dogging” than know “blogging” (yeah right).

What do you think? Is doggingdirect a name that fits? Or should people try and pick URLs that don’t sound so, um… vulgar?

You are visiting your favorite dating site after excitedly receiving an e-mail alert that you have new messages. You open the message, and it sweetly reads, “You have beautiful eyes. I am an art student and couldn’t pass up a chance to draw your beauty. Let me know what you think!” Your heart swells as you imagine a modern day Vermeer, carefully painting each and every minute detail that contributes to the loveliness he sees in your face. You click the attachment and BAM

out comes this:

… what would you do?

Would you laugh because it is clearly a joke and a pretty funny one at that? Or would you be heartbroken, because your time on a dating site is meant for meeting dates (and potential life parters), not getting silly and somewhat mean-spirited pranks pulled on you?

The prankster who created the masterpiece above has been trolling dating sites recently with messages and pictures similar to the one above, making horrible MS Paint renditions of women’s profile photos in what could be the funniest dating site trick we’ve seen in a long time.  While we have giggled our way through this list of the best “portraits” the jokester has done, we still have to say that he might do better keeping his skills off dating sites, where women are working to find love, not a joke at their expense. On the other hand, it’s not as horrific as this one, so we have to give him credit for keeping his little joke online.

What do you think? Is this a silly joke or offensive and mean-spirited teasing?