Farmers, geeks, Mormons and even the herpes-afflicted can now find love online through the next-gen hook-up trend: niche dating services
By Sabrina Jalees, Special to Digital Journal
Digital Journal — After disappointing date upon excruciatingly awkward date, I’ve reached the point where I’d rather be “set up” in the O.J. Simpson sense than through my eager, matchmaking friends. Let’s be honest: When it comes to forming romantic connections, the failure rate is higher than Lindsay Lohan after a night of binge partying. Even avoiding those dreaded arranged hook-ups through trillion-profile Web dating isn’t as thrilling as before.
Enter the solution: niche online dating services. I know you’re “way above this,” but frankly, Lonely McLonesome, open your mind. I’m here to finally disassociate Web dating from Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed, fashion-senseless geeks who smell like wet shoes. With intentions both romantic and lusty, cool inquisitive singles are joining the cyber-herd and cutting out all the bullshit in the process.
Niche dating takes the principle of “plenty of fish in the sea” and gives you the appropriate equipment to hook only the hook-worthy. By narrowing down to specialized hobbies or demographics, these sites take the macro of online romance and reshape it into a microverse. The bounty is huge — online dating is a $494-million (US) industry that is expected to reach $642 million (US) by 2008.
Face it, it’s a necessity to relate to the person you’re canoodling with on a level deeper than the mutual affinity for wild sex. Niche online dating sites include FarmersOnly.com, where members share common planting ground, and H-Date.com, where herpes-afflicted folks can meet singles who have, ahem, sewn similar seeds in their crops. A site like Geek 2 Geek (gk2gk.com) lets you connect to the pocket-protector crowd by scrolling through profiles without photos, since the site espouses: “True geeks just don’t care about looks.” Whether you’re a gold digger (Millionairematch.com), an animal fanatic (DateMyPet.com) or a Mormon fetishist (LDSMingle.com), there’s surely a site with your interests in mind.
Online dating wasn’t always this weirdly specialized. The ball first began to roll with the birth of larger companies like Lavalife and eHarmony whose services put the magnitude of love matches on e-steroids by hitting the most worldliest of wide webs. Once people were open to hooking up on dial-up, the chances of meeting someone who didn’t cause that vomit-in-mouth feeling shot up exponentially. The booming popularity of more specific sites like ChristianDatingNetwork.com and LargeFriends.com (for the charmingly chunky) has taken the universe of online flirting in a more personal direction.
Lori Miller, a spokesperson for Lavalife, admits, “Six or seven years ago we were seeing network growth as high as 100 per cent. We’re still doing very well but that percentage has lowered to about 10 per cent today.” The nine-year-old digital dating network responsible for 1.3 million messages a day hasn’t missed the memo themselves. From boxing to bowling, today’s Lavalife also gives its members the option of narrowing down their single-searching to niche interests.
When it comes to specializing your soul mate search, what have you got to lose? That dinner date with your sister-in-law’s accountant who’s got the personality of a cardboard box? Besides, as general interest in these dating networks snowball, so will the number of emerging options. Soon enough, deaf, koala-obsessed lesbians will have an easier time finding each other than drunk nymphos at a swingers’ bar.
