Choosing a Match
If you’re going to head on out into cyberspace to find a gay match on a gay lesbian dating site, you probably ought to go ahead and use an exclusively gay site. While there are some straight sites that offer women seeking women and men seeking men, many of those sites are not actually catering to the gay community. One site even stated in its terms of use policies that the women seeking women and the men seeking men section of their website was for the express use of people seeking interest in friendships and non—sexual companionships. Yet hundreds of members from the GLBT community happily handed over their monthly subscription fee in order to take a shot at meeting their perfect gay match.
A lot of these match profiles were selected via a computer generated selection process and match profiles were sent to emails as gay matches. Those who signed up under the terms were up in arms while those who were seeking gay and lesbian relationships didn’t understand why they were receiving their gay match profiles from disinterested parties. The entire process ended up being shut down for weeks while the programmers tried to fix the bugs in the system. I guess it didn’t occur to anyone that the bug in the system was that the gay match profiles were being treated as an after thought for profit and was actually anti gay in the first place? Who knows. What matters is the end result was certainly anything but pretty and after a few death threats were forwarded in the replies to interested parties, the website revamped the entire same gender portion of their site.
Perhaps not all straight dating sites are like this, but straight dating sites are not all that interested in providing a solid grounded base and the same level of customer service to their GLBT community as a gay and lesbian online dating site. During the programming stages of a straight site that offers women seeking women and men seeking men, those same gender portions of the site are not given anywhere near the same type of attention to detail as the straight portion. The computer generated gay match system isn’t nearly as efficient or as high tech as those that are generated specifically for a gay website. Rather, the companies often figure that as long as gay matches are reaching the gay profiles, the details really don’t matter. Of course, we have all heard the lovely disclaimer by one popular straight site that refuses to deal in gay and lesbian online dating that their :scientific research” is based solely on heterosexual couples and thus they can not offer gay matches with the same standard so they opt not to offer it at all.
The gay and lesbian communities are simply looking for a forum to be able to receive gay matches in the privacy of their own homes and to be able to correspond with people that interest them with the hopes of igniting a spark. This is of course the entire point of a gay and lesbian dating site. This is pretty much the same process that the heterosexual community experiences, but straight sites opt to treat the GLBT community as though the differences are so great there can’t possibly be any type of science behind offering a quality gay match option.
Most dating sites, whether gay or straight, offer opinions, advice, and safety warnings directed at making the online dating experience a better one. Of course, straight sites that do include a gay and lesbian section rarely offer any material directed toward the gay community. The material that is offered is often written with a bias or a slant and is rarely composed by a member of the GLBT community. While your gay match profile might not differ that drastically from those of the straight community there is no denying that the GLBT community faces different issues when using an online dating site than the straight community. While it is great that these companies are making an effort to include gay match profiles in their service, if you have the option to use a company that really caters to the GLBT community, why not use it? You are bound to get a better experience simply based on a level of understanding the issues, the experience, the lifestyle, and the gay match statistics that you just can’t get with a straight site. Gay and lesbian dating sites are finally coming into their own. The gay and lesbian community is finally being supported in the same ways the straight community is when it comes to internet dating and dating advice.