The United States has over 40 million people registered on over 1,500 online dating sites. These numbers are a bit overwhelming, so it is helpful to go over sites that might be most useful to Catholics. There are two basic types: general dating sites that have large numbers of people and those that are specifically Catholic dating sites.

General Dating Sites

Match.com typifies a general dating site. You begin by setting up a profile. Match.com asks a series of questions about you, your interests, lifestyle and background and values. At the end of the questions, Match.com encourages you to post a picture of yourself to generate greater interest in your profile. Once your profile is set up, you can search by age, interests, zip code, gender, or even key words. This searching ability is necessary as Match.com has more than 20 million users. (Its already high number of users was increased in 2010 when it absorbed Yahoo! Personals.)

If you worry about being able to sort through these numbers yourself, you can use the Match.com sister site, Chemistry.com. Chemistry.com has you take a personality test and then uses this information to suggest people who would be a good match, ideally for long term relationships.

eHarmony is another large dating site, also around 20 million users, and focuses on people who are interested in marital relationships. To set up a profile on eHarmony, you take a personality questionnaire consisting of over 400 questions. Your answers are analyzed by eHarmony’s “patented Compatibility Matching System” that uses personality traits to match individuals. This process eliminates those interested in casual dating and attracts those who are looking for serious relationships. Some believe that this is the reason eHarmony is one of the few online dating sites that has more women than men. eHarmony’s uniqueness and popularity are reflected in its approximately $50 a month cost.

While there are other general dating sites, Match.com and eHarmony are the most prominent. Other general sites operate in a similar manner but typically have some features that distinguish them from these two goliaths. The best examples include Coffee Meets Bagel, which uses your Facebook profile to find matches and allows women to contact men who have already expressed interest in them. Zoosk also works through Facebook and other social networking sites. These sites have around 10 million users each.

These sites can be useful for Catholic for a number of reasons. First, they provide a large pool of potential matches and they all have a large number of Catholics present on them. Second, they all have ways of indicating how important your faith is to you and matching you with people based on this characteristic. The limitation is that it’s up to you to indicate how important your faith is and what values you hold most important. You must take the initiative in attending to those whose faith and morals seem compatible. In short, these sites have lots of people and many useful tools for matching, but it’s your responsibility to make your faith a key component of these matches.

Catholic Dating Sites

Catholic dating sites have opposite strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, they make faith and morals central to the process of matching. They facilitate both talking and learning about the faith. Their weakness is that they have smaller numbers of users.

Catholic dating sites all function similarly to the general dating sites with profiles, search options, and messaging systems. They supplement helping people find matches by providing articles and advice columns about the Catholic faith. Finally, they all charge around $20 a month, lower if you sign up for six months. CatholicMatch and CatholicSingles are two of the more prominent sites.

CatholicMatch is run by Acolyte, LLC (whose founder is a Catholic) and is one of the largest dating site specifically for Catholics. Its perspective is expressed through its seven “Do you agree with the Catholic Church’s teaching on…” questions that everyone must answer when they set up their profile. (These questions focus on the Eucharist, premarital sex, contraception, life issues, papal infallibility, Mary, and Holy Orders.) These questions can be answered by agreeing, slightly agreeing, or not agreeing, and the answers are used to find matches. CatholicMatch also runs the CatholicMatch Institute, which features success stories from CatholicMatch couples as well as dating and marriage advice.

CatholicSingles, another large dating site, aims to connect faithful Catholics by focusing on their activities and interests, rather than pictures. Users are asked to provide information on their personality, family background, spending habits, and how often they pray and go to mass.  In addition to answering classic prompts such as “My ideal first date might be,” users on CatholicSingles can add responses to “How religion plays a role in my daily life” and “What being Catholic means to me” to their profiles. Singles can filter for potential matches by age and location. Unlike CatholicMatch, they do not ask questions on whether you agree with Church teachings or not.

A third Catholic dating site launched in 2018. CatholicChemistry promises both a fresh approach to dating and a streamlined interface. Founder Chuck Gallucci says, “We want CatholicChemistry to be more than a meeting-place for Catholic singles. Every aspect of the user experience is designed to lead people towards deeper fidelity and appreciation of their faith.” Like CatholicMatch, the site also asks users’ opinions on Church teaching, but allows users to select if they’re unsure, but open to learning more. Once you’ve created a profile, you can filter potential matches by age, location, mass attendance, liturgy preferences, and answers to faith related questions.

The one site that is slightly different is AveMariaSingles. It focuses on a very specific Catholic audience. The website “pledges to offer a service solely dedicated to helping faithful, practicing Catholics find their future spouse and help them become a better follower of Christ.” The site is for Catholics who are able to marry in the Church and opposed to using contraception. Members have discerned a vocation to sacramental marriage but have not yet found the right person. AveMariaSingles offers a slightly different payment plan: a one time fee of over $150 that allows permanent access to the site. The result of this approach is a highly active membership that is just over 10,000 people.

While this list of sites is not exhaustive, it should give you a sense of the kind of sites that are available as well as their popularity and usefulness.

For Further Reading

• Catholics Are Meeting Their Spouses Online – a PDF from CatholicMatch

With almost 40 million of the U.S. population having tried internet dating, it has become one of the largest online industries, grossing almost two billion dollars in 2011. eHarmony and Match.com have over 30 million users combined and the sites that focus mainly on Catholics—Catholicmingle.com, Catholicmatch.com and Avemariasingles.com—account for well over 200,000 individuals.

Given these numbers, it is fair to ask how helpful these sites are for finding successful relationships, including marital ones.

How do these websites help?

• These sites enable you to overcome many geographical limitations. Online sites expand the range of people you might meet. You can contact others of similar interests that are beyond where you work, live, and worship.

• You have a better chance of meeting people with similar beliefs. The websites either match you with people based on your preferences or provide tools that enable you to do the searching yourself. The Catholic sites have the added advantage of emphasizing a person’s faith. This enables people to discuss their beliefs up front, in the first few interactions, instead of after several conversations or dates. As shared values are essential for successful relationships and marriage, it is helpful to discuss them as you get to know someone and before you move forward in a relationship.

• The sites make it easier to meet people in-person, the best way to evaluate the potential for a relationship. They help you draw from a large pool of individuals to find those who might be of interest to you. After a few interactions online, the sites often suggest a short meeting in a public place, like a coffee shop, to see if you want to continue getting to know the other person. (Three or four online interactions seem to be ideal as by then you know if you are interested and you have found out most of what you can without meeting in person.) Many of the sites even sponsor events for users to facilitate these face-to-face meetings. Match.com, for example, has an initiative called “The Stir” where they sponsor events for users to meet each other.

• Each site takes several precautions to ensure the safety of its users. All of the companies said they screen profiles before posting them and continually check them for any violations of the company’s decency standards. Users are able to report any inappropriate material on profiles. The sites also recommend that you delay sharing your phone number and email address until after a few in-person meetings. You still must be cautious and responsible for your own safety, but there are several mechanisms in place to help protect users.

What are their limitations?

• Different sites focus on different types of relationships. Match.com is geared to provide users with a full range of relationship options from casual encounters to finding potential spouses. eHarmony emphasizes serious relationships, utilizing a 400 question personality inventory to pair users. The Catholic sites focus on serious relationships through a two-fold process of self-selection. First, by targeting Catholics, these sites attract Catholics, and Catholics typically value marriage. Second, each Catholic site further indicates what kind of emphasis it places on marriage. Avemariasingles.com, for example, is for those “practicing Catholics who are serious about marriage, not window shoppers looking for a date.” Catholicmingle.com, on the other hand, is for those seeking a faith community “for friendship, dating or marriage.”

• Be wary of any distinct, special, or “scientific” claims for matching people. What research has been done on these methods indicates, at best, that they are not as effective as in-person assessments and, at worst, that they are flawed in their approach. What these “matching” options are good at is eliminating those who are least compatible. In other words, the sites are better at indicating what two people would NOT have a good relationship rather than what two people will have a good relationship.

• Too many matches can become overwhelming. Imagine looking at a menu in a restaurant that has 1,000 possible meals on it. It is difficult to choose. Typically, what people do in these situations is break it down into easier choices (“Do I want chicken or fish?”) and eliminate huge portions of the menu. The problem is that this process can easily eliminate some of the best options. This approach is often what people end up doing on dating websites. When faced with a large number of matches, people choose some characteristic, like hair color or height, and eliminate those who do not have that characteristic. They do this to make the choosing manageable, but it does not guarantee the best outcomes. In short, more does not necessarily mean better.

• The sites tend to overly emphasize personal preference or fulfillment. Obviously, your own choice and preferences matter a great deal in choosing a spouse. Yet, marriage for Catholics is not just about what you want but how you will love and care for others. Another way to think about this is that dating websites often make the process feel like shopping, like a person is picking out a new coffee machine, golf clubs, or clothes. The result is that trying to figure out who is a good match often stops with “what makes you happy.” It forgets to ask: “Is this person good and loving to others as well as to me?”

• Finally, no one should forget that the goal of these sites is to make money. They usually allow you to register and browse for free and do not require payment (typically around $20 a month for 6 months) until you want to contact someone. This money provides you a service, a useful and often quality service, one that can even help you to find a spouse. Yet, the goal of the company is still, first and foremost, profit. While they want some people to meet and be happy together, they want most people to keep coming back and using the service. This is how they make money. Your interest in a good marriage and their interest in a good profit may align, but they will not always or necessarily do so.

Do they help you to find a spouse?

They can. In fact, in 2011 almost 20% of marriages began online. Just be clear that these dating websites help not by finding the perfect match for you but by expanding the number of people you can meet.

These sites complement meeting people in-person or through family, friends, or church groups. If you approach the sites this way, you should feel comfortable and even hopeful using them.

For Further Reading:

Catholics Are Meeting Their Spouse Online – a PDF from CatholicMatch