A reader recently asked for my assessment of different dating platforms. This is a very pertinent inquiry, and one not quickly answered to do the question justice. So, I embark on a series of posts over time to consider the strengths and weaknesses of different platforms: whether they have a niche or target audience; and what distinguishes them from other dating platforms. Let’s begin with a review of Match, the original platform of Match Group.

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, then you’ve probably noticed that I reference the dating platform Match.com with some regularity. This is because it’s the platform I’ve used the longest and with the most success, though it has its drawbacks. Due to my familiarity with the platform, it makes sense to start here.

Beyond my own experience, I’ve done some research, looked at comments about different platforms, and inquired about other people’s experiences. If you have particular feedback (good, bad, or neutral) about a platform, I’d love to hear from you either in the comments section or through my Contact page.

Potential Matches

Quantity of Matches

A definite strength of Match is that it seems to have the largest database of users. The reader who submitted the question senses this as well, saying, “Match does seem to have the largest sheer number of subscribers…and the ability to view as many of them as you wish.”

Having a large database, of course, gives you more profiles to look through and a better opportunity to find a good match.

Quality of Matches

The name of the dating platform Match implies that the platform can provide or “match” you with a compatible romantic partner. I’ve personally had this experience. I’ve made several compelling connections over the years. I’ve also met many men who weren’t the right match, but who were interesting connections nevertheless.

A large database allows for more possibilities and a better chance at making that right connection. I’ve found that the profiles that Match directs me to generally fit my search preferences better than other platforms that I’ve tried.

For instance, among my dating preference criteria I include “graduate degree” for level of education, and the profiles that I’m directed to largely meet that criteria. That has not been my experience on other sites. And, if the profiles a dating platform directs me to don’t match my criteria, then the chances of me being interested or finding a match there are slim.

That said, I still go through plenty of profiles that don’t grab my attention before I find one that does (That’s where further discernment comes in.). But, since the profiles better meet my criteria than on other dating platforms, my odds of finding one who does are improved.

Not too long ago, there was a development that I found helpful. There was a tweak to the system that showed my profile to men who fit my dating parameters as part of their Discover. This means that men who fit my dating parameters started reaching out more to me. Thus, the onus wasn’t always on me to be the one reaching out to my preferred type.

Profile Structure

Like most dating platforms, users provide photos, basic personal information (e.g., profession, height, education, etc.), and a personal Summary. On the Match dating platform, the Summary takes the form of an open-ended essay. The Summary gives users the opportunity to reveal their personality or their limitations. Sometimes the limitations are in their character. Other times their limitations are in their ability to find words for who they are.

A nice feature that the Match platform provides is the ability to hide your profile. This comes in handy if you’re exploring a connection and want to hide your profile from others while you do so. Alternatively, it’s also helpful if you want to take a temporary break from dating without deleting your profile. By hiding your profile rather than disposing of it, it’s there to come back to if the connection doesn’t work out or you’re ready to jump back in the dating pool.

Navigating the Match Dating Platform

Platform Recommendations + Personal Agency

Match does a nice job of delivering daily profile recommendations that fit or approximate your dating preferences. Additionally, the platform allows for personal agency in searching for compatible matches beyond the profiles they select.

The Discover and Highlights features of Match are where they provide profiles to you. Discover is a function where they provide a finite number of daily potential matches for you to peruse. Historically, Discover has been my favorite feature as the profiles are right there for me and they reasonably match my preferences. However, over time, the number of daily profiles provided has shrunk. I used to get two hundred daily profiles (I counted once), now they deliver about fifty, tops.

The Highlights feature delivers additional profiles. These profiles match you on a particular quality: Standout Members, Shared Values, or Compatible Dating Intent. You have around twenty total at any given time. Each profile is in your Highlights for a week before falling off. The downside of Highlights is that if you’re taken with a profile, you can only send a Super Like. You get one Super Like per week with a Premium subscription. Beyond that, you have to spend money to buy more Super Likes. A little bit of a racket that, but more to that point later.

The personal agency comes into play with the Search feature. If you’ve blown through your Discover profiles and the Highlight feature isn’t doing it for you, then try Search. You can input your dating preferences and have a plentitude of options (depending on how narrow or broad your preferences are) to scroll through. And, you can save searches to revisit later. I date long distance and currently have saved searches for both the west coast and the east coast that I check on occasion.

Interactions with Potential Matches on the Match Platform

Interactions take the form of Likes (You can like a profile or a particular photo.); Super Likes; and Messages. Once both parties have interacted in some form, you are a “Match“. At that point, your interactions are moved to the Match tab where all of your Match interactions are housed.

After a while, Matches who you’re no longer interacting with are archived, though the more recently archived ones can still be viewed.

You can also put your profile in Private Mode if you want to control who sees your profile. Private Mode only allows people who you’ve interacted with to see your profile. Doing this gives you more agency over your experience, but it also puts all of the onus on you to discover new connections.

The App

In the past year, Match has updated how the app works. There’s a walk-through tutorial about how to use the update and what swiping one way or another means (left=no; right=yes). However, the app is highly sensitive. More than once when I was intending to scroll down to look at a profile, I accidentally “liked” a profile. That’s problematic, as there’s no way to “unlike” a profile.

This has left me in the position of either letting the like stand, welcoming an interaction I wasn’t intentionally inviting, or blocking the person to negate the like. Not so user-friendly.

The current incarnation of the app is overly touchy, so touch with caution!

Quality of the Service

Performance Review of the Match Platform

In the last few years, I’ve noticed more technical difficulties with the Match dating platform. Sometimes this looks like Discover profiles not loading properly even though I haven’t gone through my daily selection. Other times I’ve gotten a message “something went wrong” and need to refresh the site.

The technical difficulties got worse when Jay Shetty came on as a relationship advisor last year. I assume this is because they retooled the site when Match brought him on. At that time, the platform stopped loading the Discover feature reliably, so I was paying for a service that I largely wasn’t able to use. Jay seems to be gone now, but while the technical difficulties have improved somewhat, they still persist.

Recently, I noticed that despite my dating radius of 1500 miles, Discover was only recommending profiles within 300 miles. This limitation really annoys me. I’m not receiving the expansive geographical profiles that I’m requesting. I’ve contacted Customer Service, but they failed to resolve the issue satisfactorily, instead initially suggesting I should expand my preferences…really? Expand beyond 1500 miles?

Incidentally, the quality of Match’s performance has declined as the number of related services (e.g., OurTime, okCupid, etc.) provided by Match Group (and their promotion of them) has increased. They’ll even have pop-ups for these services while I’m trying to access the declining service that I’m already paying for.

This performance decline is much in the same way that Facebook’s quality declined with the expansion of Meta and its services (e.g., Instagram). I don’t enjoy Facebook as much as I used to, because I’m not seeing what I want to see (My friends!). And I’m not enjoying my experience on Match as much as I used to either.

Match Customer Service Review

I’ve had mixed experience with Match Customer Service. Years ago, I wanted to expand my dating radius to 1500 miles but could only manually change it to 999. I called Match Customer Service, and they were very helpful, changing it to 1500 miles for me.

Another time when I emailed due to technical issues with their site, they told me to expand my search. In essence, they were blaming me for the problem and giving me an unrelated canned answer. I followed up with an email telling them that my search was already expanded to 1500 miles and that I have a dating blog. They fixed the issue.

My most recent issue was when my Discover radius was narrowed to 300 miles rather than the 1500 mile geographic radius that I have set. When I contacted them about the issue, they suggested I expand my preferences. How ironic–they narrowed my search, but suggested that I expand it.

The days of the customer being right are long gone. Match, like so many other corporations these days, seems quick to suggest the customer needs to do something better. It’s frustrating and infuriating. I went a few rounds with Match Customer Service until someone actually addressed my complaint rather than giving me a canned answer, but the issue was never resolved.

These days, Match doesn’t have an easily accessible phone number. Like so many other user-unfriendly corporate models, they don’t seem to allow their customers ready access to a real human being on their end. The current experience flagrantly prioritizes money over customer care. The irony of this is that they’re in the personal relationship business, yet their customer service is currently very hands-off and impersonal.

Money, Money, Money

They say that money makes the world go around, and whoever they is/are, they nailed this one.

As I already mentioned, Customer Service has declined while the Match Group has simultaneously expanded their ventures. Rather than give me excellent service on Match, the service I regularly pay for, my experience has declined (e.g., less daily Discover profiles, not honoring my geographic search, more technical issues). Meanwhile, I get pop-up ads inviting me to try their other platforms (e.g., Plenty of Fish) from Match Group. What I want is a quality experience on the platform I’m already paying for.

At the same time, a Match dating platform subscription has become more expensive with more tiers and more add-ons. And while they’ve become more expensive, the service and the number of daily Discovers have declined. Additionally, there are less discounted offers and coupons readily available. However, among the more popular dating apps, its price is comparable. Also, it doesn’t make sense to use the Match platform without buying a subscription as its functionality is severely limited.

If you do subscribe to Match, the longer the subscription, the better the value. That said, even though a subscription is priced per month, you pay for the subscription in full when you subscribe or renew. If you “cancel” your subscription, they’ll usually offer you a discounted price to stay on.

You can buy a subscription for one, three, six, or twelve months. I usually do the six month option at this point, and I subscribe at the Platinum level so I can use the features without excessive limitations.

Are You a Match for Match?

As the Match dating platform performs best with a paid subscription, its subscriber base tends to be older than younger. Many twentysomethings can’t afford a subscription. Most of Match’s users are between 30-49 with the age range of 50 + as their fastest growing subscriber population. This last tidbit may have something to do with some of us who originally subscribed in our forties are now in our fifties? Life happens and time keeps moving.

Match has traditionally been long-distance friendly, but as of late, they haven’t been honoring my long-distance geographic radius. You’re able to set the radius for how far away you are comfortable with dating. Whether they honor it over 300 miles is another thing. Maybe that will shift the next time they play with the algorithm. They regularly tweak the algorithm.

Other than that, it’s got a fairly general subscriber base, not niche. And, while Match is a good place to look for a serious relationship, people are there looking for a variety of things. There’s even a place where you can identify your dating intent: Just See Who’s Out There; Date, but Nothing Serious; Start a Serious Relationship; Don’t Know Yet, or No Answer. I’ve even seen people looking for polyamorous situations.

Other User’s Thoughts

In addition to our inquirer’s input above, he also mentioned that there seem to be “a bunch whose accounts are long-dormant, which is super annoying.” Agreed. If there’s an upside to this, maybe they found someone successfully on platform and forgot to hide their profile?

My friend Chris is more critical of the platform than either our reader or myself. When I asked for his opinion, he said that it seemed like there were a lot of bots on the platform. Further, he said that it felt like a grift, like they were just trying to get money. To his mind, the Match dating platform didn’t feel legit. As I mentioned before, there’s definitely a corporate money angle to the platform. Clearly, Chris senses that. He gives Match a poor review.

However, my sense is not that Match isn’t legit, but rather that it’s performance for the user is limited by the heavy lean into corporate profit. I’ve had the experience of making some compelling connections (real men not bots). I’ve also met some interesting men through the Match platform who weren’t my “match” but who I enjoyed connecting with nevertheless. So, to that end, I see it as a relevant dating platform.

While Chris’s experience of Match is a contrast to mine, his point-of-view and experience are both valid and relevant. Different people have different experiences. The more information you have about the range of experiences something offers, the more you’re able to discern a thing. In this case, I hope you’re better able to discern the Match dating platform for what it is, and whether it’s a match for you.

Final Thoughts

Match has been my preferred dating platform to date, though lately I’ve found it disappointing. It’s certainly the platform that I’ve made the most compelling connections on. The quality of Match’s service has declined over the years, while simultaneously becoming more expensive, but, I haven’t found a platform I like better–yet.

If you’d like a thorough breakdown of the services that Match provides, check out the VIDA Select site. And if you have experience with Match or another dating platform and would be willing to share your thoughts, please comment below or send me a message on my Contact page. I’d love to know your thoughts on Match and other platforms.

My hope is that this post has given you some insight into both the strengths and shortcomings of Match as a dating platform. Regardless of what dating platform you are or aren’t using, good luck out there!

An Update: A Proliferation of Fake Profiles

Up Next: Looking at Dating Profiles–Information & Summary Look-fors

• Zoom Out
• On Heterofatalism (and other Trending Topics)
• Beware: How to Spot Fake Profiles
• Relationship Values: On Being Seen (and Heard)
• Q & A: What is a Committed Relationship?