ClueChick: real clues from a real chick

Say you're signed up with a dating site -- one of the ones that you pay for -- and your hope is to find love. If not the one and only, at the very least, someone who's a good match, with whom you share common interests, and who you can trust is more real than, say, a random post on CL.

That shouldn't be so difficult, right? After all, people take the time to write their profiles, they pony up $30 or more each month, which certainly ought to indicate their sincerity, and they post pictures of themselves to show they're for real.

Maybe not. As reported in The Guardian Unlimited last week:

A recent lawsuit against Match.com charged the matchmaking service with sending a female employee out on a date with a male subscriber as ``date bait'' to keep him signed up. Another lawsuit against a personals service offered by Yahoo Inc. accused the Internet portal giant of creating fake profiles to entice subscribers.

Unsurprisingly, online matching sites are big business. Unlike free sites such as CL or OkCupid, your interest and that of your potential partner(s) are not the only factors in the equation.

As you will read in the Guardian piece, the matching services are putting up a big fight to protect their reputation, and it may well be that these lawsuits are baseless. On the other hand, they may not be.

This is a clear case of caveat emptor.

We'd all like to think that when it comes to love, we can look through rose-colored glasses. Don't we all hope that each person can find the happiest romantic relationship possible? Don't let that hope blind you to opportunists looking to take advantage, whether they be pic collectors on CL or unscrupulous dating sites who want to keep you (and your bank account) around just a little bit longer.