I came across a blog post written some months ago in which somebody has analysed the subscriber base and subscription rate of paid dating sites. The post is here: “New Report: Online Dating in 2006.”

The main thrust of the article is that paying subscribers to dating sites account for approximately 5% of their membership, down from 6% in 2005. If this is the case, then people really are wasting a great deal of time and money 95% of the time on paid dating sites that require both members to be subscribers before two-way communication can be established. Most paid sites fall into this category.

You are lucky, because you have a choice. You may not have been aware of free dating sites before now. They do exist, and you can find out a lot about them by browsing through the articles here. If you use these sites, the subscriber base can easily email each other for free, so you won’t be wasting 95% of your time emailing people who won’t reply.

In fairness, there are also some paid dating services that allow the receiver of any message to reply to you at any time. If you do use a paid dating service, I recommend that you use one of these. If it costs extra money for that subscription option, I believe it’s likely to be money well spent.