We have received some great feedback from current and prospective members re: enhancing overall experience on the site. Accordingly, the features described below — which will facilitate the process of new members coming on board, writing actively, and meeting one another on the site — are currently being developed and will be completed within a week:

1) Facebook integration. New members will have the option to sign up via Facebook, and existing members can log in via Facebook. **Nothing from TruConnection will post on Facebook walls. ** We are exploring LinkedIn integration as well.

2) Registration outside NYC / Boston area. To date, we have been open to new members in New York City and Boston area. For members outside these two regions, there is now an option on the registration form to leave name / email address / city. Once we have significant interest in your city, we will launch there.

3) First Word. For new members, the option to write an intro about themselves prior to gaining full access to the site, encouraging members from the get-go to start writing and sharing on the site.

4) Social sharing on blog posts. The ability to share each individual blog post, rather than just the blog itself.

As TruConnection continues to grow, more and more members are finding it a refreshing change from mainstream dating sites. Rather that relying on detailed profiles, dating questionnaires, and matching algorithms, TruConnection.com operates under the premise that what you write (or how you express yourself creatively through artwork or photography) + your photo is the best first impression when meeting online, and the strongest foundation for a meaningful connection.

Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks.

A few posts ago I made reference to sneaky/deceptive practices that many dating sites engage in. I want to share a quick tale of such an experience I just encountered:

In my research of literally hundreds of sites, I…er, a guy I know…has signed up for many of them. One site in particular, which in concept is sort of in competition with TruConnection, has been sending me messages several times per day.

These messages are called Love Alerts, and until today I have mostly ignored them. Just now I clicked on one, and found that I had a new message from someone (which is surprising, because I don’t have a photo, and my profile is empty). The subject line read ‘it’ll be my last Email if you don’t answer’, and it was from a girl in the UK.

Curious, I looked through past Love Alerts from this site, and found that I had received several messages from females all around the world — Germany, Hungary, Johannesburg, to name a few — and one girl in NY had added me to her Hotlist just last week! Again, with no photo or profile, this was pretty flattering.

This all sounds innocent enough — the site is trying to get me more engaged as a member — but here’s the issue: I couldn’t read any of the messages unless I became a paying member. I couldn’t see anything more than the subject lines. And I couldn’t initiate messages without paying, either.

So the girls that DID message me, they must be paying members from around the world who choose to spend their time messaging a guy in NYC with no profile or photo, right?

It’s more likely that these messages are not real, these girls are not real, and these efforts are an attempt to get me to become a paying member. This type of practice preys on the vulnerable, desperate, and less-than-brilliant.

And it is all too common on online dating sites, whose goals often have nothing to do with bringing single people together.

A few weeks ago, as I was going through my morning ritual of seeking new articles on online dating/dating/relationships (partly to learn new perspectives, partly to comment and introduce TruConnection.com), I came across this article in Psychology Today online entitled: ”Is a ‘Marriage of Convenience’ So Bad?”

The author, a renowned psychologist and frequent contributor to psychologytoday.com, offers pros and cons of a so-called ‘marriage of convenience’ — loosely defined, the idea of a married couple staying together despite falling out of love. She talks about the financial and logistical difficulties associated with divorce, the fact that with kids you’re never truly apart from your spouse anyway, and that if the situation is tolerable and livable, perhaps it isn’t the worst thing. The author recognizes that such an arrangement is not the ‘dream’ of marriage, but shouldn’t be stigmatized, either. She uses the phrase ‘companionate marriage’ to describe an arrangement in which ‘spouses are willing to give each other some accommodations and freedoms so that they can meet other vital needs elsewhere’.

Not being married, it isn’t my place to comment on the psychology of marriage, or what married couples go through. But in my opinion, this article is symptomatic of a deeper issue that arises in all stages of a relationship, and which I believe contributes to less-than-ideal arrangements: the idea that outside factors and societal pressures should have an impact on the potential happiness you can achieve in a relationship, or should affect who YOU choose to meet / date / marry in the one life you have.

It’s easy to get impatient about this. Reading the last paragraph, friends I know will say ‘oh come on, get real.’ We are social creatures, and it’s lonely to sit and dream of a world in which true love is just that, and everything else is secondary. It’s much easier to consider the things that are deemed ‘important’ in a potential relationship: background, family, education level, career path, etc. We develop a checklist mentality not because these are truly important factors in falling in love and staying in love, but because that’s what we think is the recipe for long term ‘success’ in a relationship.

Online dating sites know this. Many are set up to provide you with as many data points about another person as they can extract through dating questionnaires or personality tests. They realize that we all have an image of an ideal mate in our mind, and they try to make it easier for us to find that person by allowing us to filter based on things we find ‘important’.

This approach looks good on paper. And when you are feeling impatient, you don’t want any BS, you just want to drill down and be as specific as possible with your parameters. Went to college. Makes a certain amount of money. Is much taller than me. Gym 3x/week. No smokers. Wants to have minimum 3 kids. No exceptions.

You review your matches, and perhaps you date a few. Maybe one seems great, and you develop a relationship that blossoms into something significant. Maybe you fall in love, get married, and stay in love.

Or fall out of love. Fall into a convenient arrangement. After all, the data points still match up.

What if your first impression was based on something more real?

The approach of TruConnection.com — in which members share limited information about themselves, just their writing / creative expressions and a photo — is not perfect. But it is a way to open a window into one’s personality without knowing everything about them. It is setting you up for a meeting in which you will learn the things about her that you don’t yet know. Your connection, if you make one, will be based on a more real first impression.

We are not using data points and formulas. We are not attempting to, as one popular dating site CEO described his site’s approach, ‘engineer the next great relationship.’

More importantly, we are not engineering the next marriage of convenience.

Spring’s reared its head again and for me that always means two things: Allergies and anxiety. The first, I’ve found a way of dealing with thanks to some strong medicine. The latter, however, is more of a challenge. As anyone who has gone through a lifetime of classrooms, papers, finals, and so on can attest, as the semester nears its end, there is the inevitable mental to-do list of requirements left to fulfill, books left to read and papers left to write.

It’s been nearly 10 years since my college days ended, and I still get a vague sense of anxiety when April rolls around. Spring, a season of growth and new beginnings, has for me always been a season of deadlines, a season in which to get things done, and so I use this time of year as a season of rumination, a time to think about what’s going on in my life, where I am, where I want to be, and what I want to be doing.

 
For years I looked on Spring with dismay. I was never one to “put myself out there” so in the face of all the things I wanted to do, people I wanted to meet, and connections I wanted to make, I religiously put my nose down into the work at hand and justified my inability to share my true self with the lame excuse of lack of time. Work was too important, I’d tell myself.

I like to think that if I had had something like TruConnection, a place where I could write freely and meet others while doing so, I would probably have learned a lot about myself, would have grown, and possibly would have met some people I could connect with because they were able to see who I really was.

 
If you’ve signed up for TruConnection but have not tried putting yourself out there, I really encourage you to share. Write to your heart’s content, share something about the real you, and you might be surprised to find someone who is truly interested. And if you haven’t signed up yet, give it a shot!

-Chris