Love and Specificity: 5 Odd Online Dating Sites for Valentine’s Day
Look, there’s no accounting for taste. The heart wants what the heart wants, and people get together for all sorts of weird reasons. For instance, my wife and I met at a druidic S&M ritual after a 24-hour rave in the catacombs beneath Paris. This might seem weird to some people, but we’ve been together 17 years now and all of this is totally true, so far as you know.
The good news is the Digital Age, in her infinite wisdom, has provided us with online matchmaking services for everyone. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we present five online matchmaking services for discriminating lonely hearts.
Clown Dating
The go-to joke with a situation like this is to suggest that clowns are scary and the idea of clown dating site is terrifying. But here at Yahoo Tech, we endeavor to remain above such cheap shots. Actually, the idea makes a lot of sense. Clowns presumably have common lifestyle issues that others don’t, like makeup removal and giant shoe expenses and what to do with all those nurses buried in the crawlspace. From the website: It’s no fun looking for love when you’re a clown, for behind all the make-up and the red nose is a lonely heart. Indeed.
Gluten Free Singles
If these young people look uncommonly happy, that’s because they’ve thrown off the oppressive yoke of … gluten! Partner site to the less specific Healthdate.com, Gluten Free Singles offers the usual array of services – chat rooms, personal messaging – plus profile options for indicating why, precisely, you’ve chosen the gluten-free lifestyle. Hey, if love blossoms from a shared aversion to cereal grain byproducts, then surely it was meant to be.
Mullet Passions
Part of the sprawling Passions Network, which offers more than 200 specialty dating sites to choose from, Mullet Passions is the “100% Free Dating & Social Networking for Singles Sportin’ a Mullet.” It’s business in the front and party in the back at Mullet Passions, and there’s even a Mullet Lover Affiliate Program for participating sites to earn commission on mullet love. Sure, we’d all be more comfortable if this were a joke, but evidently it isn’t, and now we must move on with our lives.
Can Do Better
For the saddest Valentine’s Day experience ever, click on over to Can Do Better, a colossally depressing enterprise based on the following protocol: You upload a photo of yourself and your current partner. Then other members vote on which of one you “can do better,” with the winner earning admission to dating service’s premium subscription area. The site’s motto – “Let the World Decide!” – was selected over the alternate suggestion: “The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 32,844.”
FurryMate
If you’re unfamiliar with the remarkable subculture known as furry, Wikipedia has a pretty good primer. And you’ll want to pay attention to the term yiffing, because that’s where FurryMate comes in. It’s a matchmaking service and online community dedicated to the furry lifestyle, which largely involves dressing up in cartoon animal "fursuits” and socializing, to various degrees of intensity, at conventions and costume balls. Unlike many of the other hyperspecific dating sites out there, FurryMate appears to offer legitimate services to a large and active community of members. Check out this promo video to see what you’re missing….
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Glenn McDonald writes about the intersections of technology and culture at glenn-mcdonald.com and via Twitter @glennmcdonald1.
