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Written by jay
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Monday, 28 January 2008 06:16 |
The first in a two-part series looking at new online personals/matchmaking options for gays in the market for a relationship. This part: the advertising push.
If being single on a frigid, rainy night isn't bad enough, the non-monogamously inclined in San Francisco now have to deal with insecurity times a thousand at the Castro underground MUNI station:
In case 27 Dresses and the Valentine's displays at Walgreen's weren't making you feel shitty enough, PartnerForLife.com and assorted other matchmaking sites now promise to make you feel even worse about not conforming to heterosexual norms.
Suffice it to say, we were not emotionally prepared for this onslaught and quickly found a glory hole to spend the evening pressed against.
The mini-campaign, so far confined to this one MUNI station, turns out to be an in-house-designed teaser for this online gay matchmaking site that hasn't launched yet. PartnerForLife.com was started by a professional matchmaker, Dale Bullock, who claims to have matched up over 200 gay couples in SF; so far they are only collecting pre-registrations for their new online service. Following a classic marketing scheme, PFL has simultaneously exacerbated an anxiety and offered its solution… but until Valentine's Day, they won't tell you how much it costs to avoid dying alone.
Partner for Life, like its straight-and-narrow counterpart, eHarmony, features an online personality test or "compatibility profile" that takes 2 to 3 hours to complete, except this one is written by and for gay men. In fact, the vacuum left by eHarmony's refusal to admit gays has spawned a cottage industry of sites for gay men who are looking for more than a hook-up (or who were only looking for hook ups prior to being bombarded with ads for monogamy.)
With sites like this and The Millionaire Matchmaker premiering on Bravo, and Paula Abdul using a matchmaker to find her a millionaire, it seems the old-fashioned yenta biz is a growth industry (even the NYT says so). Chemistry.com isn't specifically geared toward gay men, but uses a gay man in one of its primary national ads and touts its non-discriminatory matchmaking service. In fact, gay staph could be just the marketing angle these LTR sites have needed to get dirty homosexuals out of the bars and onto bridal registries. Who are we to judge? We finally gave in after seeing MyPartner.com.
MyPartner.com was launched in 2007 also by a San Francisco-based professional gay matchmaker who had only before offered traditional, offline services. Their ads are a little less superior than PFL and, more importantly, the service is available now. We, too, hoped to be matched with a young hottie who smiles just enough and wears tightly fitting pullovers over a training bra. We didn't even mind his semi-lazy eye.
Singing "Matchmaker, matchmaker" we submitted our profile. To our
unsurprise, we mostly found what we expected to find… desperate-looking
fortysomethings posing in front of their Beemers. (click for larger)
Best of all, we found Prince Charming here without paying a cent, and even with a premium membership we'd only out five bucks, which is way less than we'd spend for a drunken night and a fumbling cab ride home with a stranger. We might not have a husband, but at least we've got a life. That's what we tell ourselves anyway.
PartnerforLife.com
MyPartner.com
Chemistry.com
RELATED:
SF Gays to Add Staph to Fats, Femmes
Hitting it Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love (New York Times)
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