Dating sites for every niche, from Ayn Rand lovers to people with colostomy bags.
There’s no stigma with online dating anymore.
There’s really not. There used to be. About five or six years back, my friend Steve was on JDate and had a line in his profile like, “If you don’t mind, let’s just tell everyone we met at a park or something.” And every single girl who wrote him commented on that line and told him they loved that idea.
But over time, online dating continued to shed its stigma. At this point, the place where I met my girlfriend (adult kickball) would be considered nerdier than if I’d met her on eHarmony. (Which, from what I can tell, is just a website where neurosurgeons try to get hand jobs. This will be! An everlasting love!)
And with de-stigmatization and popularity… along with every corporation in the web sphere realizing that loneliness equals dollar signs… online dating has become more and more niche-fied. So behind the giants like Match.com there are literally thousands of smaller, more targeted online dating sites.
I plowed around and found the 11 dating sites that serve the most obscure niches. I’m reluctant to say these are weird dating sites or strange online dating sites because they’re not, they’re just… different.
Well, a few are weird.
1 | Lovebitten (dating for vampires)
Their slogan is “the best human/vampire dating site.” (ETA: A few people told me this site is a promotion for HBO’s True Blood… damn. But Vampersonals.com, GothicMatch.com and GothScene.com are all real and in this same genre.)
I blame Twilight for this. I blame Twilight for a lot of things.
But… and I’m just spitballing here… I’m guessing that if you go on Lovebitten, the vampire you get is going to look a lot less like Robert Patterson and more like a paler Perez Hilton wearing wax fangs.
If you’re a vampire on the site, the human female you get probably isn’t going to be much like Kristen Stewart either. Because she’ll probably have at least some modicum of acting ability.
2 | Farmers Only
The website is called FarmersOnly.com, but there’s a quote from the founder on the page that reads, “You don’t have to be a farmer.” I am confused by your brand messaging, sir.
3 | Tall Personals
Seems like a useful place for a giantess to find a man who can allow her to wear high heels and/or who can take her in the post… but there’s a big controversy. The first question of their FAQ reads “I thought there was a criteria for membership, i.e. height F: 5’10, M: 6’2. I find many normal height (5’8 women and 6’0 men) people … why is this happening?”
The answer from the powers-that-be: “This website is for tall people and their admirers. Not everyone has the same definiton [SIC] of what is tall.”
I smell a scam. If I wasn’t below average in height and vehemently against happiness for tall people, I’d be outraged.
4 | The Atlasphere (dating for Ayn Rand fans)
You can just imagine the girl telling her friends about her Ayn Rand date the night before. “So things were going well, we ate some appetizers, talked about personal rights, had some wine, used the word ‘dystopia’ 47 times and didn’t give homeless people any change. Then we got back to his place and it turned out his fountainhead was as thick as Atlas Shrugged.
“I never do THAT on a first date but, hey, rabid individualism doesn’t always have to mean my night ends with me masturbating to photos of Steve Forbes.”
5 | Equestrian Cupid
This would be cool if it was a site to hook up your horse with another horse. Like a stud matcher. And the female horses could rate the studs “Do ’em” or “Glue ’em.” (HI-YO!)
Sadly, it is not. It is one of many, many dating sites oriented around bringing together people with similar taste in animals. There’s even a site called Date Me Date My Pet where people’s animal compatibility is given more weight than any other measure or predictor of compatibility.
6 | DateCraft (dating for World of Warcraft fans)
There are tons of “geek”-oriented dating sites, but this is my favorite. Mostly because they display photos of their 15 most recent visitors… and when I went there, the ratio was 12 dudes/two girls/one I’m not sure. Which seemed juuuust about right.
7 | Pokerfaces.net (dating for poker players)
Like any poker-related website that ends in a “.net” I have a feeling like this is a front for an online gambling site.
On the topic of poker and dating, I made the mistake of actually listening deeply to the lyrics of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face the other day. In that song she makes a bunch of tragically stilted poker metaphors… and also confuses poker with blackjack, Russian roulette, craps and using a glue gun.
8 | STD Friends
If you look at their HTML source code, here’s what they have in their meta tag as website keywords: “STDs, STD dating, STD online dating, STD personals, STD singles, STD matchmaking, Genital warts dating, hsv1 dating, hsv2 dating, Hepatitis dating, Chancroid dating, Chlamydia dating, Crabs dating, HIV/AIDS dating, Herpes dating, HPV dating, hepatitis dating, gonorrhea dating, syphilis dating, STD friendship, STD support, STD community.”
And once again, trichomoniasis gets the shaft. Ironically.
9 | Crazy Blind Date
On this site, you agree to go on a last minute blind date. You don’t get to see a photo of the person or even communicate with them. It’s an interesting, albeit terrible sounding, idea for online dating.
It’s not, as I had hoped, a website where you get fixed up with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.
10 | Adult diapers
This is one of those that I really didn’t want to put on the list because it felt so contrived… but if I’m doing a list about offbeat online dating sites and DON’T include it, then I’ve really failed on my journalistic obligations.
Yes, this site is dating for people who wear diapers. Not Depends, but rather baby diapers. I’ll just never understand that fetish. Even Japanese woman-on-octopus porn makes more logical sense to me.
11 | Meet An Ostomate (dating for people with -ostomies)
I can imagine it’s tough to date post-colostomy… it must be super hard to bag chicks.
(Sorry.)