What Is ConnectingSingles?
Connecting Singles is an online dating site that’s been around for almost a quarter century, since 2001. It’s a mainstream site so everyone is welcome, and it’s safe for work since there’s no nudity allowed. It’s also got some fun dating features for you to explore, which we’ll expand on below.
We’ll investigate the cost of using the site, and how complicated or easy the login process is. We’ll let you know what we think of the quality of the singles, and what it’ll take to have a fully complete profile. If safety is a priority for you, we’ll tell you about the safety features that are available and if we discover anything concerning in the Terms of Use or Privacy Policy. Finally, we’ll explain our rating and give a final recommendation in the final thoughts section.
Pros
Signing up is quick, easy, and free.
Well-designed site.
Many ways to initiate contact for free.
Inexpensive trial available.
Cons
Constant pop-ups while browsing the site.
Many profiles visible in search results are deactivated.
Too many emails – we received an average of 10 per day.
VIP Membership is pricey.
Very few fun features.
Login Process
The registration process will take 5-15 minutes, depending on how much of your profile you complete. There are multiple Connecting Singles sign up links on the homepage to take you to the registration form, which starts with your gender and the gender(s) you’re seeking. You’ll then enter your first name, birth date, and email address, and create a password.
That’s followed by 7 optional steps to complete your profile before you start browsing the site, you can skip all of these to do them later or complete them during registration. See the Profile Completion section below for details about steps 1-6.The 7th and final step is verifying your email address. You do this by clicking the link that was emailed to you.
You can skip this step now, but you’ll have limited access to the site and can expect constant pop-ups and reminders to verify your email until you do it. Ditto with adding a photo, you’ll have bright green banners telling you “YOU’RE INVISIBLE” until you add at least one. Later, when you want to join the site, your Connecting Singles login details are your Member ID or email address and your password.
Profile Completion
There are 6 steps that you can either complete during registration or decide to do later. The first step is adding a photo. Step 2 is answering some shorter questions like “What do you like to do for fun?” and “What is the most interesting fact about you?”. There are 14 questions in total, and you must answer all of them to have a fully complete profile. Step 3 is the About Me section where you can write some more details about what you’re looking for.
Step 4 has the appearance and lifestyle questions, and asks about your eye and hair color, height, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and many more. Step 5 is all about your interests, where you can choose your hobbies and favorite music genres from a list. If you’ve done step 1 and 2, or 1 and 3, you’ll unlock step 6, a free introduction message. This is a message that you type out and it’ll be sent to all the members near you, as a way to initiate conversations.
In addition to those 6 steps, you can also add a video introduction or message to your profile. The video introduction is for you to introduce yourself and what you’re looking for and can be a great way to verify that you’re the real deal. You can also add video stories, similar to stories on other social media. This can be a video of an event you’re attending, a skit, or anything you’d like.
User Account Quality
The users on this site seem to be quite real, and the biggest sign is the number of profiles who’ve written their contact number over their photos or added social media info on their profiles. There’s nothing quite as human as finding a way to cheat the system and get in contact for free, and that’s what’s on display here.
There are also some fake profiles but these are quite obvious, for example one woman who had the same copied and pasted message with odd grammar as an answer to every profile question. Profiles with no information should be treated with caution. Most profiles have photos which is generally a good sign.
The search page boasts that there are upwards of 69,000 members. However, while browsing, many of the profiles we clicked on stated “[Name’s] account has been deactivated and is no longer in use”. This seems misleading, because those profiles are seemingly counted in the total number of members, and it’s disappointing to click on someone’s profile only to find out they’ve left the site.
Dating Features
Encounters
A fun feature available on the ConnectingSingles dating site is the Encounters feature. This is the swiping ‘minigame’ that most dating sites have adopted, where you see someone’s profile picture and indicate your interest. Your options are yes, no, or maybe. If you both click “yes”, you’ll get a notification that you’ve matched. This is a great way to start to gauge mutual interest.
Some features that set this apart, is that you can see a preview of who’s coming next, with some short facts about them like their location, age, and eye color. You can also see your last swipe and can change your answer.
Dating Diaries
You can also create a post, give it a title, and enter that into your Dating Diary on your profile. Other members who view your profile can see a snippet of what you’ve written, although only premium members can open the diary entry to see the whole thing. You can use this to share fun and interesting activities or jokes. It has a lot of potential to be a great way to showcase your personality to potential matches.
Blogs, Forums, Polls, Poems
Some other ConnectingSingles reviews mention many more fun features to explore, including blogs, chat forums, birthday lists, poems, recipes, and many more. It seems these used to be available, but the site may have simplified or downsized by removing them. Our testers couldn’t find these features and another site user posted Dating Diary entries asking where they were, and later that she was leaving the site.
Inbox Filtering
ConnectingSingles allows users to control who can contact them by setting a filter, rather than allowing anyone to contact them or limiting messages to only once you’ve matched. There are a few filters, the first is setting an age range for your match between 18 and 120.
You can also specify how far they can be from you, by setting a distance range from your city. And finally, you can specify if only members with photos should be allowed to contact you, or if you’re okay with no-photo people contacting you too. Once you’ve set these restrictions, only members who comply with your filters can message you.
Voice and Video Calling
No online dating site is complete without some kind of chatting functionality, but ConnectingSingles takes it one step further by allowing you to voice or even video call your match from the site. These are a great way to verify that your match is a real person, that they’ve used their own photos, and that they’re using up-to-date photos.
It’s also a great way to start getting comfortable while getting to know each other. This feature is only available to premium users.
Contact Other Members for Free
While searching through profiles or viewing someone’s profile, you can take a few actions with a free profile. You can send them a wink, which will give them a notification and is a clear sign that you’re into them. Or add them as a favorite, making them easy to find in your favorites list later. You can also send them a chat request, which will give them a Connecting Singles mail incoming notification, and lastly, you can send one free initial message to any user.
Unfortunately, while it’s great that there are so many ways to initiate contact, free members can’t read messages. So, most members will get a notification and a prompt to buy a subscription. This could be another way to tempt users into upgrading and getting VIP. It also adds to the email spam – you’ll get an email any time someone sends you something, our test profiles get up to 10 emails per day.
Prices & Costs
ConnectingSingles is monetized through ads, selling subscriptions (called “VIP Memberships”), and various add-ons (called bolt-ons). These hidden costs can seem like a money grab unless the model is created to keep the subscription cost low by allowing you to get a baseline feature and add any extras you want.
VIP Membership
You’ll find that with a free account, you’re able to explore the site and send a limited number of messages to potential matches for free. You’ll need to buy a subscription to continue chatting once those have been depleted. In addition to reading and replying to messages, there are also the following perks:
Access to the bolt-on features
See who’s viewed your profile
Read people’s Dating Diaries
Voice and Video call other members
Send virtual gifts
The VIP Membership monthly cost gets cheaper as you purchase it for a longer period:
1 Month: $60.45 per month (Billed as $60.45 on the day of purchase).
3 Months: $40.32 per month ($120.95 on the day of purchase).
6 Months: $29.33 per month ($175.95 on the day of purchase).
1 Year: $25.21 per month ($302.45 on the day of purchase).
VIP Membership 3 Day Trial
When you first join the site, you’ll get an offer to give the VIP Membership a test drive:
3 Day Trial: $2.99
That’s only a dollar a day to enjoy all the perks of VIP. While this can be very tempting, be aware that this will automatically be renewed at the end of the 3 days as a 6-month subscription if you don’t cancel it first.
Bolt-ons
Once you’ve got a VIP Membership, you can add one or more of the bolt-ons to your subscription to enhance your experience. There are four options to choose from:
Contact for Free – $14.99 – Let free members send you the first message and read and reply when you’ve messaged first.
Reply for Free – $12.99 – Let free members read and reply to your messages.
Search VIP – $6.99 – A highlight for your profile in the search results.
Read Notification – $6.99 – This will send you an email to let you know when a match has read your message.
These prices are to add the feature to your subscription for only 30 days, so if you’ve got a 3 or 6-month package, you’ll need to renew your bolt-on at the end of the first month.
Discount Codes
As annoying as the pop-ups can be every time you visit a new page, sometimes they contain helpful information. For example, after a few days of not buying a subscription, our testers got a pop-up containing a discount code for 25% off the price of the full membership, for any package except the trial. A few days later, there was a discount code for 50% off.
How Safe Is ConnectingSingles?
Become RealMe Verified
From your profile, there’s a link saying “Become RealMe verified”. In theory, this will take you to another site (TheRealMe.com) to verify your identity. However, this link seems broken because it led to a search page instead of a registration page. You can also theoretically search for matches on RealMe to verify their identity, but you need their last name, which isn’t readily available on ConnectingSingles.com.
If RealMe has any information on your match, it will show you their criminal, arrest, and court records. However, when testing it, we found that it rarely had any hits when searching. If there are any results to your search, you must register to see them.
Your Personal Information
Any information you add to the site can and will be shared with the other dating sites owned by the same company (White Label Dating Inc.). Your card information is considered to be part of your personal information, and this is shared with all companies within the holding group. It also states in the Privacy Policy that if the company is sold, your information will also be transferred to the new owner.
Report and Ignore
If you’ve been talking to someone and it turns sour, you can Ignore them. This is the equivalent of blocking them and will stop them from being able to view your profile or communicate with you. If they’ve done something that you believe to be against the site’s terms of use, you can also report them. Reporting someone will result in the moderation team investigating the report and the other person’s account could be suspended or terminated.
Final Thoughts
Connecting Singles has a mix of fake and genuine profiles, with most genuine users including their contact details in their profiles. This is likely because the VIP Membership is so expensive that very few people can afford the cost, and profile moderation is too poorly executed to prevent it. Several users in the search results have deactivated accounts despite still having the ‘New User’ badge.
These suggest that something is making new users immediately jump ship, and even those who stick around are finding ways to communicate elsewhere. While there are some interesting features like Encounters, the ‘free messages’ only serve to tempt people into buying premium. Voice and video calling is also an enticing feature but is only available to premium users.
ConnectingSingles is meant to be a mainstream site, but dating sites need members to succeed and there seem to be very few genuine users here, and even fewer who pay for premium to be able to chat. For all these reasons, we rate the site 5/10 and recommend connecting your single self to a different, better dating site. If that hasn’t convinced you, at least try the 3-day trial first, but don’t forget to cancel or you’ll get signed up for 6 months.
FAQ
Is ConnectingSingles A Good Dating Site?
It’s just fine. It’s expensive for what it is and doesn’t have that many users, but it’s perfectly functional.
Is Connecting Singles Free?
It’s free to create an account and start conversations, but if you want to read and reply to messsages, you’ll need to buy a VIP Membership.
How Much Does It Cost To Join The Site?
VIP Membership costs anywhere from $60.45 to $302.45, depending on how long you get it for. There’s also a trial available for $3.
Is There A ConnectingSingles.com App Available?
It seems there used to be one, but it was buggy. Currently, there’s no app on Play Store or the App Store, but there is an APK available. Or else the Connecting Singles mobile site is a good alternative.
How To Delete My ConnectingSingles Account?
Go to My Account and then to Site Membership, and you’ll see the Delete account button in the bottom right corner. That takes you to the FAQ question about it, with a link to follow. You’ll need to confirm that you understand it’ll be permanent, select a reason from a list, and click Delete My Account again.
