Online dating for professionals – high calibre online dating

February 20th, 2009

We all want to find people who are similar to us, so if you’re intelligent, well educated, professional, attractive or well off, you may well want to use an online dating site that caters to people of your high calibre and/or high standards. This post is about exactly such dating sites. Some aim to actively make their membership exclusive, while others have just ended up that way. Some offer attractive dating or dating for rich people, while others are geared towards graduates and professionals of a more regular variety.

The sites covered in this post are (full reviews below):

1. Parship- an upmarket UK serious dating site with psychometric testing
2. Lovestruck.com – a localised urban dating site for city professionals in many cities around the world.
3. – UK-only dating site for professionals, graduates and “smart people”. Has an exclusive feel and a nice crowd.
4. Diamond Lounge – an exclusive dating site for the high-class and well-to-do dater
5. Speed Dater – UK’s biggest speed dating company, offers special events for professionals, high earners and international professionals
6. Sugardaddie.com – famous and popular upscale site catering to the attractive and successful as well as high earners and businessmen and women.
7. Wealthymen.com – international dating site for high earners that uses verification methods to confirm people’s profession and income
8. Guardian Soulmates – UK site frequented by liberal, cultural professional graduates
9. My Single Friend – Attractive young professionals galore

The reviews

Parship is a serious dating site for people who want a serious relationship or marriage. It’s pretty upmarket and attracts a professional crowd. The site is based around a detailed personality test that helps the site choose suitable matches for you. The test is so in depth that you can even purchase a personality assessment as an optional extra.

Lovestruck.com

A dating site for busy city professionals who want to fit their dating life around their work and other social commitments. Encourages meeting people for lunch, coffees and post-work drinks, as well as singles’ events in trendy locations. It’s actually a number of websites, one per city in the UK or abroad. London, Edinburgh, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore are but a few places catered for.

My Single Friend
Sarah Beeny’s incredibly successful dating site is flush with attractive single graduate professionals and many creative people. Definitely one of the best collection of singles around but catering mostly to people in and around cities in the UK (although it’s constantly expanding outwards).

is a UK site aimed exclusively at professionals and graduates. It markets itself as being for intelligent people and draws a nice crowd. The site is not as big as some of the other ones, with about 75,000 members in total, but it the people seem nice and genuine and can generally string a sentence together rather well.

Diamond Lounge aims to be an exclusive site for high earning, classy daters with high standards. There are definitely a lot of people on the site that fit that description, though I did spot a few scammy profiles that have slipped past the moderators. The site requires you to register your details (for free) before you can check out people’s full profiles. Membership outside of the US is not always very big, but it’s worth a look.

Speed Dater is the UK’s largest speed dating and singles’ parties company. They have special speed dating events for professional graduates and some for elite professionals – people who make more than 40k a year. Their events are large and extremely popular.

Sugardaddie.com was the original millionaire dating site. It started out as trying to match out rich men with beautiful women but has since grown to become one of the most successful dating sites in the world for beautiful, professional men and women from USA,Canada,UK and Australia. It’s been on TV in just about every country it covers and draws a very classy crowd, although there were some oddly scammy profiles on there too.

Wealthymen.com is another site aimed at people who make a lot of money. They claim to use various means of verification to verify people’s income, profession, address, etc. Approved/verified members will have a special symbol displayed on their profile, but not all people are verified – I don’t think they force people to go through the process, whatever it might be. Of course, most people would probably not bother making contact with unverified members.
Annoyingly, even when you sign up for the free account, you can’t view people’s full profiles, which is a pain. Some profiles seemed obviously scammery or jokey (spotty 18 year old kids who make $500k-$2million anyone?) so it would have been good to take a better look at the site before deciding whether to pay. There is no way to see whose verified and who isn’t without paying. There were quite a few profiles that seemed genuine at first glance, so if you’re as rich as the site expects you to be, I guess you won’t mind paying $9.95 for a 7 day trial to check them out.

Guardian Soulmates is the dating offering from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. It’s open to people who don’t read the Guardian, but the people dating on here definitely fit the Guardian reader’s profile: culturally aware, left-wing liberal, creative and heady. It has a very detailed search facility and a good list of features to keep anyone happy.

Related posts:

1. Urban dating sites and online dating with singles’ events
2. Asian online dating and speed dating sites
3. Valentine’s day singles’ parties

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