Personal story time!

I've tried Parship this year, which is quite "popular" (or at least advertised a lot) in Germany. I'm paying around 50€/month for a membership for one year and have cancelled the membership now. I don't think it's worth it.

From the outside, and also at the start, it's very professional. There's a lengthy personal test and everything has some kind of class. They really try not to be some lower-level "fuckbuddy app" or something like that. I liked that image because I'm not looking for something like that and I thought the price would "filter" out all the people who are just in for a quick chance.

So I really took my courage and tried to make good first steps with the womens I had high "matching points" with. I read their profiles, tried two write a nice first message, asked questions about what they wrote in their profile, sometimes pointed out similarities. Possibly I'm very clumsy in doing that, but I think very few people are actually "good" in "dating" (probably not those an apps anyway?!?) so I thought it might be good enough. Anxiety and low self-esteem don't really help much either with all of that.

Quick note: Parship will not show you an image of the partner right from the start. It's blurred until you approve that your chat partner may see it. I like that because as someone who's probably not that good looking, this somewhat helps putting personality before looks.

What I quickly found out is that there are lots of dead profiles. Last activity weeks ago. Nevertheless, parship is happy to recommend those profiles in-app and via mails ("If you find your love today, it might be because of our recommendations" - actual mail title), but messages to those profiles were usually never read.

I also found out that women seem to be massively getting spammed. One woman wrote me and told me she'd really love to answer every message but she received over 50 messages in a day, sometimes from guys hundreds of kilometres away, and she would just have to make a cut somewhere. (Obviously she made a cut at/with me.) Not sure if those guys from hundreds of kilometres are actually ready to leave everything behind for da date, seems more like some high-level "fuckbuddyism".

Something, that might be related to this, is that women are active on the platform, like "last activity yesterday", but will still not read your messages and not visit your profile. Not sure if they are simply not interested or also overwhelmed.

Besides that you have the same problem with premium/non-premium accounts. I've received messages from woman who wrote that they are not able to read any further messages from me, because they have no premium account and are not planning to buy one. As I am somewhat brief in my first message I will obviously not post my postal adress, mail address and mobile phone number. Also rumors are that Parship will ban your account if you do that. Not sure though if it's true. Anyway, I'd find it impolite at least to "spam" somebody with that.

From the outside you can not see which accounts are premium and which not. Which means, in my case, that I'm having a good look at the profile, trying to write a good first message and making a good first impression (while fighting hordes of anxiety) only to receive a "nice message, sorry that I've got no premium. bye."-type answer. I asked Parship support about this and obviously it's not planned to mark non-premium accounts as such.

Another thing I found "complicated": Parship offers you various different methods of contacting the other person. You can like single entries in their profile, you can simply message them (premium function, I think), you can send "ice breakers" (choose five images, see what the other person chose), you can also "smile" at people (can also add a message here - that's what I'm usually doing) and you can also have video chats (never tried that).

This makes using the platform somewhat complicated. Is something better than the other? What should I use for the first contact? Smile only? Should I allow my chat partner to see my image right from the start? Or only after we wrote? What to do with "ice breaker results"? Are two matches good? Bad? Something to talk about? Why would I even video chat through parship and not trough WhatsApp or something else? Who knows? I surely don't.

Parship also has a message board for its members. Topics are... well... recurring. "Why does nobody write me back?", "Do you like my pictures?", "How big should my search radius be?". All in all it's a mixture of very old topics, where Parship itself also engaged and tried to help, and mainly dealing with rejection. Not sure if that helps anybody, it just feels like they felt the need to have a message board somewhere back in the past.

So, after almost a year, 600€ less in my wallet, lots of times getting turned down I wonder if I should just have invested that money in treating myself with some nice dinners and going to a bar every other week. Maybe I'd have met a woman that way.

My expectations, everybody on Parship is really into serious dating, has been disappointed. It's not that it was unbelievable high, but I wonder that it seems to be as low as is.

For Parship it's fine I think. There will be the next guy like me who feels like something is missing and that "serious online dating" might be a good way to find what he's looking for.

Last words: If you're single woman from Baden-Württemberg (Germany), drop me a comment. I've got two cat and enjoy writing long comments on Hacker News. Maybe we'll fit. :-)