Linked love: OKCupid offers options for polyamorous couples
It's an extension of a small beta program that launched last month.
One of OkCupid's biggest advantages versus other matchmaking sites is the seemingly endless amount of dating data its users provide voluntarily in an effort to find a compatible mate. The flip-side of that is OkCupid can use that information to tailor its site to emerging trends -- like offering the option for polyamorous folks to link their profiles to make finding like-minded people easier. Rather than awkwardly creating a joint account or hoping those 11 letters stand out among the rest of your profile text, The Atlantic writes that now those who list themselves as "seeing someone," "married," or "in an open relationship" can link their profiles (similar to Facebook) to eliminate any sort of confusion.
Again, this wasn't a random change, rather it was spurned by the massive amounts of information OKCupid has available to it. Forty-two percent of its users are willing to consider dating a someone in an open or polyamorous relationship, while 24 percent are interested in group sex. The Atlantic says that those numbers each jumped by eight percent in the past five years and that, in the same time period, people identifying exclusively as monogamous has dropped 12 percent. This is simply the site reacting to what its users are looking for.
Sites like Poly Matchmaker and BeyondTwo serve the community exclusively, but like The Atlantic says, this is the first mainstream site to offer ethical non-monogamists the option for finding one another. It's apparently something that rolled out to a select group of users in December, but went wide on Friday. It's an opt-in process too, where both members of the couple have to agree. Lets hope this leads to fewer breakups.
[Image credit: Alamy]
