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Lovestruck Review

A fresh approach to online dating geared for single professionals that works perfectly in London but leaves other cities playing catch up.

In the age of online dating it’s almost impossible to imagine a time when finding a date – even more so, a partner – through the internet was something strange, weird and well… let’s face it, simply not very cool. Thankfully these days are now long gone and good riddance too!

However, we can’t fault you if every now and then you still find online dating a bit intimidating. It’s just all that pressure of… well, you know, 'dating'. Sometimes you just wish things could be a little easier. That you could go out for just a bite to eat without putting a stamp on it. Just enjoy some lunch together with someone who seems interesting and take it from there. Without all the awkwardness of a real 'date'. We know what you mean as we’ve been there.

Lovestruck.com is a site that aims to do just that: it sets you up for lunch if that is what you wish, yet it still works like an online dating site where you can look around, flirt and potentially find a real match.

Lovestruck primarily focuses on urban areas, people who work and live in big cities and busy professionals who are looking for people like them living near them.

Getting started on Lovestruck

Signing up to Lovestruck is easy. Except, you should know that you can’t just sign up to their universal site and start browsing profiles from all around the globe. No, the whole idea behind Lovestruck is that it matches you with people NEAR you, which is good as you don’t get a whole bunch of matches that live hundreds of miles away but could prove problematic for those who live/work outside the big cities. Lovestruck currently has specific sites for people in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Dublin plus world cities New York, Singapore and Hong Hong. On the Lovestruck homepage you specify your nearest city which takes you to your local site.

The good thing about signing up is that you don’t need to spend a long time writing up your profile before you can start browsing. All you need to do, is come up with a username and password, specify the gender you’re interested in (Lovestruck also works for gay and lesbian daters), choose the area where you work and live – and that’s you sorted. You can sign up and start browsing the profiles straight away, seeing what’s on offer and how other users have built up their profiles.

Or you could just start building up your own profile straight away as – needless to say – it increases significantly your chances of actually finding a date and in sparking their interest in you.

Your Lovestruck.com profile

When it comes to filling in your profile, it’s one of the easiest and most straightforward versions out there in the online dating world. It’s mostly about ticking the boxes and choosing answers from pop-out boxes or multiple choice questionnaires. In fact, there’s not much that you need to write yourself at all – except for the 'narrative' of at least 50 words that you have to complete. They won’t actually let you proceed without filling it in, so better get your thinking cap on and come up with a good one. Don’t worry though, Lovestruck provide some help should writer’s block hit you in the moment. And you also have an option of hiding your profile narrative from users that you haven’t marked as your favourites.

One thing we should point out is that Lovestruck proofread users’ profiles carefully and they have their own rules one must adhere to. They do expect you to put some work into your description and won’t accept poor grammar or text-style English, so if you’re not so sure about your writing, you best put that spellcheck on.

You can obviously upload a photo – and we cannot advise doing that strongly enough – and if you’re a paid member, you can add and view multiple photos. There is also an option of hiding your photo from users other than your favourites thus narrowing the chances that you will be seen when you don’t want to be seen.

Well designed

The good thing about Lovestruck profiles is that they don’t clutter too much information into that one page. The profiles aren’t overwhelming and brimming with so much information that it’s hard to take it all on board. It’s all very straightforward and easy to grasp.

We also like the way that your 'homepage' has been designed. You have in front of you the page stats applying to your profile: how many times you’ve been winked at, how many members have marked you as their favourites, how many members have checked you out and – now to the really important stuff that we also mentioned earlier – which members are free for lunch, which members are free this night and (depending what city page you’re using) what events are on near you. Of course, the system also shows your favourites, users you have checked out or winked at. If you’re up for it yourself you can easily mark whether you are free for lunch or a date and that means you’re going to appear in other users’ list from where they can pick you out and ask you for a lunch.

If you’re a paying member, there is also an option of visiting all the profiles “incognito” – that means there will be no signs of you visiting someone’s profile and you can snoop around anyone’s page as often as you wish without worrying that you'll scare them off or seem like a crazy stalker. After all, we all know how tempting it is to visit someone’s profile a hundred times a day when you’re really into them. You can also hide the data of when you were last online – a handy little feature in itself.

Another interesting feature which we have never really encountered in other dating sites is their very own Newsfeed feature which works a little like Facebook newsfeed, giving you updates about the users – who has updated their profiles or uploaded new photos etc.

How to communicate

Getting in touch with other members is easy. There’s winking and there’s emailing. That’s it. No chats or complicated instant messaging systems. All easy and straightforward. What is important to know is that in some of the Lovestruck city sites messaging (reading and replying) is free for unpaid members, in bigger ones (like London) you have to pay in order to do that.

Free vs Paid site

So – what do unpaid members get? Like we pointed out, in bigger cities the options are more limited than in smaller ones. For example, in Lovestruck Edinburgh you can read messages and see if your emails have been read. In London, however you can only set up your profile, search the members and wink at them but you can’t read or send messages. There are two paid member levels in Lovestruck London, Connect and Elite, both giving you plenty of options to get the best out of your online dating experience. Elite members can use the 'incognito' feature and get VIP positioning for their profiles and perhaps most importantly the ability for free members to contact them. Of course, bear in mind that big city users also have to pay a little more for using Lovestruck.

Conclusion

If you're a single professional who lives in London then we hands down recommend Lovestruck as a creative and fun way to meet new people and potentially find a match. There's a large active membesrship, the quality of the profiles is high and the site is intuitive and easy to use. If you're from outside London then it's definitely worth signing up to see who's online in your area as you can do quite a bit on Lovestruck with a free membership so you've nothing to lose. It's not the cheapest dating site around but it's one of the best we've tested to date.

Pros and Cons

  The 'free for lunch' and 'free tonight' lists showing up in your profile.
  Being restricted to big cities only and having to sign up with a specific city.