Parship Review
Parship ratings
Summary: Quite a serious site attracting a more mature membership. Prepare for a lengthy questionnaire.
3.1
Parship takes great pride in its compatibility matching – in order to evaluate your characteristics in a truly thorough fashion, everyone has to take a free psychometric test upon joining. The test takes about 15 minutes and will analyse your personality, behaviour, attitudes and values so you’ll have a better chance of finding someone you really match with.
Creating your Parship profile
What we liked about Parship is how they’ve tried to make the usual tedious profile-creating process a little more pleasant for you. You start off with a 15 minute personality test – then you put together your profile, which has been made relatively easy for you with less things to think up yourself and more ideas and tips handed to you on a plate. We all know that when it comes to profile-creating it’s always the hardest thing to come up with a really original and/or funny description of yourself. You don’t want to sound lame either so you just spend ages working it… and at the end of it you’re still not happy. Well, there’s no need to worry about that in Parship. They do most of the hard work for you.
However, at the same time, there’s not a lot that you can actually find out about a person from the profiles on Parship – sure, there is the compatibility test, so if you go by that they will match your profile with compatible ones out there but should you want to know a little bit more about the person, you’re left to finding it out yourself from your potential date and not so much from their profile. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – in fact, in many ways we prefer a dating site that doesn’t pretend to do all the work for you. After all, you can only trust someone’s online profile to a certain extent and can only find out in real life whether you really like someone or not. But just be warned – while it is easier to create a profile here, it’s also harder to stand out. And it’s all made doubly hard by showing you blurry images instead of photos. But we’ll come back to that.
The test itself has all kinds of different questions and apparently it analyses 30 different aspects of your personality – it’s up to you if you believe in a compatibility test or not, but in any case you can get some kind of an insight to your personality from this one – it provides you with a personality report as well, which might be quite enlightening if nothing else. All prospective dates are compared against your test results and then the system gives a certain value to each and every prospect out there on the site. Once you click on someone’s profile, you can get a detailed view of where exactly your views and values match and where they don’t match that well.
Some people are reluctant when it comes to posting their photo on an online dating site. Parship has thought about them – your uploaded photos appear in a blurry preview format, so it only gives an impression of what you look like. You can then release your proper photo to a contact if you want them to see it clearly – but remember, that also means it’s harder to stand out and be memorable. Basically it means that Parship is not a site for those who are just looking for some easy fun and flirting – this is a page for those who are serious about relationships, who actually want to find someone they can connect with in meaningful and lasting way.
There’s a 78% chance you’re going to hit it off
Upon joining (and completing the Parship test) the system automatically creates a list of suggested partners for every user. It will constantly being renewed, so you can keep up to date with new users on the site. Like we said, all the contacts are presented with a little percentage icon next to their name, indicating your compatibility score, thus helping the selection process.
A weird thing is that not only are you unsure what the possible dates look like – because the photos are blurry – you won’t also see their names or even user names. All you can see is a ‘code’ of numbers and letters and of course, this makes it very hard to remember the people you ‘meet’ on this site. Therefore Parship lets you name them yourself, so that you can keep tabs on who you’re interacting with. Of course, you can mark them as favourites or remove from your future searches, all these features are available.
You can even make notes on the match – privately, of course – which makes it easier to remember the essential details about him or her. It actually makes more sense than you might think as you’d be surprised how hard it is to remember details about someone if you have actually never seen their photo!
Searching on Parship
Your search criteria gets saved the first time you join the site, so you don’t need to repeat it ever again – if new people who match your partner preferences join the site, they will automatically appear in your suggested partners list. However, should you want to look for someone else for a change, you can just change the search criteria and perform a new search. In addition to the UK, you can also search for users from some other European countries. However, we have to warn you that we found the search itself is not really extensive when it comes to places outside London – even in the whole of Scotland it didn’t find us very many compatible results, not to speak of smaller places.
Also, the search itself is maybe a little hard to find. There’s no straightforward “search” button on your homepage, you’ll find it under “partner profiles” where there’s a link to your search criteria. From all that you can definitely tell this isn’t a site for just killing time and mucking about in the online dating scene – this is for people who mean serious business.
If you like someone on Parship, you can send them a “smile” or an Icebreaker – which is a mini-multiple-choice-quiz, just another way to get in touch, if you’re a bit shy plus it helps you find out whether you and the potential date are on the same wavelength. Another nice touch is you can agree on a fun forfeit you can do if you answer all the questions the same. Or, if you want to just skip that stage you can immediately move to emailing and just contact the person straight up.
When it comes to extras, Parship won’t really offer you any of the instant messaging, audio/video chat options – but it does give you the free personality test plus all the comparisons between you and your possible dates, so that’s definitely a great extra. Also, there’s a mobile friendly version of the site and a Parship app for the iPhone.
Free singles coaching advice for Parship members
This is something we haven’t seen offered on any other dating sites so far – a welcome option to talk with a singles coach and receive advice and feedback on your compatibility test results and personality profile and other dating related advice and tips. As a Parship member you’ll get access to freephone number (Sundays 1am-1pm) or by email anytime – where you can talk to Dr Nafsika Thalassis, a researcher with a special interest in psychiatry, for a confidential and friendly discussion.
Free vs paid site
With the free membership you’ll get to take the famous Parship test and see your results, plus obviously create a profile, upload a photo and both send and receive contact requests. You can send and receive smiles and icebreakers but they are limited. While you can upload a photo and even release it to other members, you won’t be able to view other people’s photos unless you pay.
With a full 6 or 12 month Premium membership Parship will also give you a ‘contact guarantee’ – a guarantee of a minimum of ten contacts or another six months free.
Parship review – Pros and Cons
The personality test and compatibility matching – they really mean to find your match
Can become a bit of a blur with all the blurry photos…
And so ends our Parship review, we never promised it would be short! Hope you enjoy the site if you choose to sign up.
About the Author
Aet Suvari has been reviewing and writing about the world of online dating since 2008 and the launch of Online Dating Help. A stickler for promoting ethical practices within the UK dating industry she champions the sites that get it right while highlighting those holding it back. You can follow her on Google+
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