I’ve been asked to do a sponsored review of Matchdoctor, which is a dating website that I have been a member of for over a year. I haven’t been doing a ton of online dating lately, but I have been thinking about throwing my hat in the ring again.

The biggest advantage of Matchdoctor is that you can do pretty much whatever you want, email, post pics, IM, see full profiles, and it’s all free, no credit card required. There aren’t any pop-ups, and overall the site is very easy to figure out. There are no confusing links to adult websites, and it seems like most of the profiles on here are looking for dating or a relationship. I haven’t received a lot of spam or inappropriate propositions on this site, which I can’t say for some of the other free sites.

There are many great features about this site including a chat, a way to tag your favorites or friends, a great search feature, a dating forum, but my favorite feature has to be the ability to turn the Instant Messenger off. For those of you (woman particularly) who are on other free dating websites, I’m sure you understand how great an option this is.

The other feature I like about the site is it allows all of its members to contribute to a blog, so you can read about other’s experiences and get to know people outside of their profiles.

As for the quality and availability of local profiles, I was very impressed. There are some free sites that you sign up for only to find out that there are two people in your area that fit what you are looking for. On Matchdoctor there were pages of profiles for me to browse through, and I never had to worry about coming across any nudity or explicit headlines so I can even browse at the office if it’s a particularly slow day.

There are a couple features that I can’t use with my free membership, including checking out who has viewed me. I also had a little trouble getting my password emailed to me because I had forgotten it. But overall this site is very easy to navigate, I never get spam from them, and I think it’s one of the higher quality free sites out there for people who are looking for dates online.

Now let’s see if you can find me!

After a recent event I’ve been thinking about exactly how young is too young for me. I’m not thinking about dating 17 year olds here, but I still feel that even 22 or 23 is too young for me. I know everyone is different and there may be many mature 22 year olds out there, but I haven’t met any. In a few years I know this age difference won’t matter, but right now it seems like a really big deal.

I’ve heard many people say that you can tell a lot about a person by who their friends are. The more I think about this, the more I can’t decide whether I agree with it or not. When I look at my friends, I see some similarities and many differences, but they are all great people. I would not be at all upset if someone judged me based on who they are, and I hope they would feel the same.

At the same time, I’m not sure I want to judge people based on other people’s actions. I suppose if someone chooses to hang out with a person who doesn’t have the highest set of morals, that would be their own decision, but it probably would reflect on them at least a little bit. But say someone is friends with someone who has “problems” - should this reflect on them?

For example, I probably wouldn’t choose to date someone who is, say, an alcoholic. I would, however, have no problem dating someone who had a friend who was an alcoholic. I think this shows that the guy I was dating had a caring side, and wouldn’t just bail on his friend when the times got tough (of course if all his friends are alcoholics that’s a different story).

Then there is the counter-argument. I will use a real life example from my past. I had an ex, who had a roomate who consistently cheated on his long-term girlfriend. I knew he was doing it, but didn’t really know his girlfriend, so I felt like it wasn’t my place to tell her, and none of his friends were gonna give him up (see guy code, act II, section 1). Should I have lost respect for my ex because he is friends with a guy who would do this even though he was supposed to be in a committed relationship?

In the end the girl ended up finding out her man was cheating, after he gave her Herpes (again, true story), and a few months later I realized that, at least in this case, I should have judged my ex by his friends because he was doing the same thing to me.