Positive Singles has developed a solid reputation for matching heterosexual singles with HSV-1 and HSV-2, but what about its matchmaking potential for gay and lesbian singles living with HIV or HSV?
In this article I’m going to take a closer look at gay and lesbian representation on Positive Singles, and compare my findings in a ‘test search’ to other popular STD-related dating sites.
For comparisons sake, I sought out other popular dating sites in both the HIV and Herpes/HPV categories (since no other amalgamated STD dating site is really on the internet radar besides Positive Singles). I did Google searches for ‘HIV dating sites’ and ‘Herpes dating sites’, then used Alexa.com to determine how popular the site is (note that a lower number denotes greater popularity):
HIV dating sites:
positivesingles.com: Alexa rank = 50,803
hivpassions.com: Alexa rank = 1,180,072
positivesdating.com: Alexa rank = 533, 984
hivpoz.net: Alexa rank = 1,677,461
pozmatch.com: Alexa rank = 269,441
hivandsingle.com: Alexa rank = 2,269,913
Herpes dating sites:
positivesingles.com: Alexa rank = 50,803
mpwh.net: Alexa rank = 187,800
herpespassions.com: Alexa rank = 3,398,471
h-date.com: Alexa rank = 447,913
So, based on these searches, the most popular dating site exclusively for HIV is PozMatch.com, while the most popular dating site exclusively for HSV is MPwH.net.
In order to compare match potential for gay and lesbian people I needed to focus on one region, and was looking for a city or state that was mid-sized, without a particularly large gay population. So, I chose Colorado, a mid-sized (with a 22nd ranked population in the U.S.) state that was considered a political ‘swing state’ in 2008.
I also broke down my profile searches by basic age group, so for each sex I wanted results for whether you were looking for a match between ages 20 – 40, or ages 41 – 60.
Here were the results doing this search in Positive Singles:
Man seeking man, 20-40: 297 profiles
Man seeking man, 41-60: 290 profiles
Woman seeking woman, 20-40: 61 profiles
Woman seeking woman, 41-60: 23 profiles
Now, I decided to break this down further to determine what diseases both gay men and lesbian women who used Positive Singles were living with. For the sake of brevity, I combined all ages together. Here’s how it looks:
Men seeking men, Colorado state (all ages):
- HIV: 418
- HSV2: 23
- HSV1: 6
- HPV: 12
- HEPC:1
- HEPB:4
- CHLAMYDIA:3
- HSV2 & HSV1:2
- NOT LISTED:30
Women seeking women, Colorado state (all ages):
- HIV: 11
- HSV2: 31
- HSV1: 5
- HPV: 7
- HEPC: 1
- HEPB:
- CHLAMYDIA: 2
- HSV2 & HSV1: 7
- NOT LISTED: 20
Here are the results from the exclusively HIV dating site, PozMatch.com, for the state of Colorado:
- Man seeking man, 20-40: 8 profiles
- Man seeking man, 41-60: 22 profiles
- Woman seeking woman, 20-40: 0 profiles
- Woman seeking woman, 41-60: 0 profiles
Here are the results from the exclusively HSV (herpes) dating site, MPwH.com, for the state of Colorado:
- Man seeking man, 20-40: 0 profiles
- Man seeking man, 41-60: 0 profiles
- Woman seeking woman, 20-40: 0 profiles
- Woman seeking woman, 41-60: 0 profiles
So, what this data makes clear is that most gay men who join Positive Singles are living with HIV, while the lesbian women are primarily living with HSV-2. Gay men with HIV resoundingly choose Positive Singles over the reasonably popular PozMatch.com (418 profiles vs. 20 profiles), while – most surprisingly – not a single lesbian woman, or gay man for that matter, came up in the Colorado search for the HSV site MPwH.net.
I must admit that, though I knew that Positive Singles was the most popular of these sites as per Alexa rankings, the wild imbalance of popularity between it and the other two was quite a surprise.
