Our Marry Well Review Bottom Line:
- GOOD: We like the novel approach and the price tag.
- BAD: It’s a relatively new site, so the membership numbers are low.
- TAKEAWAY: It’s got real potential, but it doesn’t beat out the others, especially eharmony.
As we’ve gotten feedback on our best Christian dating sites review, one of the comments that keeps coming up is how few people have heard of Marry Well. To be honest, we hadn’t heard much about it either until we got ready to write our Marry Well review.
Created by the folks from Boundless and Focus on the Family, Marry Well was designed for those Christians who might be more skeptical of some of other online dating sites. Marry Well seeks to walk members through the process in a slightly more community-like environment than they would find from the other online dating sites.
The idea is to engage members in every step of the process: exploring, dating, engagement, all the way to marriage. Members can even give personal references from pastors, family friends, mentors, or parents, if they so choose. Marry Well has blog posts for support, ice breaker questions for conversational starters, and profiles structured similar to Facebook with status updates and wall posts as a way for members to interact. And, at $5.99 a month or $14.99 for a 3-month subscription, it’s hardly a financial gamble. We like a lot of the things we see on the site.
However, while Marry Well has potential, there are some problems.
For starters, it simply does not have the numbers yet. A search for guys ages 25-35 in a 300-mile radius from DFW resulted in less than 100 profiles. The same search for females ages 25-35 in a 300-mile radius from DFW only resulted in less than 250 profiles. A search on other sites would net in the thousands, so that is hardly a small discrepancy.
If you’re into long-distance dating, then those numbers might not bother you, but most of us aren’t looking for a relationship with someone who is at least 4-5 hours away. Besides, that’s a total number of profiles. It doesn’t take into account how many are inactive members, those who are currently dating someone, or those who just created a free profile in order to look around the site.
Some might find Marry Well to have a more conservative approach than most online dating sites, too. This can be a pro or a con, depending on your personal preferences. They promote themselves as being for marriage-minded individuals. Simply put, they really aren’t into providing a service for people who just want to date around; they believe how you date is as important as who you date.
They also believe that Christian singles should live intentionally toward marriage and not ignore what they believe is a God-given desire for marriage. They also promote male initiation. They tell female members that when men are ready to initiate contact, they will send you a message.
Like we said, Marry Well has potential if it grows in popularity and membership numbers. We’re not especially hopeful that they will though, considering they don’t do much marketing to Christian singles. However, they do a pretty good job of engaging the members of their community in discussions about current dating topics and trends when they do join the community.
We just think that when compared to the other best Christian dating sites we’ve reviewed, the numbers alone definitely put Marry Well at a disadvantage over the others. But, if you are a reluctant to join the world of online dating, Marry Well might just be a good starting point to ease you into it.
Have you used Marry Well? What has been your experience with the site?
