The internet has the power to connect people in a way that we’ve never seen in human history. Our original founder knew this when he started CatholicSingles over 20 years ago in 1997.
Since those early days, we at CatholicSingles have been lucky to be the starting place for thousands of marriages and even more friendships. We can’t even imagine how many children have come into the world from couples who met on CatholicSingles.
But 20 years in Internet time is an eternity, and the world of the Internet looks much different today than it did 20 years ago.
20 years ago, our members connected to use through dial up modems, AOL accounts, and oversized computers. Today, our members check in on their accounts from their phones during a lunch break or on their tablets while watching a show.
For as much as the Internet has changed, we haven’t changed a whole lot…until now.
We’ve been hard at work over the past 9 months building a foundation for a more effective platform where singles can truly meet other singles for both love and for friendship. What you see here is the first major step in a series of updates and upgrades that are coming.
Here are a few of the big changes we’ve made:
The Biggest Change is One That You Probably Can’t See (Yet)
CatholicSingles was originally built 20 years ago. As we all know, the Internet is a much different place today than it was 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, much of our site hasn’t kept up with these changes. CatholicSingles was operating on old software and old databases. While they worked well enough, they made it difficult for us to add new features to make your experience better.
A big part of our new look was to rebuild the site from the ground up. This is going to help us create and add new features in the future.
The Biggest Change You Can See: Activities
Activities are our BIGGEST change, and one that we will be developing over the next several months. To be honest, the aren’t quite finished yet, but we just couldn’t wait to release them.
We built activities to make introducing yourself and getting to know other members easier and more natural. This is based on a lot of feedback we’ve received from our members, specifically:
Complaint 1: Messaging people is awkward.
How do you introduce yourself to someone you don’t know at all? What is someone messages you…but you aren’t interested in them in a romantic way?
People’s expectations on dating sites is different than in regular life. In regular life, if someone says “hi”, we usually don’t think much about it. But on a site like ours, if someone says “hi”, it’s not a stretch to wonder if they are looking for a date.
Complaint 2: Filling Out Your Profile is Hard (or Misleading)
Writing a great profile is key to
getting more introductions, but for a lot of people, writing about themselves in a flattering way is really difficult.
Of course, there are others who love to write about themselves…but they also love to embellish so they can get more introductions.
We aren’t getting rid of profiles with the new CatholicSingles, but we are adding activities to supplement your profile.
Activities for the win!
We built activities to allow members to message you based on what you are doing rather than only on your profile.
Activities are any action that you take on our site: updating your profile, adding new photos, joining the site. In the future, we will be adding quizzes, games, ranked lists, caption contests, and other activities that are just plain fun.
(Shouldn’t dating be fun?)
These activities are built to help your natural personality come out rather than trying to advertise yourself.
When you log into your account, you’ll immediately see activities from people that are on CatholicSingles who live near you. You’ll see if they played a game or if they updated their profile. You’ll be able to see if they liked an article in our apologetics section, or if they added a few photos.
And you’ll be able to “like” their activities or send them a message about their activity.
For example:
- Maybe a user takes a quiz on their favorite 80’s movies…if you are a also a movie buff, you can like this activity or send them a message.
- If a user likes an answer in our apologetics section that you’ve never heard of, you can like this and they’ll know that you both liked it.
- Or, a user might vote in a poll about their favorite sport. If you share that interest, you have something to talk about, but if you hate sports, then maybe that person isn’t the best for you.
Less Pressure to Find Out if That Member is “The One”
When you reach out to someone based on a common interest, it’s simply easier to start a conversation. And that’s the goal with activities: to make starting a conversation easier without having to question someone’s “bigger” motives.
…We are excited, but still working on this section
We are working really hard to build out our activities section, but if we are honest, it’s a bit light right now. We have a few things there right now, but you should expect a lot more items to be added in the coming months. We are still building out our code to add a lot of our activities, so once that is done, we’ll add a lot more stuff to do!
Apps! We Got Apps Coming!
Over 50% of you access CatholicSingles.com from your phones, and one of the most common support requests is for a dating app.
It’s almost a crime that we don’t have a good, usable app…but that’s changing!
We are very close to launching a 1st edition app for both Android and iOS! The apps are designed to be add-ons to the website, but you’ll be able to perform the basic functions, send messages, and look for other members to connect with.
Our New Logo: A Reminder That We Want to Grow in the Four Loves
CatholicSingles has had a few logos over the past 20 years, but this new logo encompasses our goals and vision for CatholicSingles.com and our apps (more on those in a bit).
This new logo is built off of C.S. Lewis’s “Four Loves”. In this work, Lewis explores the main types of Christian love:
- Storge – A bond of empathy and familiarity, much like we experience in family life. Members at CatholicSingles have a natural familiarity with each other as we share a love for the same faith. This is our common ground.
- Philia – A love of true friendship. Lewis talks about this love in terms of a strong, lasting, and faithful friendship. While we know that many join CatholicSingles to find love, our hope and goal is to give our members lasting friendships as well as love.
- Eros – This is the love that most associate CatholicSingles with – a deep, loving, relationship with another that results in Christian marriage.
- Agape – Unconditional love. The deliberate choice to will the good in another. This is best stated in 1 Corinthians 13.
It’s easy to see how CatholicSingles is supposed to help us grow in Eros love, but it’s our hope, our goal, and our mission to help our members (and ourselves, frankly) to grow in all four loves.
Let’s Have Fun Dating and Meeting Other Catholics!
In the coming months, we plan to add a lot of new features including:
- Games, quizzes, ranked lists, polls, and other activities. We plan to build this section out A LOT over the next year.
- Better profile questions. While we are changing our fundamental approach to our site, your profile is still super important. We will be updating and adding new profile questions and giving you more control over your own profile.
- Updated apps. Our first edition apps are being built as add-ons to our website, so they will have limited functionality. We do have plans to expand our apps to be entirely stand alone applications.
- More powerful filter options. We’ve heard from a lot of members that they’d like better filters when doing a search. We are working on adding these options and will roll them out this year.
We are REALLY excited to bring you new features and services that will help all of us grow in the four loves! The changes you see today are just the first step (and it was a really hard step to finish) in a series of additions and changes that we hope will help make CatholicSingles.com the place to find faith, fellowship, and love!
