Christian Mingle Online Dating Sites Review

Matching Criteria

Christian Mingle offers a very simple sign-up process. To join the dating community, you're required to answer a short series of questions that can be managed in under two minutes. You'll be asked for basic demographic information like your sex, age, and location, as well as a couple of questions about your faith and your faith requirements for a partner. Users must upload a photo before completing their profiles and accessing the site's features.

If you prefer to answer a few more questions, you can. Just click on the Advanced Preferences button on the questionnaire once you've completed the mandatory questions and you'll be served up a few more questions. But either way, Christian Mingle doesn't use a lengthy personality test to inform its matching technology.  We suspect that the algorithm Christian Mingle uses to make match recommendations isn't rocket science. When we tested the site, our hypothetical Christian user who described her faith as non-denominational, was matched with users in her preferred age range who lived nearby and enjoyed a few of the same activities that she did. Each recommendation comes with confidence rating, expressed as a percentage. The higher the percentage rating, the more boxes a user checks for you. 

But the simplicity of Christian Mingle's algorithm may suit many users' needs perfectly well.  They've already decided that the most important quality in a partner is a shared Christian faith. Otherwise, they wouldn't be using a Christian dating site to begin with. 

Profile Customization

Christian Mingle allows users to submit a summary of themselves and their dating desires. The summary can be as brief or as lengthy as you wish. As we browsed available matches, we noticed that most users write just a few sentences about themselves. They typically add some of the details about themselves gathered by the Advanced Preferences feature, such as whether they have children or want children and what kind of relationship or relationships they're interested in, from casual companionship to marriage. Most profiles we viewed were snapshots, not detailed portraits, due in part to the limitations of Christian Mingle's few profile requirements. But some users just choose not to offer a lot of information. One user—clearly a man of few words—completed his summary statement this simply: "What you see is what you get."

Interface Features

Christian Mingle offers a limited feature membership free of charge. To enjoy all of the site's features, you do need to subscribe, however. Monthly membership rates start at $24.99 when you sign up for a six-month term.

Christian Mingle is easy to navigate. When you visit your profile, you'll see a small menu bar at the top of your page, with separate labeled Browse, Messages, Matches, Activity, and Help. By clicking on the Matches tab, you can view a short list of users the site automatically recommends for you each day. Matches are presented with a photo and the user's age, height, and location.  

In Browse mode, you'll be offered a longer list of profiles you can sort through to find you own match. You can expect to see dozens of profiles. To narrow down your choices, you can filter profiles by various criteria, including whether a user is currently online. That's a great feature if you're looking to start up a conversation immediately. The Messages tab is self-explanatory. The Activity tab reports how many users viewed your profile, the number of likes and mutual likes you've received, and the number of profles you've viewed. You can also see each of the profiles you've visited in he Activity tab, which is handy if you want to return to a profile you've read before for reconsideration.  

For those looking for dating advice, essays on faith, examples of faith rewarded with love, or just plain inspiration, Christian Mingle publishes an online magazine, Believe. The magazine archives hundreds of love stories that began on Christian Mingle. The stories are formulaic, but they serve to reassure users who may have been disappointed in the past that the right someone is out there and encourage people not to give up hope.

Security and Privacy Measures

When it comes right down to it, online dating site users are responsible for their own safety. The Christian Mingle website offers a few tips on how to protect yourself in the online dating world, but it doesn't discuss any security measures it undertakes on users' behalf, such as identity verification or routing profile reviews. It doesn't discuss the  tech measures it takes to protect users' personal data (some of which is quite sensitive, of course) but the site is secured through SSL encryption.

Few people take the time to review the privacy policies of all the websites they visit before sharing their personal data. But with online dating sites, it's especially important to do so. You should know how and with whom your data is shared. Be aware that clicking on external links from Christian Mingle's site typically means you're subject to another company's privacy policy, not Christian Mingle's. We also recommend that you not join any dating site through a social media platform like Facebook. That gives the dating site access to anything you post, from family photos to rants about your boss. Christian Mingle notes this policy toward  outside social media platforms: "When you have enabled the use of our Services through a third-party social networking site or mobile or other application such as Facebook, Google or Twitter (a “Social Networking Site”) or connect or link our Services to a Social Networking Site, you permit us to access and use certain information about you that is made available to us through or from that Social Networking Site."

Inclusivity

When people join a religiously-affiliated dating site like Christian Mingle, they're paying for exclusivity. They want to restrict their dating life so they're only meeting people who are like-minded in their faith. To be clear, you can choose to join Christian Mingle even if your religious beliefs aren't clearly defined; however, there's no box to check for atheist, agnostic, or Buddhist on the site. And pretty much every user profile we perused emphasized Christianity as the preferred foundation for a relationship.

Christian Mingle does cater to both heterosexual and gay users. If you're bisexual, there's no practical way to use the site to search for both men and women. The company doesn't make any accommodations for non-binary folks or others with unique gender or sexual preference needs.