Staying Fit
Frequent travel and the intense demands of serving your country in uniform have always been tough on relationships. Veterans often have special dating needs as well — seeking partners who understand and respect the military ethos and culture.
This means that veterans and military personnel often have a harder time than the average person finding the right romantic partner. Mainstream dating sites like Match, eHarmony and EliteSingles have options such as hashtags and categories to help military-connected daters, but they’re not set up specifically to serve such users.
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The good news is that there are a range of dating sites that work especially well for the military community. Here are five options to explore.
Zoosk
While not military-specific, Zoosk works well for military members and actively helps protect those users from scams. According to Zoosk, daters who reference “active duty” get almost three times as many messages from potential matches as the average person, and those who refer to military service or veteran status get 65 percent more messages. To reduce the risk of scams, Zoosk partnered with SheerID to allow active duty military and reservists to verify their identities.
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MilitaryFriends
MilitaryFriends offers free memberships that allow users to browse other members and give them “winks” to let them know they’re interested. Users can give 50 winks a day, but can only chat with those they wink at if they pay for a premium membership. Users can use “Spark” to get fed photos of potential matches that they then can swipe into the “heart” pile if inspired. Users can block selected members from contacting them, an important feature of any dating site.
Army Dating Service
Army Dating Service offers free and paid versions, with nonpaying members able to send up to 10 “flirts.” Users must upgrade to a premium membership to send messages to other users. Note that the site is part of a dating-site network and will automatically include your information on related dating sites unless you opt out of this via privacy settings. Members are from all over the world, and users can search for same-sex matches.
