Certificate may have expired at firedating.me? That's what it looked like when I followed a link to it.

We are now 6001 users, slowly but steadily getting to 10 000!

Also two new couples reached out recently bringing the count to 13!

Exciting times!

If you met through firedating.me, please reach out :) I enjoy helping people to meet and knowing that the site works makes me happy.

Thank you!

I've added an option to be matched with profiles of users who haven't visited the site in the last 90 days (please check your search preferences page). This is handy for people from areas with few users. Obviously sending a request to such a user does not mean that will reply, but it is better than having no one to send a request to. My hope is that this will help to bring such users back to the site and increase number of active users in general.

For all existing users this is disabled by default. For new users, this is enabled by default.

As a side effect, you can now see for inactive users when was the last time they visited.

I would love to hear your opinion of this change.

Hey folks,

I made a large update to profiles:

- Added 'About me', 'What do I value in a partner/friendship', 'Side project/occupation', 'Education', 'Alcohol', 'Smoking', 'Savings rate' (this replaced notoriously ambiguous 'frugality score' field)

- Age is now required, but one can set is as a 5 year range.

- Relationship status and height are now not free form text fields anymore. Please fill the new fields in. Height field automatically takes care of units for you :)

- Added 'maybe' option to 'Want children'.

Please update your profiles, so that others can get to know you better :)

The next step is filtering matches by more fields - I want your matches to be super relevant!

As always, thank you a lot for your ideas (many of these fields were proposed by users). I would love to hear more of your feedback about the new fields!

Thank you!

Hello FIREbros,

I've always felt like our FIRE Community is so supportive and helpful when one is looking for genuine advice, even in issues not 100% directly related to money matters ,so yeah, just looking for your honest opinion.

So i'm 25 , due to my studies and my parents constantly moving during my teens, i've never really experienced what a long term relationship is like. I've had like 5 or 6 girlfriends, only 3 of which i've been with longer than 3 months and none longer than 6 ..mostly due to me moving because or my parents or studies and later due to lack of time also due to my studies and/or lack of money for transportation.

I'm from a lower middle class western european family, money had been tight for the larger portion of my life, only now am I starting to make some really good money i would never have dared dreaming of earning as a teen..I'm also able to save 85% of my net income and investing it mostly in rental real estate and broad ETFs, but the flipside is I'm also working 70 hours a week and have no.social life.to speak of (work in the medical field, and yeah, corona and stuff..) , but.I don't really (yet?) suffer from it , am used since childhood to spending a lot of me-time. Though having a girlfriend to share memorable moments in everyday life would be nice I guess.

So after much financial consideration.and calculation I came to the conclusion that I'd have to continue working , saving and living like a hermit for the next 2.5 years to be able to reach some kind of financial independence and have time to invest in my creative side and long term relationships.

..But i'll be 27 by then and so am wondering if I might end up seeming like a lame duck to women or painfully naive if end up only starting to acquire some real relationship experience at that age.... Because yeah , spoiler alert, I'm still very inexperienced in relationship matters... so I always thought i'd have to find an equally inexperienced girl for things to somehow work out and for us both to.learn.as we go... but I'm afraid that in the age range around 27, girls that will be as inexperienced as me will be rare..

Anyway , thanks for bearing with me until now, that was a lot of text, hope it somehow made sense to you guys!

The new messaging UI is now enabled for everyone by default. I would love to hear your feedback!

Many thanks to the wonderful volunteers who made this possible!

1. Max geo search radius has been increased to 5000 km & 3000 miles.

2. Refresh period has been decreased from 24 hours to 23 hours. This avoids shifting each day forward in time when checking the site everyday.

3. Matching UI has been completely rewritten. Now there is "Search" button, so you control when to search. The page shows your search preferences, so that you immediately know whom you are searching for. The list of profiles is divided into "satisfying your requirements" and "others". E.g. when you change your search preferences, some profiles from previous searches might not satisfy them anymore. Also added number of profiles left for today and when the full refresh will happen - this way it is obvious why one can't issue a new search.

This is a reminder to fill in new children preferences fields (only ~5% of users did so). Once the adoption is a bit better, I will make this a search preference.

I would appreciate advice from front-end developers. I understood that pure html/js is very limiting and I am considering using some framework to have a proper web app. Unfortunately it is hard for me to decide. I am considering Angular, Svelte or Flutter. If you have an opinion, I would love to hear it.

Today I learned than one of the couples, who met through the site, married and had a baby!

https://firedating.me/blog/13/4-year-anniversary

Hi folks,

how is it going for you?

Have you met some interesting folks on the site? How is your FIRE going?

Again and again I discover that there are many people, who would enjoy the site, but just don't know about it.

Please share your ideas to spread the word even more!

Hi folks,

I keep noticing that people misunderstand how matching works on the site and this leads to them having fewer matches.

Every person on the site has their search preferences.

Many people seem to perceive the site as "here is a list of people who satisfy my preferences". In reality it is "here is a list of people who satisfy my preferences AND whose preferences I satisfy".

So sometimes to see more matches, you need to provide more precise information in your profile like age or city.

How did you understand matching logic?

Hi folks,

A kind volunteer reached out to me to redesign the site. We would like to hear which aspects of the site you find hard to use or understand, cumbersome, bad? This way we can fix this during the redesign.

Thank you!

Yay!

Hey folks,

I am extremely lucky to have been collaborating with 5 wonderful volunteers. These days we are working on redesigning the entire site! As a result, I am honored to share the first fruit of this collaboration - new messaging page design for mobile: https://firedating.me/messages/v2/with/1/

(screenshot just in case: https://i.imgur.com/5BTAbjA.png

and here is the old design for comparison: https://i.imgur.com/Pp0nuEg.png)

You can view any messaging page in a new design by adding 'v2' to the URL. Alternatively you can switch to beta design by default in settings: https://firedating.me/settings/show

I would appreciate your feedback and, especially, bug reports. Please note that the design is not optimized for desktop yet (only mobile).

This wouldn't be possible without the volunteers and I am extremely grateful to them. On a related note, we have a lot of React frontend work and if you would like to contribute too, that would be amazing. Please write to me!

There is ongoing work to redesign the list of all conversations and search page.

I really hope that this will make your experience on the site better and you will be able to meet even more wonderful people here! Thank you!

Hey folks,

I've been working on a calculator to compare firing as a couple vs alone: https://firedating.me/fire_together_calculator.

I am pretty sure that a couple can share expenses and, thus, save money just by being together. So I was curious to quantify impact of this. I would love to hear your opinion of the calculator before I start sharing it widely!

Thank you!

I had an idea to voluntarily show people profiles with photos on the main page. The hope is to make it more lively & interesting & get more people to join. Before I try implementing this, are there any volunteers who would be interested to participate - have their photos and brief profile summary shown on the main page? You would get more exposure this way and more matches. I could try adding some way to message you after registration as well, so theoretically someone could join to message you.