Walking around Eastern Michigan University, you might have noticed little business cards strewn around advertising a dating website called www.OnlyHookups.com.
What you might not know is 26-year-old Kellen Bell, an African American studies major, and 24-year-old Brandi Bell, a creative writing major, are the owners and creators of this website. The Bells, who are married, go to EMU and met through mutual friends.
Joey Huang, a junior majoring in secondary education said he would never try online dating, but it is every individual’s choice.
“None of my friends admit to meeting girls online, but I suspect that some of them have,” he said. “There are some girls my friends won’t let our other friends meet.”
Kelsey Anderson, in her second year at EMU, said online dating is not for her. She went on to tell a story about her friend who thought she had met a guy online who was overseas.
Anderson said this went on for about a year until her friend found out the person she had been chatting with was not overseas and was not a male. In fact the person whom she had been chatting with for so long was a girl who didn’t like her. She took some guy’s pictures and pretended to be interested in her. The girl was pretty devastated, Anderson said.
Anderson is not opposed to online dating for older people, who might be divorced or single parents, but she believes people in their teens and early 20’s need to be very careful. She made sure to say this was her opinion, and people should do what makes them happy.
Senior Andrea Pearce, an education major, said she has never tried online dating, but knows a lot of happy couples that have. She even knows a married couple who met on the Internet.
The Bells came up with the idea for the site because there are a lot of dating sites on the web, but most of them don’t focus on the personal social aspect.
They decided to name it OnlyHookups because they want people to meet up, not just chat online. The Bells’ site is a site meant to weed out the serious from the not-so-serious online users.
The site is free to join, but in order to chat through e-mails you must be a paying member. You could pay $5 a month, or you could buy a lifetime membership for $30. Right now in order to chat with another person you must be a paying member, or be contacted by a paying member. If your purpose is solely to view profiles, and/or flirt by “poking” you can get by with a free membership. A profile consists of a picture and a little bio information.
The Bells’ records show their traffic is primarily from the Southeastern Michigan area, but the site is starting to attract traffic from all over the country. Kellen could not be positive, because it is the Internet and people can lie, but the average age range for people who sign up on the site is 25. The Bells say right now on average they have about 30,000 hits a month.
There are different types of online dating sites. There are sites that focus on the LGBT community, different religious groups or cultural groups and sites that will ask a random questions and match people based on compatibility. There also are sites for single parents, senior citizens and fetishes. The point is it is pretty easy to find an online dating site that will fit you. You could also decide to do what the Bells did, and create your own.
