reason you find yourself rolling your eyes at cooing couples and repeatedly calling Valentine's Day, "that corny Hallmark holiday" is that your footloose-and-fancy-free lifestyle is getting old.If that's the case, it might be time to make an investment in your love life.
These include fashion sites like Modcloth.com, which lets shoppers help decide what clothing it should sell, and Blanklabel.com, where consumers can co-create their own custom-designed shirts, to myriad niche news sites like for a politics fix and for media gossip.
So it's no wonder that hyper-specialized dating sites would start proliferating.
Niche sites accounted for 23% of the online dating market in 2008, says Eric Resnick, director of strategy for Courtland Brooks, a marketing and consultancy firm to the online dating industry, and the owner of Profile Helper.com, which helps people write online dating profiles.
And they're up to 29% now, he says, quoting figures from Experian Hit Wise, which tracks consumer behavior online.
Dating experts say niche sites can better help daters zero in on what they are looking for.
"If something is highly important to someone" -- be it a personal passion or political outlook -- "these niche sites are much more efficient than the mainstream sites" at helping them find a like-minded soul, says Jill Crosby, founder and CEO of Spiritual Here's a sample of the niche sites on the web as well as a few mobile apps designed to help you find love.Who knows: You might be scheduling a romantic dinner reservation for two for February 14, 2013.Marry Me Commitment phobes need not subscribe: Marry Me is geared toward folks in search of a permanent partner, Candy Tolentino, CEO of Marry Me Already.com, tells."Marry Me also enlists a very personal approach to matching its members by hand selecting users to feature, promoting video diaries of selected members, and even allows users the opportunity to have personal blogs and storytelling within their profiles," she says. Marry Me will begin charging to a month sometime in the next few months.Anyone who signs up before its conversion to a paid site automatically receives a free one year membership. The 50-plus dating site launched in May with more than one million members, making it the largest dating community focused on the boomer-and-up crowd, the company claims.