How do you find love in a multicultural and busy city like Toronto? If you have not found Mr. or Mrs. right by the time you are done college/university, it gets harder to meet that special someone. There are places that you can wander around trying to see if you like someone and see if happenstance will strike.

Yonge St. in Toronto (The Longest Street in the World)

But for the rest of us, where do we meet them? At a bar? A baseball game? A bookstore? A Coffee shop? Next to us on a plane? At the travel clinic?  My answer would be on an online dating site!

If you are still not convinced it works, well try doing the math. If you enter a room with a hundred people, let’s assume 50% of them will be of the opposite sex so you are left with 50 people, out of those 50 only 10% are age appropriate and single. You are left with 5 people, how long would it take you to spot those 5 people and to ask them other questions such as do you like to travel? What are your basic habits, etc… Online, you can see it right away (you do loose the chemistry aspect and that is why you will need to go on a few dates, but at least you know you have something in common to start with.)

There are a couple of Toronto dating sites that I have not only tested but gone on dates from:

1) POF.com or PlentyOfFish– This site is free, so it’s a great way to get started. However, most men & women on this site are not looking for relationships. This site will contain most people and will give you all sorts of results. Think of it as the widest net which requires a lot of effort to find the right fish.

2) OkCupid– This is the site where I actually found my soul mate. It is also free but attracts more intellectual and interesting people. They base the matching on sets of questions which is what is used to determine how compatible you are to them. While, it may not always be accurate (not like any statistical model is) but you can see their responses and decide for yourself.

Starbucks Coffee Shop

3) eHarmony– They claim to be the most serious about finding you your wife/husband. This site is perfect to whoever does not want to do the search on their own. After a long questionnaire, they send you 5-8 matches a day, however after a month or more the matches start to decrease. It also takes a good week or more before you actually get to the free form type of communication as they ask you to go through a few steps before that.

4) Match.com – This site is somewhat in between eHarmony and OkCupid. You need to pay but you can talk to people right away without having the need to wait for days. And they claim to have the most number of dates. I met a few people from this site, they were all great but I also realized that most of them were also on free sites.

5) Ethnic specific sites: while I have not tried any of them, they do exist. There is jDate for Jewish people, Christianmingle or Christan cafe for Christian people, and a bunch of other sites.

Having met many great people from dating sites, I would encourage everyone to try! Of course you can still take that flight hoping they would sit right next to you, read in your favorite coffee shop and attend events around the city but why not do both?