I Built a Gamer Dating Site Because I Needed One — Here’s What I Learned About Gamer Love

The Call

It was a Tuesday night. Patrick called from Hawaii.

We’d stayed in touch since high school — same basketball team in Woodstock, Illinois — and reconnected after college. He was stationed near a Marine base on the other side of the country. I was teaching high school English and working nights on whatever came next.

The pitch was about three sentences: “You said you could make a dating site for gamers, right?” Yeah. “I’ll need your help, but yes.” “Alright — we’re doing it then.”

I will never forget that phone call.

What We Were Actually Building

The problem we were trying to solve wasn’t technical. It was social.

Both of us had navigated mainstream dating in our twenties as people whose lives were built around gaming. That experience is exhausting in a specific way. You learn quickly how to manage the disclosure — when to mention it, how to frame it, whether to lead with it or bury it. You get used to seeing a certain look when it comes up. Gaming was a thing you explained, not something you shared.

What we wanted to build was the opposite of that. Not a dating site where gaming was a checkbox. A dating site where gaming was the premise. Where you didn’t lead with an apology and nobody asked you to justify the time you spend doing the thing that matters most to you.

From the beginning, that’s what LFGdating was for: “a clean, tasteful dating site for mature gamers.” Not for the stereotype of gamers. For the actual community — which is bigger, more diverse, and more interesting than the stereotype would suggest.

To build it, I turned down a varsity boys basketball coaching job. I turned down an offer to teach a higher-level curriculum — which, for a non-tenured teacher, was not a casual decision. Pat, coordinating from Hawaii across a four-thousand-mile gap, was up at 4:45 in the morning working on this. Neither of us came from a tech background. We just kept building.

What 13 Years Taught Me About Gamers and Love

Gamers Are Actually Great Partners — and Now There’s Research

The members who make it on LFGdating — who find someone, who stick around — they’re not despite being gamers. Gaming is part of what made the relationship work. The patience you develop in a soulslike carries over. The communication skills from years of coordinating in multiplayer environments carry over. The capacity for commitment that any long-term RPG player has demonstrated extensively carries over.

Gaming is not a liability in a relationship. With the right partner — someone who actually games, not someone who tolerates that you do — it’s a genuine asset. The research now says so explicitly. We built for this before we had the data.

The Stigma Was Always the Problem, Not the Gamers

“Introduce yourself as someone who plays video games, and you already feel a judgment coming.”

That line is still on the LFGdating website. I wrote it a long time ago and I still think it’s true. The problem we were solving in 2010 hasn’t fully gone away. Gaming is mainstream now in ways it wasn’t then — but the stigma around it as a romantic identity? Still present. Still the thing we’re designed to eliminate.

There is a large difference between sticking out as a gamer and standing out for your passion. LFGdating is supposed to make the latter possible. I think it does.

The Thing That Still Gets Me

People ask me sometimes what success looks like for LFGdating. The financial answer exists. Pat and I are both clear-eyed about the business side of this.

But the actual answer — the one I have trouble describing to people who aren’t running something like this — is the cancellation notice.

When a paying subscriber cancels because they found someone, we get a notification. To most subscription businesses, that’s churn. That’s a number going the wrong direction. To me, it’s — honestly, I don’t have a better word for it — it’s basically every great holiday wrapped up into one email notification.

The first bottom line at LFGdating has always been how many people are actually meeting and communicating. The second bottom line is financial. That order matters. When a paying subscriber leaves because they found their person on LFGdating, both bottom lines did what they were supposed to do.

We built this because we needed it. We’ve kept building it because the community that found it needed it too. Thirteen years in, that’s still why I’m up until midnight and Pat is up at 4:45.

Why This Week’s Theme Felt Personal

We spent this week writing about the research behind gaming and relationships — the data on gaming couples, the psychology of how gamers form connections, the practical question of where gamer singles should be looking. It’s all real, it’s all sourced, and I recommend reading all of it.

But the underlying point of the whole week is the same thing that motivated the phone call from Hawaii in 2010: gamers deserve to find each other. The premise that gaming is something you disclose and manage on a dating profile — rather than something you lead with and share — was always wrong. We built LFGdating to be the correction to that premise.

The research catching up to something we knew anecdotally is gratifying. The community that keeps choosing this platform over 13 years is more gratifying.

Stay classy,
Casey and Pat