Positive Singles Review: The right dating site for you?

Because of misinformation and misconceptions, dating with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) can be challenging. You may wonder when to disclose your STD status or worry that your STD will be a dealbreaker for your new partner.

The CDC estimates that around 26 million people in the U.S. contract at least one sexually transmitted infection (STI) each year.1 If you’re living with an STD, you’re certainly not alone, and finding a partner with an STD may take away some of the worry associated with dating.

Positive Singles helps with STD dating. To have a profile on the site, you must have at least one STD and be willing to date others who also have STDs. But is the site worth it? Can you find romance? Is the product worth the cost? Read our review to find out the answers to these questions and more.

PositiveSingles offers those living with an STD the opportunity to meet others in the same situation for romance, friendship, and support. It is currently the biggest and most well-known STD dating site, expanding its dating pool and giving you the best chance to connect. In addition to dating, it offers resources that can help you receive care, get questions answered, and feel like part of a community, even if you aren’t ready to pay for a full membership.

At Innerbody Research, we take pride in thoroughly testing every product or service we review, including Positive Singles. All told, our testing team spent more than 100 hours using the Positive Singles website and app, as well as those of its closest competitors. Our results gave us the ability to break down nuances of the company’s services you might not learn without signing up yourself.

To fully develop our understanding of the situation, we also sought out scholarly articles regarding the dating behaviors of people with STDs, providing us with another 50 hours or so of dedicated research. Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this review was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions involving staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

To evaluate Positive Singles, we put ourselves in the shoes of potential users and asked ourselves what would be the most important aspects of the service to them. Privacy considerations topped the list, followed by what free features were available, what a paid membership costs, and what the user base was like.

Let’s take a closer look at each criterion to see how Positive Singles fared.

Privacy protection

It’s understandable that privacy would be top-of-mind for people looking into dating sites that require them to disclose any STDs with which they’re living. There’s no shortage of stigma in our society around STDs, especially incurable infections like herpes or HIV.2 Like most STD dating sites, Positive Singles asks that you verify your account via email before offering you access to any of its features.

The company’s privacy policy isn’t anything special. It resembles the company’s competitors and many other sites dealing with sensitive personal information, like telehealth providers. However, within that policy is a kernel of information that we appreciate. Specifically, the company states that it can’t guarantee the ability to recover any of your account details more than six months after you delete your profile. Other competitors, like POZ Personals, don’t provide anywhere near this specific amount of information. Others, like Meet Positives, charge you a fee if you want your details deleted.

Each of these sites has customizable privacy settings for users, and this is where Positive Singles lags behind a bit. Options to hide your picture or profile from certain groups or user types are only available to premium members. POZ offers some of these options for free (though with less nuance), and Meet Positives provides them all to free and paid members alike. HWerks doesn’t appear to have any of these additional privacy options, but the fact that the company doesn’t offer any free service of any kind protects you from curious individuals who might check out the site and find you there.

User base

The size and quality of any dating site’s user base will play an enormous factor in your potential to find a match. This is even more true if you don’t live near a major city. No STD dating site boasts more members than Positive Singles, which advertises more than 2 million active users at the time of this writing. In our research, we’ve found its user base to be very diverse, and we’ve also found that the female side of the user base (which is typically much smaller than the male side for any dating site) offered plenty of matches for our male testers.

By contrast, our testers ran searches on Meet Positives using criteria that included no specific location or gender and an age range between 18 and 70, and they got back just over 400,000 results. That’s only about 20% the size of Positive Singles’ user base. And HWerks, which has no free services whatsoever, has just under 10,000 subscribers.

With some sites, there were relatively open-ended searches we ran in major metro areas that sometimes resulted in just a handful of profiles. This would be especially disappointing for anyone who ponied up and paid for a premium membership in good faith before performing a search and realizing they weren't going to find anyone in their area.

Free features

STD dating sites typically offer some form of use free of charge, but they reserve their most convenient features for paid members. That might mean that you can search your state for free but not your city. Or you can respond to messages other members send to you, but you can’t initiate a conversation.

Often, these differences create an environment in which a free membership makes it nearly impossible to find a potential match and eventually meet them in real life. We’ve found many STD dating sites to be too prohibitive in these regards. With some, a profile pic might catch your eye, but you can’t see the full profile unless you pay. Or you might get to see the profile but have no way to let the person know you’re interested. With a free membership through Positive Singles, you certainly have restrictions, but you can see profiles and indicate your interest to others. If they happen to be paid members, they can start a conversation with you (free members can’t initiate), and you can go from there.

Ultimately, it's easier to use Positive Singles for free and potentially find a match than it is with the other sites we’ve researched.

Membership costs

If you decide you want to go all in and reap the benefits of a paid membership, you’ll find a wide range of prices among providers. Most platforms offer discounts if you’re willing to pay more up-front, subscribing to quarterly, biannual, or even annual billing. Whether or not such a bill is worth it to you will ultimately come down to how long it can take you to find a match.

We came across some informal research from a reputable jeweler who surveyed more than 1,000 Americans who had met their current partner on a dating app or website. According to this survey, it takes the average person around eight months to find someone and establish a relationship from an online dating platform. But most STD dating platforms like Positive Singles offer quarterly and biannual plans that bring down the cost per month. If you pay the discounted rate for quarterly billing and it takes you around eight months to find a match, you stand to save some significant money.

HWerks has a one-time $56 payment that gets you lifetime access as its only subscription option.

So, if you signed up for Positive Singles on a month-to-month basis, that would cost you $272.92 after eight months. You could start with biannual billing and then switch to month-to-month if it hits six months and you’re still single. After eight months, that would only cost you $177.97, saving you nearly $100.

Of course, this all makes that $56 charge for HWerks seem a lot more enticing, but keep in mind that HWerks’ business model suppresses its user base, with under 10,000 active users when we last checked.

And if you’re not looking for love, but you want a way to have some fun without having “the talk” about your status, then a long-term investment might be a smart place to start.

Positive Singles is currently the most popular and most robust STD dating site. Established in 2001, the site has over 2 million registered users with over 2.5 million member conversations each month. Over 60,000 members have written success stories about finding love, romance, and friendship on Positive Singles. It happens to be our team’s top choice among STD dating sites in 2023; visit our comprehensive guide to STD dating sites to learn more about how they compare.

The site does not cater to a specific STD. Instead, you’ll choose your STD from a list when setting up an account. Your STD status shows in your profile, and you can search for potential partners based on their STD status.

The list of STDs includes:

You might reasonably be wondering why treatable STDs like chlamydia and gonorrhea are on this list. Well, certain STDs typically considered treatable can become chronic issues due to antibiotic resistance or other means that sometimes take a while for doctors to understand.3 During this period, it’s perfectly acceptable to connect with others with similar issues and enjoy each other's company.

However, it is not recommended that anyone undergoing antibiotic treatment for an acute infection engage in sexual intercourse until at least a week after that treatment course is completed, and ideally not until you’ve tested negative.

In addition to assistance with dating, Positive Singles includes many other amenities that members can use, including:

• Live dating advisor: Advice about matching and going on dates via chat
• Dating advice: Suggestions from other users about effective dating
• Treatment stories: Information from other members about STD care
• STD Q&A: A forum to ask your STD questions and get answers from the community
• Care locations: A list of STD-friendly clinics and doctors submitted by other members
• Blogs: Create your own blog or browse the 20,000 blog posts published per month

Positive Singles also offers a mobile dating app for Android and iOS. See the dedicated “The Positive Singles app” section below for full details about what the app provides.

Positive Singles company reputation

Positive Singles doesn’t have a page with the Better Business Bureau, so we weren’t able to use that as a metric for its online reputation. However, the site does have a page on Trustpilot. Unfortunately, it only houses 20 reviews at the time of this writing. Those reviews are mostly positive, with the rating standing at 4.0 out of 5 stars.

Negative reviews for Positive Singles typically involve difficulty finding enough matches in a specific geographical area or frustration with scammer profiles attempting to fleece honest users. In our testing experience, certain geographical areas are less well-represented on the site than others, especially rural areas. And every dating site we’ve reviewed — both traditional sites and specialty sites like Positive Singles — has been a hotbed for scamming activity. It’s a sad fact of the industry.

Positive Singles is like most mainstream dating sites. You’ll create a profile that includes details about your personality, interests, lifestyle, and any other details you wish to provide. You’ll upload photos of yourself and customize your profile to attract potential mates. And then you can browse member profiles, match with those that interest you, message other daters, and develop relationships.

Our testing team found the experience with Positive Singles to be straightforward and intuitive. The site provides useful tools for its free members that can help you make connections, and the interface is exceptionally useful on the Premium side.

You can choose to have a more traditional, browsing-based search for a partner, or you can employ the FLAME feature, which, as its name implies, is based on the functionality of Tinder. You can look at profile pics alongside some basic information and click on an X or a heart to indicate your interest.

Quality and diversity of Positive Singles users

How you might measure the quality of Positive Singles’ user base is ultimately subjective, but we’ve spent enough time on this site and those of its competitors to know some things that are less subjective. For example, how diverse is the population on a given site? Some of that will have to do with demography (e.g., fewer Latinx individuals in Alaska than in Texas), but even accounting for that, there are conclusions we can draw.

We also looked closely at the average number of images and the depth of detail in users’ profiles from site to site, as this is indicative of a company’s successful tactics for getting people to share more about themselves.

In every category, we found Positive Singles’ users rose above. Their profiles tended to be more detailed, with a greater number of images. And the population here is more diverse than others, in part because it’s such a larger pool of users than you see with other sites.

It’s free to create a profile on Positive Singles. But if you want to use the site’s full functionality, you have to pay a membership fee. This is typical of all the STD dating sites we’ve encountered, and Positive Singles’ pricing is about middle-of-the-road. That said, for the tools it offers and the breadth of its user base, you get more value for your money here than you would with another site.

Here’s how Positive Singles pricing breaks down:

As you can see, opting for a higher up-front cost dramatically reduces the cost per month. After a year, it’s almost twice as expensive to go with the monthly plan over the biannual plan. However, cancellation doesn’t net you any refunds if you decide to cancel after the first month of a biannual plan, for example. So, if you’re not sure that online dating is right for you, or you’re extremely confident that you’ll find a match quickly, a month-to-month plan might be a better option.

But is paying for Positive Singles’ Premium membership worth it in the first place?

A standard (free) profile allows you to explore some of the site’s features, but the types of searching you can perform are limited. You also can’t send and receive messages from all members. Here’s what you can do with a standard profile:

• Upload photos to a public and private album
• Search for matches by state
• Add profiles to a list of favorites
• Send unlimited winks — a quick way to let someone know you’re interested
• View which users favorite, wink at, or message you
• Respond to messages from premium members

If you pay for a membership, you’ll get full access to all of the site’s features. As a premium member, you can access all of the standard features plus:

• Send and receive messages from all users
• Search for matches by city
• Use the 24-hour chatroom
• Enable security and privacy options
• View reverse matches — members for whose preferences you’re a match
• See when a member last logged in
• Use enhanced search features

In our experience, membership is well worth the price. In testing, paid memberships saw a significant increase in communications.

The Positive Singles app is just as robust as the site. Its high ratings by users are a testament to how user-friendly it is. The app is free to download, but it requires its own membership to use.

We want to be very clear here: Membership in the app and membership on the site are separate. A paid membership in one does not get you access to the other. We recommend you consider your preferences for using the platform and communicating with other members before investing in either the site or the app.

Nowadays, most people will likely be more comfortable using the app than the browser interface. And while the app includes many of the same features as the website, there are a few differences.

Unlike the site, the app does not include:

• STD Q&A
• Live dating advisor
• List of STD care locations

In their place, the app includes several features that do not appear on the site:

• Voice chat: A private chatroom using voice instead of text
• Video calls: A private video chat between two members
• Drift bottle: A place to send and receive anonymous messages

This app is excellent. Our team only wishes that membership would provide access to both the website and the app, rather than one or the other.

STD dating sites seem to be lagging behind the rest of the field in app development, as Positive Singles is the only reputable site with a decent app. Meet Positives has an app, but it’s currently only available for Android, and despite having over 5,000 downloads in the Play Store, it has zero reviews. That said, Meet Positives can integrate with certain phone systems to provide video chat, calls, and texts that remain private (your actual number will be concealed), but these features are not app-based, and they’re only available for the site’s top-tier members.

Setting up a profile on Positive Singles is similar to creating a profile on any other dating site. You’ll enter some personal details and a profile photo. Then, you’ll verify your login credentials. Once you log in, you can go back and edit your profile.

Here are the steps to get started:

• Enter your personal info. Select your gender, age, height, ethnicity, relationship status, location, STD, and the gender of your desired matches.
• Create a profile headline. This is the first bit of info other members will see, so it’s a good idea to make it eye-catching.
• Fill in the About Me and About My Match sections. You can compose a few sentences that show off your personality and let other members know who you are and what you’re looking for in a partner.
• Upload a profile photo. Choose a picture that best represents your personality since it’s the first picture potential matches see.
• Verify your mobile number and email address. The site texts and emails you verification codes; simply enter them into the site to continue.

Your profile includes a large number of features designed to help narrow down who you are and what you’re looking for in a match. These include a short bio section, a section where you can describe your ideal match, areas to discuss your personal STD experiences, your life goals, and multiple short-answer fields regarding topics like smoking and drinking habits, a desire to have children, and even annual income.

We were particularly pleased to find a profile section dedicated to sharing jokes related to STDs. Our testers’ favorite joke from among our profile reviews: What’s the most common STD among birds? Chirpies.

Outside of your profile page, the Positive Singles site is set up so you can search profiles, create lists, match with other members, and send messages. Here’s a breakdown of the site’s main areas:

Many of these features are unique to Positive Singles among STD dating sites, though some you’ll see here and there among competitors. You’ll find similar privacy settings from Meet Positives (for free users, to boot), and POZ Personals has a useful search blocker that can prevent you from showing up in certain members’ searches. But Positive Singles is the only place where so many of these features come together, many of which are available for free.

Positive Singles takes many steps to ensure that your information is confidential. It uses privacy safeguards to protect users from litigation if disputes arise. The company won’t sell or rent personal information to a third party. We also appreciate that your personal information appears to be deleted entirely from company databases six months after you deleted your account. Some other sites' policies don’t even mention regulations about data retention.

There are additional steps you can take to secure your info. You can report profiles you suspect violate community terms of use, and verify your identity within 48 hours of creating a profile by uploading a picture of a photo ID. And Premium members gain additional control over who can see what aspects of their profile.

If you pay with a debit or credit card, the purchase will show on your statement as SuccessfulMatch for confidentiality. Surprisingly, this isn’t true of all such sites. HWerks, for example, shows up on your statement as “HW Erks & Co.,” which wouldn't require more than a quick internet search to connect you with a positive herpes diagnosis.

There are several STD dating sites out there competing for your business. Right now, none of them boast anywhere near the user base size of Positive Singles. That said, there are some features or aspects of certain competitors that might make them more appealing, even if it comes with a sacrifice in the available dating pool.

Here’s a quick look at Positive Singles’ biggest competitors:

You may have noticed that we use the term STD (sexually transmitted disease) in this article and other articles about similar dating sites. We do this because the sites we review also use the term.

However, we acknowledge that some people prefer to use STI (sexually transmitted infection) and that STD and STI are often used interchangeably. The difference is this: an STI can cause an STD.4 The word “disease” has negative connotations and implies that an illness has symptoms, which not all STIs have. It’s a nuanced distinction, but the terms do have different meanings and undertones.

After extensive testing of Positive Singles and its competitors, it’s clear to us that Positive Singles remains the best place for anyone living with an STD to start their search for partnership. Some of the site’s best features are for Premium members only, but there are enough free features that you could potentially make a match and meet IRL without paying for it. It’s just a lot easier with a Premium account.