SacredSpark: Catholic Dating

So I have been using this app for a few days, I know people who have had good luck on the creators matchmaking threads and was hoping the app would be a new option for Catholics aside from the abysmal Catholic Match. First impressions are the app looks good, and is easy to navigate. Requires you to start with a voice introduction (though I have found multiple profiles that just have silence in theirs and let it run for 30 seconds so no one seems to be checking on those. They limit how many profiles you can view every day to 15, to make the experience more “intentional” and less like swiping culture… unless you’re willing to pay in which case swipe away. They blur all the pictures except for 1 on each of the profiles to try and make the matches more than just appearance, so you can consider the whole person… once again unless you wanna pay, then you get access to all the pictures. You’re are limited to 3 likes a day… but if you want to pay, you get the drill. Is it better than Catholicmatch? Yes. I just wish they would stop trying to dress up why they have the paywalls and just admit they are a business and they want the money. I do still think there is hope for this app and that’s why I’m giving it 3 stars, it’s still small enough they can fix some of these issue without major disruption and improve overall user experience.

SacredSpark was a pleasure to use. I especially appreciated the emphasis on video and voice prompts within user profiles. I am rating the app 4 out of 5 stars because, while I was able to meet a beautiful, chaste, Christ-loving Catholic woman through the app, this review focuses specifically on whether the app met its advertised expectations. The app promotes itself as moving away from the photo-driven model used by many secular and traditional dating apps, instead encouraging users to look “past the surface” through voice and video prompts. In practice, however, many profiles contained minimal or unengaging voice intros. As a result, photos still played a significant role in my initial interest. Obviously the voice and video prompts helped foster deeper connection after the initial match, but not significantly during the initial pursuit. From my perspective, visual attraction remains an important first filter, and I often felt the need to see who I was speaking with before liking a profile. While the app clearly has genuine intentions to foster deeper, faith-centered connections through Catholic/marriage/lifestyle profile stats, the experience still felt somewhat photo-centered in actual use. I’m not saying the app was 100% advertised as pictures-less dating, but it still felt very much photo driven in practice. Still the best dating app Ive ever used though! Thank you SacredSpark, Emily, and Daniël for starting something great, and I will continue to be a fighting advocate for the truest form of online dating in this broken world!

I REALLY wanted to like this app. I listened to the episode of the Lila Rose Show where Emily and Daniel shared all about SacredSpark, and it sounded awesome. The reality is pretty underwhelming. A major part of the problem is that the app is quite new, so the available dating pool is not very big. I went into it with the understanding that since I live in a smallish Diocese, I wasn’t going to have many potential local matches. In reality, there aren’t many even when I loosened the filters and set my search nation-wide. Aside from being a new app, which I can forgive and have some patience for, the intentionality I know that Emily and Daniel tried to put into the app just does not come through. The maximum video & audio recording lengths and word counts for bios are not long enough, plus for the recordings there are no prompts given, so most people’s recordings are something along the lines of “this is awkward” and many are just recordings of dead air. The depth of the profiles is about on par with Bumble (well, really a little more superficial than Bumble), with the only advantage being that everyone here is Catholic. Another SUPER irritating thing is that you’re limited to 4 filters… EVEN WITH A PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION. The only reason I paid for a premium subscription was because I thought it would give me more filters, so that would have been nice to know before I spent that money. I seriously considered asking for a refund, but decided not to, because I do want to support this project. It’s not the fantastic online dating utopia I was hoping for, but they’re just getting started, and I hope over time the team will listen to feedback and it will change for the better.