A 30-year-old from Sheffield recently made news headlines in the UK for spending £425 to rent a billboard on the side of a busy road in Manchester in hopes of finding a date.

Mark Rofe has been single for a year now, and using online dating apps hasn’t really made a difference, so after joking with a friend at a pub that he’d be better off advertising himself on a billboard, he realized that wouldn’t actually be a bad idea. So he set up a website featuring a witty biography where he invites female visitors to apply for a date with him. The billboard has been up for a few days now, but he has already been contacted by 100 people. Sadly, 50 of them have been men.

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We’ve seen a lot of interesting dating services in the last few years, like Hater, an app that matches people by things they both hate, Dating AI, a service that lets you date people who look like your favorite celebrities, or Trump Singles, a dating site catering exclusively to Donald Trump supporters. But if you prefer a more scientific approach to dating, you may want to try Pheramor, a unique dating service that matches people by chemical compatibility, by analyzing and comparing their DNA.

Pheramor’s approach to finding suitable matches for singles is a bit different than that of most dating services. For $29.99, the company will ship users a DNA kit containing a buccal swab that they have to return for analysis after swabbing the inside of their cheeks. Pheramor will then analyze the samples and sequence 11 genes allegedly linked to attraction and compares the results with others in its database to determine chemical compatibility. The company then sends the user three potential match in their area (with their photos blurred) every day, each graded from 0 to 100, based on estimated compatibility.

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Vending machines are very popular in Asia, with businesses using them to sell just about anything, even live crabs. However, one Honk Kong entrepreneur has found a way to take vending machines to a whole new level, by designing one that sells dates to singles looking for a low-tech alternative to online dating services like Tinder.

The “Fate Capsule” vending machine outside BT Reptile, a small pet store in Kowloon’s Shek Kip Mei neighborhood, received worldwide attention earlier this year, when word of the original concept went viral online. It’s basically a multi-tiered vending machine with separate compartments for men and women which dispenses colored plastic capsules containing the contact details of singles looking for love. All you have to do is insert HK$20 ($2.5) in coins, and it will spit out a fate capsule with the description and contact information of a prospective date.

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A Chinese man recently made national news headlines for his years-long struggle to find a suitable wife. He claims to have asked around 80,000 women if they wanted to date him over the last eight years, but got rejected no less than 80,000 times. Ouch!

31-year-old Niu Xiangfeng has been described as a “dating madman” for his aggressive approach to finding a life-partner. He first made the news in 2013, when photos of him walking through the streets of Beijing while holding a sign that advertised his desire to find a wife along with his links to his social media profiles went viral online. His father died of cancer a couple of years prior and he felt like he needed to get married and start a family. Things didn’t turn out the way he had hoped, and five years on, he is still looking for Mrs. Right.

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Paul Gonzales is not the first and probably not the last man to ditch a new date and leave her with the restaurant bill, but he is definitely the most notorious and prolific dine-and-dash dater in recent history. According to news reports, the Pasadena man has been leaving his dates with the bill for over three years.

Gonzales first made headlines in March of last year, after ditching two women on separate dates in Pasadena, California, and leaving them with expensive restaurant bills. One of victims told news reporters that she had checked online and had discovered stories of at least two other women conned by the same man, going back one year. The bad publicity he got last year, following extensive media coverage of his exploits, doesn’t seem to have bothered the dine-and-dash dater too much, as just a few days ago two more women came forward to complain about being left with the bill.

One of Gonzales’ most recent victims, who preferred to remain anonymous, told CNN affiliate KCAL that she had met the man on a dating app and agreed to go on a date with him. After enjoying a scrumptious dinner and two cups of coffee, the man reportedly started talking about his sick aunt and how worried he was about her. Then he excused himself to get the charger for his phone from the car, but never came back, leaving her to cover the $130 bill.

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Popular South Korean TV show Mars People XFile recently featured a young woman who claimed to have dated nearly 200 men in the last two years, purely for materialistic purposes.

The young and attractive woman, named Han Mirim, gives speed dating a whole new meaning, admitting that she sometimes broke up with men on the same day they hooked up, just because they wanted to split the bill at restaurants, or just didn’t seem willing to shower her with gifts or cover her many expenses. Mirim claimed that during the last couple of years, she had dated almost 200 different men and had received around 1 million won ($92,000) in gifts, like jewelry, clothes or gadgets.

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An 18-year-old male teen in China recently became a social media sensation after applying to the Women’s University in Beijing and admitting that one of the main reasons for that was to improve his chances of finding a girlfriend.

Due to a preference for boys during the time that the one-child population planning policy was enforced in China (1979 – 2015), the Asian country now has the world’s second most distorted sex ratio. In some of its provinces, there are as many as 130 boys for every 100 girls, and some specialists estimate that tens of millions of Chinese men will be unable to find a wife in the coming decades. Unable to deal with those odds, an 18-year-old teen decided to improve his chances of finding a female romantic partner by applying to a women’s college.

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Joe Cohen, the young CEO of a California based company called SelfHacked, is looking for a suitable girlfriend, and he is offering $10,000 to whoever points him in the right direction. He is also offering $2,000 to anyone who can introduce him to someone else who can connect him with a woman.

30-year-old Cohen has created a very complex dating advert on his blog, in which he explains why he opted for this unusual way of finding a romantic partner, what he looks for in a woman, as well as details about himself. He also mentions that he will only pay out the reward if he successfully dates the woman for at least four months. That is apparently the amount of time it takes Cohen to get to know someone, and will also protect him against women just looking to earn some money.

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Sompong Chomphuprapet, a 65-year-old woman from Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand, recently made international headlines for her unconventional approach to finding a boyfriend. She put up a sign on her fence asking interested suitors to ask for more information inside.

With dating sites like Tinder or Bumble so popular these days, and even niche options like slow dating apps, services that let you date people who look like your favorite celebrities, and even dating sites for Trump supporters, it’s hard to believe that anyone would still choose analog over digital when it come to finding a life partner. But for 65-year-old Sompong Chomphuprapet, a divorcee from the Pibul Mangsahan district of Thailand’s Ubon Ratchathani province, putting up a sign outside her house was apparently the best option.

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Ladies, meet Alan, a 37-year-old computer science graduate looking for a partner to share his life with. But he doesn’t want just any lady, he’s looking for the ideal woman, and to increase his chances of finding her, he has set up a one page website as a guide for possible candidates. If you can’t find the perfect woman online these days, I guess she doesn’t exist.

Alan describes himself as a “European male born in 1980, 1.89mt tall with pleasant look and a slender/athletic figure,” and, while he doesn’t feel comfortable in being categorized under a specific behavior, he feels that the  INFJ personality type (Introversion, Intuition, Feeling, Judging) and the HSP trait (Highly Sensitive Person) can be used to characterize him. He is currently trying to “find his way out of the rat-race” and wants to find his ideal woman to start a life from scratch with. Interested yet?

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Let’s face it, you’ll probably never get to go on a date with your celebrity crush, but, with Dating AI, a new dating app that uses advanced facial recognition technology, you can now find celebrity doppelgangers and ask them out on a date.

The Dating.ai app works by analyzing a reference a photo you upload or select from a list of popular celebrities provided within the app, and then scanning through thousands of profile photos from popular dating services like Tinder, Bumper or Plenty of Fish to find people who look very similar. The idea of finding everyday people who look like your favorite celebrity is just a selling point, because, in reality, Dating.ai can be used to find all kinds of people, from people who look like your ex, to versions of yourself of the opposite sex (if you want to date yourself). The possibilities are virtually endless.

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Brandon Vezmar, a 37-year-old man from Austin, Texas, has become an overnight celebrity after he decided to sue his first date for texting too much during a screening of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2. He is asking for $17.31, which is how much he paid for her ticket.

Brandon and 35-year-old Crystal met on online dating app Bumble and went on their first and only date on May 6. Vezmar bought two tickets for the 3D screening of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2, and he says everything was going good until 15 minutes into the movie, when his date took out her phone and started texting. At one point, it got too much for him to bear, and he asked the woman to either stop texting or go into the lobby of the theater. She left, and never came back, leaving without a ride home, as they had both arrived at the Barton Creek Square theater in her car. He later texted Crystal to ask for his money back, and when she refused to pay the $17.31 price of the ticket, he had no choice but to take her to court for it.

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In the era of “ain’t nobody got time for that”, when most online dating services are largely based on profile photos and conversation is kept as simple and monotonous as possible, the world’s first “slow dating” app is trying to get people to take things slow by first talking and getting to know each other.

Appetence is a dating app designed around the principle of ‘taking it slow’. Instead of swiping left and right based only on your matches’ looks, you have to earn the privilege of actually seeing what your match looks like through conversation. And we’re not talking just a few short messages, either. Two people need to exchange at least 100 messages, or “encounters”, before they can see each other’s profile pictures, and that’s if they really hit it off.

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Game of Clones is a British dating reality show that has contestants describe the physical attributes of their perfect man/woman in great detail and then choose between several candidates that all look and dress the same. Apparently, the idea this new show is trying to promote is that it’s what’s inside that counts.

When it comes to the physical appearance of their perfect date, everyone has a type. Channel 4’s new dating reality show Game of Clones, gives singletons access the latest avatar building technology to virtually create their perfect partner, down to the tiniest details. Height, hairstyle, hair color, eye color, build, skin pigment, you name it they will enter it in a software and create your perfect partner based on your preferences. Once you’re satisfied with their rendition of your fantasy, Game of Clones will scour the U.K in search of eight people that fit your description and closely resemble each other, dress them all in the exact same clothes and put them all in a house with you for several weeks. With all contestants essentially being doppelgangers, it’s assumed that looks are no longer a criteria for selection, so participants will have to gradually eliminate seven of the eight candidates based on their personalities.

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Most dating services match their users by the things they like, but a new dating app called Hater completely turns this idea on its head, using common disinterests to help people find love.

Hater founder Brendan Alper, who left his job at Goldman Sachs to become a comedian, first came up with the idea for the app as a joke. But the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that it would actually be an interesting real-life dating app, and after finding some scientific studies that confirmed his intuition, he decided to turn it into a reality. Hater has been in testing since December 2016, and will be officially available for iOS and Android devices on February 8th. So get ready to let the things you hate guide you to true love.

“What we hate is an important part of who we are, but it’s often swept under the rug in our public persona,” Alper says. “We want people to express themselves more honestly. Plus, it’s easy to start a conversation with someone if you know you both hate pickles.” The app utilizes the same swiping function as Tinder or Bumble, but instead of swiping on people, you swap on topics ranging from butt selfies and bad tipping, to sidewalk etiquette and Donald Trump. You simply swipe down to hate, up to love, left to dislike or right to like. Hater than finds potential matches based on the things you hate and your location.

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