Online dating for smart people

 Finally, a dating outlet for those who are single and ready to intelligently mingle.

Genius hub Mensa is teaming up with Match.com to make sure intellectuals are meeting their mental equals.

Mensa Match, which is launching this week, pairs Mensa members with others in the program. Also known as Mensans, members are required to be in the top two per cent of the population in terms of IQ scores.

The service allows members to narrow their dating search to easily identify other Mensans with whom they might have traits in common.

As with other niche dating websites, like FarmersOnly and GlutenfreeSingles, Mensa Match is only for those who are currently in the high IQ group. However, this does not prevent Mensans from chatting up non-Mensans on Match.com. Those who are interested in Mensa but not members can still interact online with members.

"Members gravitate a lot toward things ... that help define a person," says Amarnarth Thombre, Match.com's president.

"What we've done is combine the technology of Match with these partnerships, where they can not only meet other Match members but also find each other very easily."

After receiving requests from members for a Mensa-specific dating pool, Mensa contacted Match.com, who took a poll of its members and found that 80 per cent of them valued high intelligence in a romantic partner.

The two organisations then decided to join forces, resulting in Match.com creating a Mensa badge for its users profiles.

Currently, Mensa is a community group option on the regular Match.com. This means that people are allowed to paste a Mensa badge on their profiles to signify their interest in the society, hopefully attracting fellow enthusiasts.

"We researched our member base to find out what was important to them from a membership perspective and what benefits we could offer," John McGill, Mensa's national director of marketing, told Mashable. "Something that ranked very high was having an association dating service."

Part of the reason Mensa Match was created was to provide people of high intelligence with like-minded companions who have somewhat different interests than the normal online dating crowd.

"I'm looking for people who are intellectually curious," Mensa member Anne Sereg, 55, told CNN. "And when all you're talking about is sports teams and barbeques ... when you're talking about physical traits and not existential philosophy, I'm not going to get the vibe."

This is not the first time Match.com has provided services for more specific interests.

In March, the site partnered with MLB to create a dating website targeted at baseball fans looking for love. Thombre said the dating website is looking to form further partnerships with specific organisations and groups in the future but would not disclose names.

"[Mensans] process things much quicker than most other people do," McGill said. "It's certainly not an elitist thing, they just see things very, very differently and they interact differently. ... What's great about it is when there's an opportunity for people to get to meet each other and they just might process things the same way, it makes it really perfect."

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