Does Match.com Remove Inactive Profiles?

Eventually, but not quickly. Match's Community Guidelines say that if a member does not log in for two or more years, Match may assume they found what they were looking for and delete the account for inactivity. Until that point, a profile that nobody has touched in months can still be there, so you cannot assume that every woman you see is active.

Two years is a long time. It means a woman who signed up, got busy, met someone or lost interest can leave her page up well past the point where she cares about it.

The wording matters too. Match says it "may" delete the account, so the guidelines describe what Match is allowed to do, not a timer that runs on a schedule. Treat it as a cleanup that happens at some stage, and never as a promise that dead pages disappear on their own.

A member can hide her profile at any time. A hidden profile no longer appears in search results and is not visible on the site. If you search for her again later, she is simply gone.

That is a choice she made, and it is not the same thing as a forgotten page. A woman who hides hers may be taking a break or seeing someone, and she is the one who decides.

When you open a page and it reads Profile Unavailable, the cause could be three things. She hid it, she took a break, or Match removed her, for example for a security violation. Match does not say which one, so there is nothing for you to work out from the screen.

The most useful tool for your question is Activity Status, the small mark next to a member's name. It tells you how long ago she was on the site.

• A solid green dot means she was active in the last 45 minutes.
• An empty green circle means she was last active between 46 minutes and 24 hours ago.
• An empty yellow circle means her last activity was 24 to 72 hours ago.
• No dot or circle means her last activity was more than 72 hours ago.

So a page with no mark at all is not necessarily deleted. It may belong to a woman who has not logged in for days, weeks or much longer. Match has no label that says dormant for a year.

a dating coach's advice on online dating is to treat it as a numbers game that you tune, and tuning means putting your effort where it can pay off. Writing a careful first line to a page with no activity mark is effort that may never be read.

Start with the green dots and circles. A woman who was on the site this morning is far more likely to read what you send than one who last logged in last month. Go down the list by recent activity, and work the top of it.

Do not rule out the older pages entirely. A woman with a yellow circle may simply log in every second day, which is ordinary. The point is to put the first of your effort where the odds are best, not to ignore everyone else.

The same marks apply to you. If you stop logging in, your page slowly turns from green to yellow to nothing, and women who read those marks will pass over you.

If you are going to step away, decide on purpose. Hide your profile for a while, or delete the account if you are finished. A page left standing, with no activity, tells women nothing good and wastes a slot that could belong to someone who wants to meet.

If your account was closed, Match says it can be reactivated, and that reactivating gives access to the free membership benefits without a charge. So a return does not have to start with a payment.

Do not just switch it back on. Read your own page as a stranger would. Check that your pictures are recent and your lines still sound like you. My view is that nobody writes a good page on the first draft, so a return is the perfect moment to tweak it, test one change at a time, and keep what works.

Match deletes accounts that stay inactive for two or more years, and until then a stale page can look the same as a live one. Use the activity marks to find the women who were on the site in the last day or so, write to them first, and keep your own page active or hidden on purpose.