Victoria Milan Review: Is The Affair Dating Site Worth Trying?
by John Santana
At this point in history, dating sites are normal. Step into a time machine and go back five years, however, and dating sites seemed like an exciting fad. Everyone was talking about how Tinder was about to cause the fall of western civilization (or about how they were just about to use it to get laid).
Go back ten years rather than five, however, and you will see a massive stigma attached to online dating.
And it’s understandable as to why: Establishing a bond or making a plan with someone is difficult even if you are talking face-to-face. Through the filter of text chat, it can be nearly impossible. Dating sites didn’t really take off until they innovated on solutions to this problem.
The question is: What does any given dating site offer above images and text messages?
Victoria Milan is a dating site that seeks to solve this problem in a way that many have before it: A shared interest. Unlike many before it though, Victoria Milan’s shared interest of choice is adultery.
Perhaps the word “adultery” leaves a bad taste in your mouth though. That is, unfortunately, almost unavoidable. All the shorthand one might use to describe extra-marital affairs are stained with negative connotations. But where the English language judges, Victoria Milan understands.
Initial Impressions
Victoria Milan offers a good first impression by emphasizing its anonymity options. You don’t have to provide a picture. If you do provide a picture, you can have it blurred (either partially or fully) or put a mask on it to hide half of your face. But if that’s where the anonymity ended, it wouldn’t be very anonymous at all.
The optional picture is supplemented with a variety of (non-incriminating) details about yourself. These include what you are looking for, of course, as well as keywords for you to choose from that describe yourself.
Victoria Milan puts more focus and detail into these keywords than most other dating sites. There are far more to choose from and choosing them is more meaningful. This is because these keywords play a big part in getting noticed on Victoria Milan.
When you are dealing with a situation so tantalizing as adultery, the last thing you want to do is mix the people who are just there for a one-night stand with those who are looking for a long-term affair. Victoria Milan recognizes that and uses its keyword system to filter out unlike-minded matches.
There are two kinds of details you can offer within this system: Non-critical preferences you have, and personal details about salary, appearance, and lifestyle.
The distinction between the two is important, because while personal details aren’t required, there are buttons where users can ask other users for these details before engaging in messaging.
What this means is that you can find someone, learn a lot about them, and even message them to look for an absolutely perfect match.
Of course, if you are not that picky, you can also skip all of that and use the site’s main page.
The Main Page Experience
Apps and websites—particularly dating sites—live and die on their ability to get you interacting with the main page of the site. This is where everyone starts first, and if they can’t find what they’re looking for here, they will go somewhere else. So, how good is Victoria Milan’s main page?
Well, it does what it can to simplify an incredibly complex process. It is fighting an uphill battle, admittedly.
The main page shows you other users from one of five regions: The USA, the whole world, Scandanavia (countries like Sweden, Norway, etc), Eastern Europe (countries like Poland, Estonia, Belarus, etc), and then a specific location of your choice.
What this means is that when you first land on Victoria Milan’s main page, you might be confused as to why you are seeing people that are more than 4000 miles away. But why is this? Why not just use location services like any other dating app?
In this particular business, automatic location services would be a death sentence. By its very nature, Victoria Milan cannot and will not overreach to use or publicize aspects about your real name, appearance, or location.
Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of some convenience features that other dating sites and apps might have had you take for granted. No automatic location services mean manually searching for and setting your location before you can search nearby.
However, requiring the user to manually search for these things comes with its own advantage.
Searching and Chatting
Any other dating site in the world will have a search function that sorts by rather superficial metrics. Interests, height, and certain tags if that site is feeling very adventurous.
Victoria Milan ups the ante by including things like diet, “best feature”, and even sex drive. Many dating apps will have your matches presented to you. Victoria Milan requires that you search them out. Once you do that, you realize just how good the search options are.
Another way by which Victoria Milan separates itself out from other dating sites is its way of “matching” people together. In short, it does no such thing.
“Matching” people is a whole lot of ceremony, isn’t it?
“Matching” is an event, and human minds form narratives around events. When you match someone, you make a decision, and the result that follows feels like it says something about you. What if you match with someone, then end up not liking them? You feel superficial like you enabled a bad personality.
Worse yet, what if you don’t match with anyone at all? Or your only matches end up being spam bots? The event of matching is exciting in the short-term but creates a negative user experience in the long term. Hence, Victoria Milan does away with it entirely.
Instead, contact with other users is done by peer-to-peer chatting. Users see when you view their profile (as you see when someone views your profile, as well as who it was), and can like, “wink”, or message you.
Liking and winking at users sends them a message expressing your interest without you having to craft a greeting yourself. If you’ll recall, you can also “ask” users for certain information they have not yet filled in. If someone hasn’t stated their education or income, for instance, you can ask for that before engaging.
There are limits on what you can ask for; you can’t ask what someone’s sex drive is like unless they volunteer that information, for instance. But the list of what you can ask for is more comprehensive than the list of what you cannot ask for, so take assurance in the fact that there’s little the site doesn’t cover (or, rather, uncover).
You Should Know About Sugar Babies
One of the details that you might notice Victoria Milan lets you ask about is income and wealth level. There is a reason for this, and a complete overview of the site would not be complete without it.
There is a culture of people, mainly young women, whose aim is to find financial stability as a “sugar baby”. They seek to do this by finding a “sugar daddy”; that is, someone who will finance their life in exchange for a wide range of things, from sexual favors to more domestic company.
If you have any uncertainty about Victoria Milan’s willingness to serve this demographic, look no further than the login/logout page, where a banner ad always directs you to a sister dating site that caters to sugar babies/sugar daddies exclusively. It is safe to say sugar baby culture is safe in Victoria Milan.
It is important that you know about this kind of culture and the fact that Victoria Milan as a platform is accepting of it because it informs the atmosphere of the interactions you have on the site.
The presence of sugar babies divides the site into two groups: Those who expect a sugar baby-style treatment, and those who do not. There are grey areas, but even those grey areas will tend towards one or the other simply by being on the same platform as the extremes.
Everyone is going to have an opinion about sugar babies. Whether you are one, want one, or think the whole notion is laughable, be prepared to engage with the idea if you are interested in Victoria Milan.
The Price
The biggest drawback to Victoria Milan (and indeed, the reason why being able to send canned messages through likes, winks, and asks is so important) is that in order to send an actual message, you must be a premium member. Going premium isn’t cheap, either: The cheapest plan is over $170 for three months.
The reasoning behind the price tag is that you are charged weekly, but you can’t only pay for one week then call it quits when you get impatient. This comes with advantages and disadvantages.
The disadvantage is obvious: $170 at minimum is a lot if you aren’t confident in your ability to get what you want out of the site. And even if you are, that amounts to the monthly luxury spending of many Americans.
However, there are plenty of people for whom $170 is a measly expense. Moreover, necessitating a three-month commitment is a wise design choice.
Whether this appraisal applies to you or not, you are likely aware that many people use these kinds of sites to find sex. This means that they use these sites when they are in a particular mood.
That particular mood always ends eventually—your heart would stop if it didn’t. How easy would it be to buy one week’s worth of premium chatting time, have one bad conversation, then lose the mood and swear off the whole site forever? It would be far too easy.
A three-month premium commitment might seem strange. It is definitely unusual. But you are unlikely to use a dating app every single day. If you find it necessary to do so, then the app is not working very well.
Premium subscriptions in apps like these are interesting. If you subscribed to a meal prep service, you could easily calculate the value of the service by comparing it to the cost of making similar meals bought from another source.
Many subscription services operate on this same logic: Long-term, incremental costs usually benefit both consumers and producers. The consumer gets the product they want without a large, scary price tag. The producer gets the customer they want, and the monetary security they need.
The Problem with Evaluating Dating Apps
All popular affair dating sites and apps have long grappled with this. How easy is it to calculate the value of a dating app subscription? Is it even possible? Even if it was possible, should it be done?
The act of calculating the monetary efficiency of a dating app would involve estimating the amount of time and money you needed to put in to get the greatest relative output.
So, if one app had you put in $5 a week and one hour a day to get one match, then it would be more valuable than an app that gave you one match for one hour a day and cost $7 a week.
Already you can probably see the toxicity of this mindset. It is a mindset that looks at human interaction through a microscope. Material investment is very carefully weighed, and as a result, there is an expectation of an “optimal outcome”, a material benefit to justify the investment.
When human interaction is expected to fit inside the confines of material input and output, anything adjacent or tangential to the desired output is considered aberrant.
This is most obvious (though by no means exclusive to) when someone is using the app or site to look for sex.
Sex and sexuality are incredibly complicated. Yet there is ultimately, always a final word that simplifies them: A yes, or a no. No matter how much of a complex you have around your sexuality, it is, at least in theory, possible to reduce your sexuality down to with whom you will and will not have sex.
If one evaluates dating apps looking purely for a reducible value—“Am I getting sex for my time and money or not?”—then they are going to have a terrible time. Even if they are successful by their own strange definition of success, they will have taken all the life out of the experience.
The Victoria Milan Pricing Strategy
All of this is to say that Victoria Milan’s pricing strategy has its merits. By paying for three months to a year, Victoria Milan has you take step towards something deeper than swiping through pictures for a week. It asks that you commit to a timescale that disallows highly logical value-seeking.
Many people will be turned off by this. Highly logical value-seeking is deeply baked into our financial culture. Paying money to be on the same social media platform as other people set off tons of alarm bells in people’s heads. It is an understandable predicament. What are you paying for? What are you getting for your money?
With Victoria Milan, you are getting an incredibly discreet, incredibly well-curated network of people that are all of the same mind on one thing: It is nice to make a connection, even if other connections already exist.
Final Thoughts
Victoria Milan is not the only affair-oriented dating site out there, but it puts a lot of effort into being unique. Not just in its way of having you search out people to connect with, but in its presentation.
When first logging in, you are greeted with a short, well-produced video featuring someone of the sex you’re interested in making suggestive comments towards you. If you turn the audio on you will hear that they sound like an ASMR model as they whisper every word they say.
It really sets the tone: You are there to do something sexy, possibly illicit, but still pleasurable for all parties involved. And setting that tone is important. If society doesn’t want you to enjoy yourself in the way that Victoria Milan lets you, then Victoria Milan has to be the one to let you know that it’s okay.
The most eye-catching detail of the site itself, setting aside all the eye-catching users you will see every time you log in, is the bright red “panic button” in the bottom right corner of the screen. This is for people who need to navigate away from the site quickly. To hide it from a spouse, for instance.
Victoria Milan knows what it is, what it offers, and what it needs to show you to get you interested in seeing more. That level of boldness is commendable in and of itself.
If you enjoy the culture, and if you can stomach the price tag, then you will find yourself on a platform unlike any other. And perhaps you will make a connection unlike any other as well.
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