eHarmony Blog.com

(Copied in entirety with permission from ATLBachelor, dated 21 March 2008. Thanks, Andy!)

So for any of you who have dabbled in Eharmony at some point, you might have noticed that you must go through multiple stages of communication before you’re allowed to freely speak with your match.

Initially, you fire off about five multiple choice questions which also allow for option E, a free-response answer. (I only respond via the free-response choice, so any woman who thinks outside the box and does the same wins major favoritism in my book. Same goes for actually filling-out your profile completely, much less sounding intriguing) The beauty of these is that the site saves the five questions you choose to ask, so you can re-use them with each new match. I made it a point to pick questions that screen for what I’m not looking for, ie: “does she value money over things like respect” or “is she really shy outside of her comfort zone” or “does she carry a lot of stress in her life.”

Next, you send a menagerie of qualifiers to your match… things you think you have to have in a relationship and things you can’t stand and wouldn’t tolerate. I feel this section does a much better job of screening than the previous, but still doesn’t give you a great sense of who this person is. Some of mine include: a curiosity for life, emotionally healthy, no druggies, leave work at work, interested in sex, and no childish behavior.

I see all sorts of qualifiers from my matches such as: financially responsible, ambitious, strong character, physically attractive, no fatties… but one that I see almost 100% of the time is chemistry. As in, I cannot have a relationship with someone whom I don’t feel chemistry with. To me, that is a waste of an option as I seriously doubt anyone would get in a relationship with someone they don’t feel attracted to… it doesn’t even need mentioning. I almost never see women pick anything about a healthy sexual relationship aside from not tolerating infidelity. I partially think that has to do with how women are socialized to keep sex a taboo subject unless they’re all talking amongst themselves during a round of cosmos, in the bathroom or Oprah brings it up.

“Boys must not know we enjoy sex as much, if not more, than they do… then we lose hand.”

Thirdly, you get to send three open-ended questions of your choosing. For those less interested or “creative”, you can select from their dozens of questions. People, always write your own questions…. ask what you really want to know, try to find the person behind the keyboard. I assure you that when I’m presented with a cookie-cutter question, I’ve definitely already written an answer for it before and you’ll get a cookie-cutter response. Me? I ask them which bands they’d book for a big concert, what kind of bad habits or vices they’d want to break, and what sorts of things make her smile and curls her toes. (One girl actually wrote “multiple orgasms.” I LOL’d)

Then, hopefully, you’re ready to finally write some honest-to-God emails to one another. I’m so sick of logging-in to the site at this point that I usually share my email address with her in the first message.

Sometimes it takes a long time to get to this point. Some people lose interest in the whole process first. I will admit first-hand that I need to be really interested in this match for me to get this far. I try not to take too long getting here. Some of my matches have gotten to this point in one weekend, others nearly a month. The sooner the better, for both parties. I went on a date tonight with an awesome girl, though from the time we were initially matched until today was a cumulative 37 days and until a couple of days ago I wasn’t even sure if I was still interested. I’ve been waiting on a different match to send her first message to me for nearly a month… and I’m not holding my breath.

My biggest gripe is that Eharmony will not notify you that the person is no longer subscribing to the service and is unable to contact you… and they will also send you new matches who aren’t active subscribers, essentially a dead account for all intensive purposes. A lot of these profiles aren’t even filled-out completely, which is a tip-off that it’s a dead profile and the person did just enough work to get the “free personality test.”