eHarmony Blog.com

(Copied in entirety with permission from Workbench, dated 16 January 2009. Thanks, Rogers!)

Joshua and Tanyalee Pearson are newlyweds in Redding, Calif., who met through the online dating service eHarmony and married 10 months later. The telegenic boutique owner and “geeky chemist” have become the greatest TV commercial supercouple since Jared Fogle and a six-inch turkey sandwich.

Jared scares me, but after seeing their commercial hundreds of times I’ve become attached to Joshua and Tanyalee. They got married pretty quickly, but who am I to argue with 29 factors of compatibility? The eHarmony dating site is powered by romantic science.

Five questions are used to assess Dyadic Cohesion, including how often the couple laughs together, works together on a project, or has a stimulating exchange of ideas. Univariate Chi-square and ANOVA analyses indicated a significant benefit (p < .001) for having been introduced by eHarmony for all five of the measures used to assess Dyadic Cohesion, as well as for all 32 items comprising the entire DAS.

We didn’t have Dyadic Cohesion back in my day. I met the missus at a kegger. She looked at me through the haze of beer goggles and it was love at impaired sight.

Given eHarmony’s trouble in New Jersey over excluding gays from its service, it’s interesting to see that Tanyalee has gone on the record in favor of California’s Proposition 8:

Marriage is a biblical union under God that happens to be recognized by our government. It is not subject to amendments. I believe that it would be right of our government to offer some sort of union benefit to those who wish to join their lives in a same-sex union. However, this does not mean that the government has any right to step into the church and redefine “marriage”. The separation between church and state is not to keep the beliefs of the church out of our governing systems. Instead is to keep the governing systems out of the church. …

This is not about rights as a citizen of the United States of America. This is about whether we as a country have the audacity to ammend the Bible. “Marriage” is not the term to be used in homosexual unions. This is not ever been defined in the Bible as such. Thus it is not the place or right of my government to change that. In order to keep separate as so many have suggested the church and the state, we must fundamentally re-examine the suggestions being purposed.

Leaving aside Tanyalee’s completely back-asswards interpretation of the separation of church and state, I don’t understand the impulse of some straight people to play “tick-tock the game is locked” with marriage. Why should I care if a committed gay couple wants the benefits and burdens the state assigns to married people? eHarmony is now under legal agreement with the state of New Jersey to begin applying love cohesive to gays on a same-sex service called Compatible Partners. When they start churning out gay couples whose univariate Chi-square and ANOVA analyses indicate lifelong compatibility, shouldn’t they get married and celebrate their happiness in heavily rotated television commercials? Gay people can’t possibly screw up marriage any worse than heterosexuals. If the institution can survive quickie Vegas weddings, 35,000-couple Unification Church mass ceremonies and the union of Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett, it can survive a couple with the same plumbing who’d like to file a joint tax return and share parental rights over their children.

Tanyalee takes a pretty hardline view on the issue, and given the fact that Joshua has an advanced degree in chemistry, I was concerned they might have only 28 favors of compatibility — 60 percent of people with postgraduate degrees voted against Proposition 8, according to exit polls. But the only hero named on Joshua’s MySpace profile is “Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior and ultimate HERO, role model, and friend,” and he attends a church that prescreens applicants to its School of Supernatural Worship for the purpose of weeding out gays, cultists and practitioners of witchcraft:

Have you ever been involved in homosexuality or lesbianism?

If yes, how long since last involvement?

So Joshua and Tanyalee are in harmony on this issue, and thank God for that.