I Did It For Science: eHarmony.com – Will our new scientist find old-fashioned love?

Nerve.com sends a scientist to review eHarmony:

It only took them a few seconds to smash the snowy paperweight of my romantic future.

“Unable to match you at this time.”

They had to be kidding. It’s New York City, a straight-male dater’s paradise, the most famous place in America to land girls you wouldn’t have a shot at anywhere else, where fabulous women put up with dirtbags and freeloaders and still get cheated on. No one for me? But I’m not homeless! I’m not a convicted felon! I can be monogamous, I promise! No dice. “Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched.” Yeah, when you say best matched, no shit, you’re a computer, but how about someone who might just like my cardigan collection?

– I Did It For Science: eHarmony.com – Will our new scientist find old-fashioned love?, by Jack Harrison, Nerve.com, dated 9 June 2009.

“When your psychological profile starts sounding like an astrological chart, you know you’re in trouble.”

Jack also cared enough to publish his answers to the questionnaire and buy a Premium Personality Profile for us to read. Thanks! He also interviewed Dr. Gian Gonzaga why he was rejected:

I still had questions, so I got their Senior Research Scientist on the horn. Gian Gonzaga, Ph.D. told me that people come up unmatchable for four reasons: they’re under eighteen, they’re married, they’re trying to “game the system” (i.e. not being serious about the process — their code for bootycallin’?), or they’re people who have “a complex, nuanced view of themselves.” (As an unspoken fifth, eHarmony also famously doesn’t match gay people — thus their new spin-off site, CompatiblePartners.net, which I would have called eSingShowtunesInHarmony.com.)

I’m over eighteen and never married, so in this case, the problem was me — or at least my sense of myself. “One of the downsides of the system,” Gian told me, is that if you answer questions in “inconsistent ways” it “blows the system up. It’s not an implication of how worthy you are of a relationship. It’s actually saying that you are a unique person. And finding someone is something that our system can’t handle, but it doesn’t mean that there’s not someone out there.”

“Uniquely self-delusional?” I asked him.

“No, unique in the sense that you are a rare bird in the world… a person with a complex view of yourself.”

“Wow,” I said. “That sounds pretty good.”