eHarmony Blog.com

Let me begin this short round-up of dating sites by saying I’m biased against “grazing” dating sites. I strongly believe you must not have a person pick a dating or marriage partner from a line-up of faces and headshots. People are neither meat nor bought from a catalogue.

Grazing sites

eHarmony vs. Match

Match is the biggest meat shop on the planet. Match lets you browse and shop for millions of people looking for dates, sorted by distance and what-not. Browsing for hours and looking at hotties is free and requires no registration.

Pros vs. eH: (1) Size (2) Contact thousands of people right after you pay your membership. (2) See who has viewed your profile (3) Limit matches to attributes proven to be critical to deep compatibility and lifelong happiness, such as astrological sign, eye colour, hair colour and best physical feature. Yes, I’m sarcastic here.

Cons vs. eH: (1) No compatibility profile. (2) Coworkers, your mum, your pastor and your exes would see your photo there. (3) No guided communication. (4) Quirky in Opera.

eHarmony vs. Consumating

Consumating innovates MySpace and Match by using tags as a way for members to interact and describe one another or themselves. The Q&A and photo contests it runs among members encourage people to describe themselves candidly and interestingly in their profile pages.

Pros vs. eH: (1) Free

Cons vs. eH: (1-3) like Match above.

eHarmony vs. OKCupid

Non-grazing sites

eHarmony vs. Chemistry

If eHarmony is an innovative company, it would have become Chemistry.com. In many respects, C is an eHarmony 2.0. It has a (more brief) questionnaire, members have to wait for the matching algorithm to give them matches, members undergo a (three-step) guided communication, members can control who sees their photo or personality profile or at what stage in the communication process.

Pros vs. eH: (1) Match.com (continually) offers its members the opportunity to take the Chemistry test, which quickly migrates their settings from match’s huge member base. (2) Feedback mechanisms in each step on each match — this allegedly lets the system improve and give you more of what you want.

Cons vs. eH: (1) Limited media coverage (2) U.S.-only (3) Trial not available (4) No match guarantee

eHarmony vs. PerfectMatch

PerfectMatch has connections with Hollywood, because two worldwide-release films mentioned their site. As the first eH alternative, it attempted to combine the personality test-based matching of eH and the extended lifestyle criteria-based matching of Match.

Pros vs. eH: Allows “grazing” between paid members.

Cons vs. eH: No trial available. Allows “grazing” between paid members.

Matching criteria weirdness

While doing my roundup I found