Let’s stop the speculation! Here are the facts:
There’s a maximum of five matches a day, no matter how nice you are, how empty your list is, whether you’re paying or how often you change your Match Settings.
Non-paying members are matched to paying members. “To find you high quality matches, … we have established a system where users can be matched before they join as eHarmony members.”1 So “maria (fortcollins, CO)“, who’s missing photos and answers, will probably not respond to you.
How the eHarmony Matching System works:
The eHarmony Matching System is comprised of a series of complex models designed to create matches between highly compatible individuals. These models work by evaluating 29 critical underlying Factors, each comprised of a multitude of variables, which have been proven to predict the success of long-term relationships.
Detailed information about these Factors is gathered during the eHarmony Intake Questionnaire. This information is then used to generate a unique Factor Matching Profile for each person. The [patented] matching system makes literally hundreds of thousands of comparisons using the composite scores of each Profile to ultimately determine each of the durable matches that eHarmony provides to its users.
The multi-faceted Factor Matching Profiles form the foundation for the predictive modeling which the eHarmony Matching System uses to precisely analyze the essential personality, temperament, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, skills, core interests, personal history and character of each individual user. This scientific precision at the core of the eHarmony matching methodology allows for the highly effective pairing of compatible individuals.2
This “thousands of comparisons” computer processing runs in the eHarmony servers for three hours every early morning between 1-4am Pacific time. This schedule is as per eH customer service.
- The so-called Factor Matching Profile (FMP) is set in stone the moment a person finishes the questionnaire, i.e., the moment the person clicks “Save and Continue” on the last question.
- Since this FMP is permanent, the system will be very efficient if it partitions the entire set of registrants into a smaller groups of compatible FMPs.
- You can imagine this as a giant university where an entrance test will determine which room number you’ll attend class. Every male in that room is compatible with every female and vice-versa.
- The eHarmony patent demonstrates the term “compatible” as two people (1) with a high “couple satisfaction index” and (2) who each have high “individual satisfaction indices” (See Dyadic Adjustment Scale). “Data for the user and data for the selected candidate is compared to approximate the satisfaction that the user would have in a relationship with the candidate.”3
12% to 20% of profiles are rejected at the end of the questionnaire. “One of the requirements for successful matching is that participants fall within certain defined profiles.” This is exactly those registrants that have low individual satisfaction indexes (see Dyadic Adjustment Scale).
Non-paying members get no more than ten active matches. “You have reached our 10 person match limit for non-paying members. To receive more matches: … either [communicate] with your matches or [close] those that are not of interest.”
- So, in theory, once they get ten, non-paying members who never return are effectively out of the candidate pool. That is, until one of those ten matches close the match.
Ten to fifteen thousand registrants join per day. So that means between 8 to 13 thousand candidates after eH rejects the 12% to 20%.
New registrants are assessed against the entire membership the day they joined. “Several thousand people join eHarmony each day and our matching system evaluates each one of them within 24 hours to see if they are a great match for you.”
- You can imagine this in our earlier university analogy as when a new person enters one of the classrooms, the class monitor there does a rollcall of those of the opposite gender in that class who mutually fit this new person’s Match Settings. There’s a maximum of five matches made to this new person.
- The statement “our matching system evaluates each one of them within 24 hours” commits eHarmony only to run searches for the 8 to 13 thousand new registrants every day. That’s only 8 to 13 thousand rollcalls. Since five is the maximum matches, that amounts to only up to 60,000 matches.
- Side note: As far as we can tell, nothing commits eHarmony to run this matching process automatically to match existing members against other existing members. Nothing.
eHarmony has 3 million paying members, as of June 2006. 60,000 matches divided by 3 million is 0.02.
Conclusion: (Just the facts, dear…) Assuming:
- all new registrants get five matches,
- all non-paying existing members are full with their ten,
- all paying members have the most loose Matching Settings, and
- we rely only on the daily computer process
There’s only a 2% chance you will get one match, and a 1% chance you’ll get two, 0.67% to get three, and so on.
Are you happy now you got three?
Visit our eHarmonipedia category for related and similar articles.
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Notes:
- Watch out for future articles explaining further how the matching process works, as documented by the eHarmony patent.
- Until we discuss it in a eHarmony Blog issue, please look up Dyadic Adjustment Scale in your favorite web search engine.
- See also our article on Matching Myths, coming very soon.
We’re all Individuals, so the one size fits all approach is basically a waste of time. I bet if the matching system gave us some more control and didn’t make such assumptions, people would use their time more efficiently.
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