When you and your wife do a “Can This Marriage Be Matched?” experiment…

John Tierney of the New York Times, having his idea of fun and as a followup to his article earlier, put eHarmony to a test:

Now that a couple of hundred Lab readers have told their online matchmaking stories, let me tell you mine. After visiting the eHarmony Labs for my Findings column on matchmaking, I wondered if its algorithm would match me and my wife of 12 years, Dana. So we each registered separately with eHarmony and answered the 258 questions. We falsely said we were each divorced (because eHarmony doesn’t offer its service to people already married) and each childless, but otherwise we told the truth. …

… We each got a few more matches over the next couple of days, but not each other.1

Listen, everyone, when you and your partner do a “Can This Marriage Be Matched?” experiment, that is, you wonder if eHarmony’s algorithm would match you two, here’s a tip for you: Live somewhere isolated, like the Pitcairn Islands

Why? Because, in Tierney’s example, of eHarmony’s 19 million profiles, 510,000 of them are in New York City and 430 people join every day there, by our estimates. Why, for goodness’ sake, run the experiment there?

First of all, it’s unethical to put human subjects in a social/psychological experiment without their consent. It’s also rude. Your apologies are not accepted. You abused the service, Tierney. Buckwalter should have banned them from the site when he heard they did this.
There is a daily limit of seven matches a day. If you’re compatible with, say, 300 women in your metropolis and 2 more join every week, you need… uh… 43 days for your experiment. It’s foolish to publish the results of your experiment after a few days.
You’re testing whether the reagent matches two particular profiles. You’re not testing how many matches the reagent makes. So, the scientific way is to put those two profiles in isolation and run the experiment there. This is Laboratory Science 101, sir.

See also our earlier, funny, post: Would it be possible that you already married your eHarmony match?