eHarmony Blog.com

(Copied in entirety with permission from Doubting Moab, dated Tuesday 12 February 2008. Thanks, Mike!)

Shortly after my divorce I decided to join eHarmony. I wanted to date around and as a busy forty year old guy in software, there just were not that many options available. I don’t go to bars and anyway just “picking up” women seemed so “90s” not to mention invasive, presumptive and kind of rude. So, I decided to do the online dating thing. I immediately paid for a year’s subscription to eHarmony – something like $350 bucks. Let’s see what the 29 dimensions have in store for me, I figured.

All in all, I was a member with eHarmony for a year and a half and it was a mixed experience. First, I’ll tell you I did not meet my fiancee on their site, but rather on okCupid, a free dating site that a few of my RL friends were on and which I joined just for a lark. A comparison of these two sites is in order as their approaches are very different, but that’s a topic for another post.

First, the good about eHarmony: most notably, I met some amazingly interesting women – intellectual, strong and confident. I decided to casually date about six women over the course of the year and a half of membership and whether that’s worth the nearly $500 I put out there, is really a judgment call. I did meet six women who fit, more or less, the basic idea of what I was looking for – successful, confident, left-leaning and attractive to me.

I also think that your early forties is a great time to be a single guy online. There are a lot of women who have decided not to put up with the crap that their lazy, ignorant and unsupportive (to hear them tell it) ex-husbands have been giving them. In short, there are a lot of single women online and a lot fewer “good catches” according to what I have heard. Yes, I polled nearly every woman I spoke with online about this so I could get a clearer picture of what they were experiencing. I must have spoken with a hundred or more women over that year and a half of online dating.

In short, my experience of meeting interesting women with eHarmony may be more a function of my age and eligibility, my educational level and communication skill than anything that eHarmony did. After all, I was matched with, literally, thousands of people. Frequently I was receiving 6 or more new matches every day. It was not unusual for me to have twenty people with whom I was in staged communication and a hundred or more new matches. It was, at times, a bit overwhelming. And you have to think, with those kind of numbers, there has to be some hits, right? Right. If I dated 6 of them, isn’t that just about a .6% success rate? Is that worth $500? Perhaps it would have been worth it if there was any chemistry to those matches, as it was, it was interesting but not really worth the $$. Anyway – the success rate could have gone up significantly if I had been more able to manage the large volume of communications efficiently and if I had been less picky.

Ok, so that’ s the good. The bad is, in my opinion, quite bad. I, personally, would never join eHarmony again. I prefer the style of okCupid and the control it gives you over your matches.

First, let’s think about what eHarmony is doing – they say they help you find your “soulmate” and they use “scientific” methods based on “29 dimensions.” A recent letter in Skeptic magazine points out that Neil Clark Waren, the founder of eHarmony has never published anything about relationships or compatibility matching in a peer-reviewed journal in his entire career – indeed his company is very close-mouthed about how they do their matching. As a member for awhile, let me assure you, it’s less about the 29 dimensions and far more about matching on race, income level, education level and religion. Oh, and sheer amazing amount of women they threw at me. So, really, I saw about four “dimensions” of compatibility matching and a lot of opportunity. Let me tell you, even a forty year old geek can find someone to like if he gets to pick out of thousands. Still, though, I never found that elusive chemistry.

Secondly, eHarmony controls all your matches. They send you lists of people they think match with you and you can not communicate with anyone else. Ever. That’s it. You only get to decide if you like the people that eHarmony thinks you might like. And, as I’ve pointed out, they didn’t do such a great job with the matching, .6% for $500 is pretty lame.

Additionally, the website is poorly designed to handle bulk administration. For example, at one point, I had five hundred women with which I was no longer or never interested in communicating. I wanted to “close” these matches but had to do so individually – click on this person, click on why I didn’t want to communicate with them, click confirm. Three clicks for five hundred women. It literally took me three days to close them all. For the love of sanity, could they just have one “select all” button? Also, at some point during the closing all these matches, I thought – is eHarmony devaluing my relationships with others? Am I treating these women, all single, all sincerely looking for love – their soulmate – properly? Am I closing out my soulmate due to sheer communication overload?

Can a website created by an evangelical Christian for the purposes of finding your soulmate really be supportive of relationships and people if they inundate you with thousands of matches and then force you, through their poorly designed interface, to treat them all like so much digital text? These are people – not just random strings of text and images on the screen. These people get a message saying you closed them. How does that rejection play out for them? Many times I thought it would have been much better if we never been matched or were able to preview each other before the match actually took place. Some websites do this – but not eHarmony.

The most evil thing that eHarmony does, in my opinion, is inflate its numbers. I can not tell you how many times I’ve tried to communicate with a woman on eHarmony and did not get a response. My policy was to talk with everyone (or as many people as I could) and very often I would get no reply. Why is this? Am I that hideous? As it turns out, probably not. eHarmony will add you to their matching database whether you are a member or not. If you try out their personality profile (this is why it’s free!) your profile is added to the database. If you cancel your membership, your profile is still in their database. eHarmony is artificially inflating its numbers in order to give you a better chance you’ll find someone attractive when you browse (for free) and convince you to join.

Recently, I went back and logged into eHarmony – interesting that I can go look at my matches without a subscription, no doubt trying to tempt past users back into using the service, and to my surprise I had new matches and some were trying to communicate with me. Sure, I stopped getting my email notices when my subscription expired but those users – no let’s be real here – these women who are sincerely looking for a mate are trying to communicate with me and they are not getting a response. This, to me, seems to be a very deceitful practice on eHarmony’s part. These women don’t know I’m happily engaged and will never respond to them – just as I never know about the women with which I was matched. It makes me wonder if eHarmony is about finding matches for people or if they are really just about the money. Don’t get me wrong, though, there is nothing wrong with making a profit, but there is a problem when that profit is made at the expense of people’s emotions – taking advantage of their loneliness and desire for a relationship.

One last thing – the whole “soulmate” thing that eHarmony yammers endlessly about – this really annoys me. Everyone I’ve dated from that site agrees that presenting a service this way puts far too much pressure on new relationships. Being rational and sane, both I and the women I went out with were interested in meeting to see if there were common interests and chemistry with a possibility of moving into a dating relationship. The soulmate approach ruins everything if you don’t nip it in the bud. Other, more casual sites, are careful to avoid this – although many have a meat-market approach that is very unappealing to me.

So, to sum up:

The good:

1. eHarmony let me meet some interesting women whom I wouldn’t have met in my normal circle of friends.
2. It’s good to be 40, male, fairly well off and reasonably fit and online, reasonably polite and educated.

The bad:

1. The matches were not scientific and there was never a feeling of “chemistry” with any of the matches.
2. There were too many matches – in the end it felt devaluing to the potential relationships and people involved in them. People ended up getting treated as objects on a list and not as individuals with feelings, interests and needs.
3. The interface is poorly designed to handle the quantity of matches they are sending out. If they had fewer matches, the interface is sufficient.
4. There is no way to browse potential matches. What you get is what you get – like it or not.
5. eHarmony artificially inflates the numbers in their database – making up “pretend” matches by matching you with inactive profiles and profiles that are “trial members.”
6. All matches are under the pressure of being the “soulmate” match for you.
7. Mr. Waren has never published anything about relationship studies. Does he really know what he’s doing?
8. Oh. Yeah. It’s damn expensive.

There are many options out there for online dating. Personally, as I mentioned earlier, I preferred okCupid because it was casual, more chatty and friendly, allowed one to browse profiles and decide for yourself if you were possibly interested in someone. There was no pretension about “soulmates” or anything. It was just very simple. Like meeting people ought to be, in my opinion.

Addendum:

I wanted to point out that the many women I’ve spoken with about eHarmony indicate they were getting far fewer matches and of far less quality than I was receiving. I think this is a function of a few things: I was searching through the entire United States, I did not limit by religion or race or income level. I did not match with smokers, though, so that would deny me about 30% of the population, if you believe in statistics.

I think that eHarmony had, at the time I was a member, far more women than men because women may find, according to my fiancee, a sense of safety in the controlled communication process whereas I’ve heard men complain about the slow pace of communication.

Also, I would like to note that though I fell head-over-heels with my fiancee on the first date and we decided to get engaged in less than four months, we were never matched together on eHarmony. We did find each other on okCupid, where I was allowed to read her profile and decide for myself this was someone I was interested in meeting. If eHarmony is scientific, they do pretty bad science.