eHarmony Blog.com

So, after 1.5 years of being on the service, I finally succumbed and decided to retake the questionnaire.

I had several motivations for retaking the test:

• Matches weren’t going anywhere. I was hoping that maybe I would tap a new local pool of members that I wasn’t being matched to.
• eHarmony CS reps kept reminding me it had “been a while” every time I sent a scammer their way.
• I changed quite a bit in the past few months. I had a significant “awakening” in many aspects of my life: spiritual, vocational and a general change in how I view the world.

As I filled in the questionnaire, it didn’t feel like I was answering differently. I tended to go with my gut reaction, just clicking what first came to mind. As I completed each page, I had this uneasy feeling that I had to go back and “check” my answers (I do the same for all tests that I take, thoroughness is just in my nature). I recall only moving things up or down one point and I changed very few items drastically. I think it took me several hours the first go-round, spread over two days [I now recall they mucked up my account and I had to take the test, TWICE when I first opened up my account]. This (third) time, thankfully, only took about 45 minutes to one hour.

As suggested, I copied all my preferences and my profile before having my account reset. It was much easier since the profile free-entry fields were a quick cut and paste or referencing which selections I made. I recently rewrote my profile to reflect my current state of mind, so no revision of those items were necessary.

A note on this: your photos and must-haves and can’t stands are retained. Most of the other preferences are overwritten but a few are saved (location/distance, I think). I did end up reviewing my MH/CS lists and have changed them as well to reflect the “new me”

So, what was the end result? Was it worth it? Does the personality profile actually reflect who you are and your state of mind?

I saved my personality and compatibility profile (which you no longer get with the new test/results) before requesting the reset and finally got a chance to quickly look over and compare them.

The printout style is exactly the same: they are both around 10 pages and use the same graphics and text. [I think I saved my profile reports right after I took the test in '06, I'll have to dig for that and see if differs.]

So, did all the changes in my life show up? Yes! Of the five areas, three changed from the wishy-washy “sometimes this, sometimes that” to one of the extremes. I think that may partly have to do with how I think about myself and how I reported it on the profile (being more optimistic overall). To be completely honest, I think that no matter what, there is always a little bit of you trying to skew the test to finding a partner more to what you think your liking is and that may play into things.

Overall, I think it was good to think about those things again and take an updated inventory of who I am. Some of the new matches I’ve gotten seem to be more representative of what I’m looking for but almost all of them are still located in terms of airplane trips (like most of my previous matches). What I was really hoping for, was to tap into a new pool of matches that live closer and that did not happen (and may just have to do with living in North Carolina).

I’m not so sure how well an investment of my time it was since my days are numbered on my subscription (now less than a week). I’m trying to be objective and positive about eHarmony but I am skeptical about how effective it is as a tool for my individual situation given the lack of results (matches that aren’t long-distance and/or lack of interest from those the few that are close). One has to face facts that no matter how eager you are, it isn’t the easiest thing to grow relationship into a successful one if it starts long-distance. The eHarmony mantra is to look as far away as is reasonable. I’m not sure how valid an option it is, given that it isn’t a trivial thing to develop a lasting relationship with someone that lives close by.