Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Dating Services Part 1 - My Experience With eHarmony

In a post last week I did a little informal analysis on the top ten results returned by Google for the search term "single christian." I pointed out that of the top ten results, six were dating services. As promised, here are some experiences I've had with dating services.

eHarmony is one of the more widely advertised dating service. I was somewhat attracted to it for two reasons. They advertised that many of the members were Christian, and they also market a concept of matching based on 29 levels of compatibility. I decided to give it a shot.

The first thing I had to do was go through a battery of questionnaires. I put in my likes and dislikes. I answered a few general (one might say abstract) questions and formed a profile online. I think I uploaded a picture, but I don't remember for sure. I started to get a few matches, but each time I tried to do something other than look at the other person's profile, I was faced with a requirement that I become a paying subscriber of the site.

This wasn't anything new to me. I had already had experience paying for a dating service, so I elected to go with a reduced-price six-month subscription. I think it ran something like $150-180. Communicating with my matches was now possible.

It may have been possible to communicate, but it wasn't easy. Most people wouldn't respond to my communiqués. I'll write more about that in a minute. When a person would respond, it was always in a very strict, formal format imposed by eHarmony. First, you send a series of five questions to the other person. The other person can then select from a series of canned answers, or provide one of their own. You get the answers back, and if you want to proceed, you send another fairly strictly formatted communiqué, but I don't quite remember what it was. The other person responds, and if you still want to communicate, you proceed to "open communication."

Open communication is basically email through the eHarmony site. People are fairly well discouraged from communicating outside the realm of the auspices of eHarmony, but people do it (I did). This is where you are really supposed to get to know the other person, almost like going out on online dates. But all this is assuming you make it that far.

Two things happen quite often. First, if you make it to open communication, a lot of times you get turned off quickly based on... well.. sometimes nothing. I got a lot of "not interested" replies with the reason of "other." Ok, I acknowledge that this happens, and a lot of people don't want to be honest on why they want to end a communication. It's the second thing that happens often, however, that is the most frustrating.

The second thing that happens is that eHarmony matches you, a paying customer, with anyone that it feels you are compatible with. That includes a lot of non-paying members. Remember, earlier I said that non-paying members can't communicate. So what happens is that you, the paying customer, get matched with maybe ten people at a time, and only one responds. That one may or may not let you get past the strict, canned communication, and can at any time shut down the communication on a whim.

I paid for eHarmony for six months. During that time I had about a hundred or so matches, communicated with about twenty of them, and only had two make it to the point where we were communicating openly. Neither were local. One girl was in Wichita, KS, and the other was in Kansas City (I don't remember which state). The Kansas City girl I wasn't all that attracted to, but my desperation level was high enough that I didn't want to let go, but I did when I "met" the other girl.

The Wichita girl seemed like she was honestly interested in me, and I was in her. Heck, I was even planning on going on a trip up to Wichita to meet her in person at some point. Our communication eventually grew slower, and we ended up drifting apart for some time. Eventually I contacted her again, and she let me know that she was seeing someone from her past that was local, and that she was only on eHarmony to "check things out."

I abandoned eHarmony until one of my friends met his fiancé through the site. He suggested that I limit my matches to local people only. I set up my profile as he suggested. In two months I have had only one match on the site. I haven't paid, so I haven't lost anything.

So what do I think of eHarmony? I think it's a site designed to play on people's desperation and pocketbooks. They're not underhanded as far as I can tell, but they're definitely not up front about the way they do business. Everything I found out was only after experience and research. My conclusion? Save your money and go somewhere else.

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