E-Harmony is one of those "scientific" dating sites, promising results based on research. Signing up involves filling out a lengthy questionnaire. Once you've filled out the form, you get a personality profile. You're not allowed to go back and change the answers, since they don't want you to tweak the results. Interspersed within the personality questions are short-answer questions about your values and what you’re looking for in a mate. It can take up to 45 minutes to fill the whole thing out.
Once a potential match is made, there is a highly structured communication framework for you to get to know your match. It starts with the exchange of profiles, and is followed by 5 closed-ended (multiple choice) questions, progressing to a list of "Must Have" and "Can't Stand" qualities, and finally three open-ended (short answer) questions. After that, you can move a quasi-anonymous messaging system. At any time either person can put the match on hold, or just close it permanently.
The membership fee is high compared to other sites, but with the 12 month subscription they give a guarantee of at least 12 matches. You don't have to join up until you want to communicate with a match, but must become a member before communicating, regardless whether initiating communication or simply responding.
I interviewed M.R.P., a straight man in his mid-30s, in CA. He says, "I opted for the $99 for 3 months, followed by two months at ~$30/month. I got 12 matches within 2 weeks. In general, their system seems to do an excellent job of finding appropriate matches. I was searching for a straight woman for a long-term relationship, and I seem to have found one... though it's still too early in the relationship to tell if it's truly long-term."
E-Harmony is a heterosexual dating site which is geared toward finding romantic partners for a long-term relationship. There are no options for casual dating or sex, and there are no options for same-sex searches. "I felt vaguely uneasy about the exclusionary nature of their service," says M.R.P. "Their justification is that they've based their matching algorithms are based on studying heterosexual relationships, and they don't have data or a model for other types of relationships. I suspect they won't ever expand their service to same-sex relationships, since one of their key demographics appears to be conservative Christians."
"The interface has a lot of shortcomings: menus can be hard to find, there are numerous limitations that seem arbitrary, and often information that was available before suddenly becomes inaccessible once a certain stage has been reached. Other clunky features of the site: They're apparently having growing problems, and the site is often slow, and sometimes just stops working suddenly. There seem to be arbitrarily short limits on the answers to questions, but no way to tell if you have exceeded that limit except by submitting the answer. All in all, I lost so many messages that I began to compose all messages in another program and just paste them in when I was done. Buttons are sometimes placed inconsistently, so if you forget which page you are on, and reflexively hit a link based on its position on the page, you may hit a link that does something you hadn't intended. Certain options are buried, and it can take a while to find out where to set your preference for when photos are displayed, your geographical constraints (only show me matches within 150 miles from home), etc. There is no way to close a match from the open communication system; you need to go 'review' the initial stages to find the close button, etc."
M.R.P. says, "It took me 45-60 minutes to fill out the web-forms, though some might need less.
"Even though the interface should be both more intuitive and more stable, the ability to fine-tune the kinds of people it matches you with is fairly powerful. I think it helps to filter out a lot of people who might be 'compatible' in some abstract sense, but wouldn't interest you for other reasons (smoker, doesn't want kids, etc.). Intelligence, curiosity and education were three key qualities I was looking for, and among the first 20 matches I received, there were 9 lawyers, 3 doctors, 2 schoolteachers, 2 people with Ph.D.s, and 4 doctoral candidates."
“During my 5 months, I got about 250 matches, about a dozen of which made it to open communication. Of those, I felt highly compatible with 6 or 7, though I only actually met 2 in person before I felt comfortable becoming exclusive with one. I suspect that my experience wasn't typical. I think I got so many matches for two reasons. First, I'm in location with relatively high population density (the SF Bay Area), and secondly I'm a man. It seems to be that the site would appeal more to women than men. But what I was looking for in a woman was probably not typical either: Intelligence, curiosity and education. I didn't particularly care about ethnicity, religion, job, physical beauty, etc."
I also received these comments on the site, from an anonymous female: "I received about five matches every few days. Most of them never responded for the request to communicate (I found out that so many people do the test and fill out the forms without paying so they cannot respond to you.) I cancelled after two months. I did communicate with some people, but the conversations just fizzled. I also found that the men were really quite sexist and not any different than the men I meet IRL. I suppose I was delusional. I thought I would meet a different kind of person through eharmony. I don't know what I was thinking. Also, the whole notion of the personality test was odd. If the questions indicated compatibility, hmm. I was matched with tons of military men... Matched with ME??????? It made no sense... Also, the men I encountered were actually more controlling than others I have met. Here is my theory... since they are essentially putting out a want-ad for a woman, they assume she is an employee and it feels like an interview and not a conversation. Guess I wasn't cut out for the on-line stuff..."
