Individuals are carefully matched using eHarmony’s patented Compatibility Matching System. You are matched by 436 questions designed to select individuals who share a deep level of compatibility to you which gives a visual of how many you have answered and how far you still must go to finish. You find out a lot about yourself before you even pay one dollar for the service. The questions are in various categories, from values, character, and intellect to sense of humor passion and goals. By answering these questions to get your matches, you know that eHarmony has a deep commitment to having you succeed in finding the love of your life.

Members cannot browse for matches like many of the other dating websites. You will not be able to see someone’s profile unless you are matched by the compatibility model. The model matches members based on if their profiles are similar to those of married couples who are very satisfied and report being married to the love of their life. They offer “guided” communication, helping you to break the ice and learn basic things about the other person. eHarmony’s unique process of getting acquainted begins with a series of questions sent via email. It is structured so that members get to know each other slowly and progressively. If your member match does not answer the questions, you will not be able to continue the communications.

eHarmony service costs more than other dating sites because its users want more than just a date. eHarmony members are very serious about meeting someone special. They pay:

• $49.95 for a one-month subscription
• $99.95 for a three-month subscription
• $149.95 for a six-month subscription
• $249.95 for an entire year of membership

The price is not for the faint at heart. eHarmony members make a true commitment to finding their perfect match. The cost may appear high on the surface, however you have to compare track records. eHarmony has the highest rate of matching now married couples who used a website to find each other. If you are truly looking for the Mr. or Ms. Right, this is the right place for you.

The integrity of eHarmony shows in its commitment to its members. During ad campaigns, the couples are true eHarmony members who met and married. eHarmony has even partnered with Tiffany & Co. Each eHarmony couple that notifies the company of their marriage will receive a Tiffany bowl as a wedding gift. They have found a formula match people well because they know what makes a good relationship work.

eHarmony – Free Personality Profile

You know, things don’t always work out the way you want them to. I was scheduled to get married three years ago, but we called it off two months before the wedding. I had not dated since that time, not because I’m bitter, but because I wanted to utilize my ‘me’ time. Now I’m ready again, but I didn’t really want to go out to the clubs like I used to, so I decided to give eHarmony a try.

Initially, I signed up for eHarmony for three months. During that time I received over 300 respectable looking matches. Of those, I met two – I’m a little picky and prefer those geographically close. eHarmony has been a great tool that has made me excited about a relationship again. I was afraid the process was going to overwhelm me, but it’s quite manageable, fun and non-invasive.

My three months then expired, so I extended it — All though, there’s a little more to this story. Before extending my membership I decided to check out one of the other popular online dating services. Below is an actual excerpt of an e-mail I sent to an eHarmony match I received days after extending my membership. It’s my first email to him following the ‘Guided Communication’ stage.

…It looks like we’ve made it into the communications wilderness now – HA. It’s no longer guided. Actually, I think the process is pretty cool. In relation to it, I have a small secret to tell you. I may have a slight advantage?! You may find this interesting … I joined eHarmony 3 months ago for the first time, which just recently expired. I liked it, but a friend kept harping re Match.com. Sooooo, before I decided to extend the EH plan, I checked it out. I entered a small amount of criteria and up popped over 100 guys, pictures and all. I looked at most, but then determined it seemed too much like a free for all. I‘m not a member, but I’m still getting faces e-mailed to me every other day. Please note that I don’t want to demean it in any way — It appears to have been great for many people, and that’s cool!!!

Anyway, I’ll move on to the juicy part… So I ultimately decided to extend the eHarmony plan. A day or two later I received your match. I thought, hhhhmmm, he looks really familiar, have I seen him around the city? It was tripping me out. I thought that I knew you from somewhere, but then it finally dawned on me (which I was glad to get to the bottom of it). I saw and read about you on Match :) I had to go back and shuffle through the faces to confirm, there you were. I remembered having an interest in you, but I wasn’t going to join, so it became moot. Then a couple days later you get dropped off into my shopping cart – HA. I don’t know why, but it cracks me up to refer to it that way. Anyway, I guess I’ve just read a little more about you, that’s all. I think I would want to know this story :)  Anyway, hello. Nice meet you through correspondence. I suppose the next step is to meet in person – sounds fun. Rather than talk on the phone, I’d like to make a plan to meet in person, if that will work for you?…

Well, that’s it. The story above tells why I’m still on eHarmony today. And coincidentally, the very day I write this, I’ll be meeting the recipient of the above for the first time at a local restaurant. I’m excited. You may want to hear more later…

eHarmony – Free Personality Profile

The famous eHarmony TV commercial with Dr. Neil Clark Warren claims that you will be matched based on 29 dimensions of compatibility. Nobody knows what crazy algorithm they use to create matches, but they do require a great deal of information.

When you sign up for eHarmony you have to answer a questionnaire of what seems like a million questions. They ask you questions about your goals, interests, work life, family life, psychology, etc. The answers require you to rate yourself on a scale.

You also create your own profile including a picture. You can opt not to upload a picture, but 99.9% of potential dates will want to see a picture of you at some point in the communication process. One great feature is that you can set the visibility of your picture. For example, you can allow all potential matches to see your picture right away or wait until open communication.

Once you have waded through all the questions and set up your profile you are ready to go. eHarmony has a search button. Every time I clicked on it I would get a message that they couldn’t find any matches at that time. I believe this was because not many men had signed up for eHarmony in my area. (This was in 2004.) Or else my questionnaire determined that I was a complete freak!

With instant gratification down the toilet, I had to wait for eHarmony to send me matches. After a few days matches started to trickle in. Then the real fun began.

When you get a match eHarmony sends you an email that gives you the name of the potential match and essentially introduces you to each other. You can view their profile. If you think the guy is a total flake or not your type then you can “close” the match. You can close a match at anytime during the process. When you close a match eHarmony has a list of reasons you can state as to why you closed communication. I’m still looking for the “It’s not you, it’s me” reason. Or you can use the reason of “Other” and leave the match wondering what the heck they did wrong.

Both parties have the option of beginning communication. In a nutshell the communication process is a set of multiple choice/open ended questions followed by likes/dislikes followed by open communication email through the eHarmony website. Up until this point your match never knows your last name, email, or phone number.

During the last stage of open communication you can set up a date, give them your real email address, and/or phone number. It’s up to you.

I used eHarmony off and on from 2004 to 2006. I went on about 15 first dates. 13 of those first dates ended right there. So why did those first dates not lead to more? The major problem I found with eHarmony was that we matched “on paper,” but when we met the chemistry was just not there.

Typically, my email inbox would ding with a lovely message that eHarmony had found another match for me to review and wanted to make an introduction. I would eagerly look at the potential guy’s profile. If his profile totally blew me away then I would start the communication process. However, most of the time I waited for the guy to start communication.

We’d answer one another’s multiple choice/open ended questions, likes/dislikes, and then send messages through “open communication.” We’d exchange our real email addresses and send multiple messages. We’d find out that we had similar interests, sense of humor, and background.

Then we’d be brave and set up a time to meet for lunch, dinner, or a drink after work. I would be excited and think that I could be on the next eHarmony commercial. Then I would meet the guy and quickly realize that my 15 minutes of fame was not going to happen anytime soon.

Unfortunately, usually the guy would be attracted to me and I didn’t feel the same or vice versa. Once in awhile there would be no attraction on both parties. This was very frustrating because we seemed like soul mates if you looked at our life resumes. There would also be guys who must have lied on their questionnaire because they acted completely different than what their profile stated.

eHarmony wasn’t a total loss though because the other 2 first dates resulted in a few more dates and a three month relationship. eHarmony is worth a try, but don’t expect it to give you a relationship like the one you see on their TV commercials unless you don’t care about attraction. Plus, the 29 dimension questionnaire is not fool proof because some people lie on it or give answers of the person they wish to be and not the person that they really are. –Heather

eHarmony – Free Personality Profile

It has to be a little weird, right, talking to somebody a computer has already determined could be your perfect match.

I’m one of those people who always want to challenge the phrasing of the question — this was true in school too. Yes, I will complain that there aren’t enough options even when “none of the above” is one of them. I always want to explain my answer. I want to narrate. I was good at essays, and especially term papers. Multiple choice tests just frustrated me, because I was always sure they’d been written badly. (Later in life, I was a teacher for a few years, and I’ll let you in on a secret: many of those multiple choice tests ARE written badly.)

In the self-description sections of eHarmony’s lengthy questionnaire, I kept running into that problem. These are the questions where they ask whether a certain statement or description of you is true or false, and HOW true, HOW false. Does “dominant” generally describe me, on a scale of 1 to 7? Well, the answer in the bedroom isn’t the same as the answer on the street, you know? Am I frugal? I drive a car with good gas mileage and I make almost all my food from scratch, but I own more than 400 DVDs. I wanted to narrate. I wanted to write essays. But you can’t have a system like this unless it’s working with quantifiable data.

Other questions were very simple to answer, though — yes, it’s important for me to spend time creating things; yes, I enjoy meeting and talking to new people. There were enough clear-cut questions that I kept going.

Now, eHarmony has prepared for my difficulty, sort of. If your answers are too inconsistent, they will reject you. That’s right. They get the most press for refusing to match same-sex couples — eHarmony is an explicitly marriage-minded service that was designed to reduce the divorce rate by creating stronger marriages, between people who won’t get sick of each other after two years, and its founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren is an evangelical Christian who used to be a dean at a seminary school. Warren claims his theories, his math, just doesn’t take homosexuality into account, and that no moral judgment is being made. Me … well, I’m straight, so I decided not to worry about it at the moment.

But eHarmony’ll reject you for other reasons: for being under 21, for being already married (I assume this only matters because of people with open marriages and people who are separated but not yet divorced), and for having been divorced more than twice. Each of those sort of makes some sense. I’m sure that divorce one pisses some people off, but this isn’t a personalized service: if you’ve been divorced three times and you’re back on the dance floor looking for love and need a boost like this to help you, maybe there’s a problem that goes beyond what algorithms can do for you. Maybe there isn’t, but it doesn’t seem any worse than my car insurance going down just because I had a birthday. Stats are stats — Geico’s banking on my unlikelihood of being in an accident, and eHarmony’s banking on their ability to find me a woman.

Once you’re in — and most people do get in, from what I understand — you fill out a few more things (“Must Haves”/”Can’t Stands”) and then you get your matches. I’ll get to mine in a minute. You can’t get more matches as long as you have unexamined ones sitting in your metaphorical inbox, so from time to time someone will “close communication” with you even though you haven’t started communication yet — they’re just kicking you off the desk so they can see who’s next on eHarmony’s list for them.

Okay.

My eHarmony Matches

It’s weird to say that this is weird, but I’ll cut to the chase: all of my first matches were deeply religious black women.

Now, I don’t have any problem with that — either with the religiousness or with race (for the record, I’m white and identified myself as such). I expressed no race preference when asked. I expressed no religious preference when asked. I don’t remember the wording of the survey’s questions, but I would have identified myself as Christian, no particular denomination, moderate feelings — and I was asked if church-going was important to me, and I said gave it the lowest possible rating. Other than Christmas, I haven’t been to church in well over a decade.

All these women in my matches were black women who mentioned God or Jesus in some way, usually along the lines of “I am passionate about wanting to be the kind of wife God wants me to be.”

That’s fine … and I’m not saying these women don’t belong in my matches. What struck me was how many of them were! When all your matches have two things in common, you reasonably assume that the eHarmony system believes those two things are right for you. The system thinks I want a religious black woman.

After all the soul-searching I did through that eHarmony multiple choice questionnaire … all the hand-wringing over whether I wanted to answer “4″ or “5″ on a scale of 1 to 7 … they sure found a way to surprise me.

Is it the site’s quasi-religious origins, and early backing by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio show? Is the user base filled with devout Christians, so that these results say nothing about my questionnaire and simply speak to the pool? I don’t know. Even if that were the case … well, I feel like a jerk to keep bringing it up, but what’s with the race thing? I have no problem with dating black women, but when they’re the only options in my matches … it just feels like somebody is trying to tell me something.

So have I hit it off with any of these women? Well, that’s the thing, I haven’t coughed up the fees yet, which means I can look at my matches but I can’t communicate with anybody.

But if nothing else, the eHarmony site has made me think about what I’m looking for, and why I’m looking for it, to a much greater degree than other sites did.

My sensibility tells me that people on the Internet are like all people. You can just as easily get hurt by a shyster in your place of worship or the local country club as you can on the Internet. You simply have to apply the same rules of propriety in all places. The danger for you on the Internet is that you have the sensation of anonymity, and you may reveal more about yourself than you would at Ms. Pittypat’s Afternoon Tea. Just keep the rule that if you wouldn’t tell Ms. Pittypat, you ought to keep personal information – personal.

Different dating sites are designed around different romantic and social goals. Sites like Match.com, Yahoo Personals, and various cultural and lifestyle based Friend Finder sites are geared more towards casual dating and long term relationships. Sites like Chemistry.com’s and eHarmony.com seek to match partners based on compatibility with the specific end goal being marital or committed.

Although the eHarmony algorithm matches individuals based on personal traits, all online dating sites have a basic social networking profile that you are required to fill out to share your general likes and dislikes with potential romantic partners. A few tips; write your essay in a word processing program first and do a spelling and grammar check before you post it. Make sure your pictures are the same shape they will be displayed in. You can download Paint.Net or GIMP which are free open source photo editing programs. If you don’t have an office suite, try OpenOffice.org, an open source word processing (spreadsheet, database, and presentation) software suite that is free. Make sure that your pictures clearly show your face, and that one of them shows a full length picture. Present your best side of course. Perhaps display yourself in both dressy and casual ways, or participating in your favorite hobby.

You may be miserably shaking your head back and forth at the screen right now thinking it’s all well and good for me to tell you what tools to use to write your personality profile but what in the world do you say? Well, first of all, this is not a job interview so don’t talk about your work. YOU are NOT your work. Secondly, don’t say what you like to do DESCRIBE what you like to do and what it’s like to be in your company. What was your greatest “aha!” moment? Where did you go for vacation? What did you read that sparked a fire in your soul? How do you express affection? What do you really believe about love? What was the funniest moment of your life? The most embarrassing? The sexiest? The greatest gift given or received?

Your pictures should be recent. You do not want your date to think that you are the grandfather of the man she thought she was having coffee with. If your picture has more hair than you do, put it in an album, not eHarmony or any other online dating site. If you are ambivalent about dating someone, don’t bother them. Calling for 27 months and having three coffee dates does not a successful romance make; never mind the Pulitzer Prize winning short stories or poetry you inspired. If you aren’t interested, politely say so and move on. If one of your dates offers to prove his claim to a gargantuan phallys right then and there, call your best girlfriend with the Russian accent and have her say “Next!” to inspire you not to give up, there’s a decent date out there somewhere. She’s really good at that and the way she will laugh at THAT story is worth the humiliation of telling it.

But seriously, dating IS serious business. After all the psycho-babble is over, none of us really like to be alone. We all wish that we had that special one person that shared our view of the world, or better yet, created a better world with us. It sort of begs the question of maybe using one of the more “serious’ online dating sites will serve you better in your quest for your one true love?

Of all the dating sites available eHarmony touts that their psychometric test produces 29 points of compatibility that can be matched to create the greatest potential for a marital partner. While this may be true, their business practices may make it difficult to take advantage of their superior matching system. eHarmony provides its psychometric test for “free” to potential members and hopes that you will sign up for their upper tier $59.95 a month membership (most other sites charge $19.95 to $36.00 for similar services.) Purchasing multiple months can bring savings and occasionally you can find online coupons that will reduce the expense as well.

Once you’ve finished taking your test you are matched with other people, both members and non-members alike. Two non- members may be matched to seduce both people to join the service. But, if one takes the incentive and the other does not, then no communication is possible between the two. It’s conceivable that your opportunity for your one true love could be thwarted by this somewhat deceptive marketing practice. You could argue that it isn’t appropriate to match people with potential members without advising them that the party isn’t a member of eHarmony’s network. On the other hand, if you can find the love of your life for a combined $120, what’s to whine about? eHarmony and fate combined can make everything possible, nu?

In my personal experience with eHarmony I’ve had a number of matches but of perhaps 150 matches in the last three years I have only communicated with a hand full of people. Reasons for rejection abound, but the absolutely funniest one was from Warren in Atlanta. I am almost six feet tall, and Warren was about 5’6”. The reason he gave for not pursuing our perfect match, despite living in the same city was that “the distance between us is too great.” I absolutely howled with laughter on the other end of the monitor. I imagine we would laugh together over many things, but that six inch gap between us may as well be 14,000 miles. Unfortunately, I couldn’t retort “We’re all the same height lying down Darling.”

It’s easy to reject, it’s easy to imagine that the person you’re communicating with is someone much better than they actually are. What you learn the most about in this process is not another person. You learn more about yourself than you might imagine, and you come to realize the things that you want in another person much more acutely. You come to realize who you are now, and who you aspire to be through the process of preparing a profile about yourself and taking the myriad of tests available on all of these sites. You discover too the impediments that you have constructed in your life to prevent yourself from connecting to others. eHarmony or no eHarmony, I hope you learn how to become your best self and how to overcome the reasons you have for being alone in the first place, as it was after all, a choice.

Come back again for more of,

Liora!

http://www.eharmony.com