The E Harmony Crapshoot
EHarmony is a crapshoot. Probably significantly more a crapshoot for someone my age, but still a crapshoot for anybody who gets on it. Is it something special, something far better than Plenty of Fish, Singles Net, True Beginnings, or any other dating site? Not really. And heres why.
First, the lengthy set of questions you answer to create your profile is subject to your ability to be truthful about yourself. Generally, these questions are answered by a biased person, yourself. You are biased because you have a goal in mind. A goal to obtain a certain type of person as your date and eventually mate. You are a biased observer.
Secondly, I have found that the vast majority of people (at least women) on EHarmony do not make their profile available to EHarmony matches (that’s people that EHarmony thinks you would match up with well based on your answers to their hundreds of questions.) Now if people do not show their profile to prospective mates, then how do they know their prospective mate is really compatible? All they have to go on is the About Me Section, a short narrative you write about yourself and have complete control over, including editing it to lie about yourself, something it is harder to do when answering the personality/psychological questions that go into your profile.
Third, the vast majority of women on this site are Christian and their About Me information generally reflects traditional family values and morals that form the basis of the Christian religion after Jesus Christ, i.e. the new testament. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but since there is no living Jesus Christ in politics, economics, or the real world, you shouldn’t be looking for him on a dating site.
Fourth, the Guided Communications process used by EHarmony is lengthy, convoluted, passive not interactive, and serves one purpose, which is to help people find excuses not to date somebody. It makes it possible for them to seek out somebody who is perfect in their mind, and I emphasize in their mind, because there is no interactive two way back and forth communications until you go through several rounds of this. This includes a first set of multiple choice questions, a list of can’t stand must haves of your mate (again canned from a list), a second set of multiple choice questions, and a final set of narrative questions with narrative answers. At no point is either party asked to actually comment on the answers of their prospective mate or engage in any dialogue with them about their answers. In short there is no real dialogue or interaction as there is with other dating sites which allow chat, IM, email, and other open forms of communications.
Fifth, people take forever to respond and sometimes, very frequently and by a large percentage of members, they close the relationship with you with no reason, no narrative reason, just a simple click in a check box. The vast majority choose “Other” as their reason, when there are listed a large number of better more truthful reasons in EHarmony’s list of reasons for closing.
Sixth, people will close at all points in the process, even closing just prior to starting open communications, i.e. after the guided communications process is over and it is time to go to open communications.
Seventh, EHarmony offers something called FastTrack. In this method, you start out by writing about yourself in detail and so does your prospective mate. At any point in this process you or they can choose to go to a secure telephone call or open up communications. But nobody ever does this. I have tried this and it generally ends up in closure.
Now I know what you are thinking. The problem is with me not EHarmony. There is something in what I am writing or in my personality that is turning off prospective mates. You be the judge. I have posted my EHarmony profile here for all to see. I have nothing to hide. You have also read my About Me info. On MySpace. And I have posted my About Me info. That I put on EHarmony. If you see things you think are a major turnoff, comment on them here in this blog.
Now on the why EHarmony is still in the end just a crapshoot like a lot of other dating sites. I mean in the end dating does not begin until you actually date someone. All of this other stuff is merely an attempt to find someone you want to date.
O.K. If you use a radius of 100 miles, and get an average of 5 matches a day, that is 1,825 matches in a year, assuming this rate can be kept up all year, but it won’t be kept up all year because as soon as you are paid up with EHarmony, you will find a slowdown in matches, down to one or two per day. Before you even get to that point however, EHarmony will expand your radius way beyond the distance you specified for where the women live. In my case, I live in northern Illinois and EHarmony has given me matches in Tennessee , Pennsylvania , Minnesota , and Canada Canada
Now if the number of women viewing your profile is about 1 a day, and they are all unique (some are anonymous, so it is hard to tell), you are getting 365 unique views of your profile per year.
365 views divided by 1,825 matches means that after viewing your picture, you are getting a return of 20%, i.e. 20% of those who see your picture go on to read your profile.
Now I have had a total of 7 women who viewed my profile and who wanted to communicate. If this is typical, and assuming I have been on EHarmony for 6 weeks, we calculate the following.
6 weeks times 7 days per week equals 42 days.
42 days times 5 matches per day equals 210 matches so far
210 matches times 20% that go on to view my profile equals 42 who have viewed my profile.
7 women out of 42 want to communicate means 16.6% want to communicate.
At this rate, for a full year of EHarmony, I will have 60 women who want to communicate. I do not have enough data yet to extrapolate how many of these will end up as dates. Some unknowns are:
Average time from viewing request for communications to viewing profile
Average time from viewing profile to decision to communicate.
Number of those who will actually communicate.
Number of those who will eventually close.
Number of those who will leave the whole thing open without making any decision.
This is for the direction of women wanting to communicate with me.
Update: After a solid 3 months on EHarmony, I have had about ten women who have communicated with me and vice versa. This is irregardless of who started communications. Thus, the figure for a year is down to 40 per year.
In the reverse direction, I have initiated communication with 50 women out of 210, or 25%, of which 3 of them have communicated back.. These are women who may or may not have viewed my profile, and may or may not have viewed my picture.
These are not really good results and on analysis it looks like there are two problems, the picture FIRST and the PROFILE second. If they don’t look at the picture, they will not look at the profile of course. And I am pretty sure many of these women are just itching to find something they don’t like in my profile. More on that later.
Other potential problems in getting hits on the picture and profile
My age 56.
Distance from me.
My location is Northern Illinois in a conservative area with at most 250,000 people within 30 miles distance from me.
The mere fact that each one of these women is also probably getting 5 or more matches per day meaning they are not looking at all of them.
People are busy and if they only look at this once a week, they are probably playing catchup and may not look at all of the pictures.
To a certain extent, if both men and women are looking for younger mates then it follows that:
A women in the same age bracket as me is looking for men in their early 50s or 40s.
If a certain percentage of my matches are in their early 50s or 40s and they are also looking for younger mates, it makes the whole process almost impossible.
Women who have closed on me have stated reasons for closure as:
Distance is too great.
Pursuing other relationship.
There are just too many things going on in my life right now.
I just don’t feel the chemisty is there
Other.
Other is the most frequently stated reason for closure when a woman closes early in communication or without communicating at all. When women change their mind at some point during the communications process, the reasons change to “Pursuing other relationships” and “There are just too many things going on in my life right now.” Or “I just don’t feel the chemistry is there.” This answer is very interesting because it is meaningless. It is meaningless because so far all you have done is answer multiple choice questions and traded your and her list of Must haves and Can’t stands. Chemistry is emotional. Emotions are something you get by talking to somebody, seeing them, conversing with them, listening to them, exchanging body language, none of which occurs until you get to open communications. So how can anybody say “I just don’t feel the chemistry is there!?” prior to this point?
The vast majority of women on E-Harmony are Christians, so it is best if you are a Christian. I am not. I am spiritual but not religious. In my experience, a small minority of women will communicate with men who are “spiritual but not religious” but will not generally go through the entire process to open communications. Open communications is the last step where you actually talk by phone or email with your match.
Now if you use guided communications, and the vast majority of women want this, you go through a multi-step process of back and forth answers to questions, submitting your must haves can’t stands, and questions requiring a narrative response. Since each side has to do this, the process can take 2 months from the initial start of communications to reaching open communications. Because many people on EHarmony have short 3 month subscriptions and don’t renew them, there is a high frequency of occurrences of getting to open communications only to find out that your match is no longer available on EHarmony. Often, this happens before you get to open communications.
A surprisingly large percentage of women do not give you their picture even if you have started communications and requested their picture. I have been in communications with women who did not give me their picture until open communications started. (I have so far only had two women who advanced all the way to open communications. One of them has not initiated open communications, and the other one closed the relationship saying she had too many things going on in her life right now. Important point: If you start the guided communications process, then the final decision to start open communications is in the other persons court, i.e. in my case, the woman. At that point, I can not start open communications. She has to. This is just how this system works.)
The vast majority of women on EHarmony do not want anybody to see their personality profile. Actually all of them so far, out of well over 200 matches. I have made my personality profile available to all women from the very start. This is really kind of interesting because it means there are a very large number of women on EHarmony who go through the process of establishing their personality profile by answering all of EHarmonys hundreds of personality profiling questions, but basically after all of this effort which is supposed to ensure you find the most compatible mate and they find the most compatible mate, these women without a profile and a picture want to know about you but really don’t want you to know anything about them (other than what they state about themselves in the About me section) until you reach open communications.
With all of this crazy game playing and role playing going on via back and forth questions, it gives both parties plenty of time to think up excuses why they should not communicate with the other person. Chemistry can break down before it ever gets a chance to get going.
It is no wonder that EHarmony has not been endorsed by any psychological organization or magazine or journal. In fact the only dating/relationships site endorsed and recommend by Popular Psychology magazine is True Beginnings. The way it functions is the antithesis of EHarmony, but it costs much more, i.e. $50 per month or $600 per year. But maybe that’s because it works. Anyway, you will all know soon because after Phase 2 of my adventure with EHarmony, if it doesn’t work, I may switch to True Beginnings, AFTER I rant and rave at EHarmony (hope that isn’t necessary of course) to get at least part of my money back.
So what is Phase II with EHarmony? I went to an Aveda salon and got my hair changed to have several highlights put in it (changed its color), got my hair cut, got my eyebrows changed as well, and got a facial. I have posted new pictures on EHarmony using my new look and to top it all off, contact lenses. Having established just how fickle, unstable, unsure, stout Christian, you pick the characteristics these EHarmony women are, I now want to see how vain they are. So in my next update, I will let you know if this changed anything. Of course, since EHarmony has already cut down my matches, the results will be lower in any case.
Update: I posted the pictures about 9 days ago. Since then, I have had four women initiate communications with me. In the previous 3 ½ months with EHarmony, I had a total of 3 women initiate communications with me. I have communicated back with 5 of these seven women. I closed at a very early stage on the other two. Two of the women and I are at the final stage before open communications but they have not made the jump to open communications. One closed on me just prior to open communications, and the others are in various stages of communication.
No comments:
Post a Comment