E Harmony Exposed - The Great Dating Crapshoot

E Harmony Exposed – The Great Dating Crapshoot

When I joined E-Harmony a couple years ago, I got conned into believing all the hype on finding that special someone, that perfect ideal mate who has the same likes and the same can’t stands as me, absolute perfection; and they indicated they could accomplish this in record time to boot. The reality is quite different.

I started to write a blog that would explain why E-Harmony has not, yet, worked out for me and how vain and shallow some of the people were/are. I was going to use the statistics I gathered on myself and potential mates to demonstrate this. I was going to show that E-Harmony is really no more effective than your average free dating site, and in some ways, it is worse. I am still going to do this, but now within the context of a bigger picture of on-line dating which I was able to gather from a new major article in Scientific American.

When I read the article in SA, it confirmed everything I thought, everything that was happening to me, demonstrating everything that is wrong, not only with E-Harmony but with other similarly based on-line dating services and the people who use them. As a result, I now believe that the more old fashioned dating services, as well as churches, friends, relatives, work comrades, and other social avenues are much more effective than E-Harmony and other strictly personality match and psychological criteria based on-line services.

By old fashioned dating services, I mean those that feature interactive IM, email, chat, and webcams with anyone that wants to meet you or you meet them, rather than going through a lengthy process of scientific reductionism to find the person that is most like you. As the SA article points out, the biggest problem with on-line dating is the “false-negative problem.” A test, (like the one with hundreds of “rank this from one to ten” type questions on E-Harmony) that determines in advance whom you will meet and whom you will NEVER meet necessarily fails to allow certain people to meet who would adore each other…” because they compliment each other, because they ARE different from each other. With E-Harmony, what you are guaranteed is you will get to meet and maybe date yourself (or reject yourself), but only after a long and protracted series of question and answer exchanges in which you get to decide “Do I really want to meet and date somebody like myself?”

Deceptive on-line dating borders on the horrific. It is so bad that there are actually websites like Dontdatehimgirl.com that people use to gripe, complain, blog, and even file lawsuits against on-line services that have not worked out for them or turned them into disgruntled seekers of love, lust, or both.

Survey research conducted by Jeana Frost, previously at Boston University and MIT, suggests that about 20% of online daters admit to deception. If you ask them how many other people are lying, the number jumps to 90%. Having not gone on a date yet with anybody from E-Harmony, I can’t say who’s lying, but I can tell you that the vast majority do not want you to know the truth. I deduce this from the fact that not one woman whose profile I looked at has actually made her E-Harmony personality profile available, i.e. the one created by E-Harmony from your answers to the hundreds of questions they posed about you and your likes and dislikes. Every person on E-Harmony obviously enjoys showing off what they think of themselves via the About me section, but nobody wants to reveal their personality profile.

My personality profile is and will remain available even if it inhibits some people from dating me because I am fundamentally an open and honest person, I believe E-harmony got most of it right when passing judgment on me, and as far as I am concerned, if you don’t like what you read in the personality profile, we might as well as get that out of the way now, one way or another, either through a date in which you ask me about what E-Harmony said about me, or through your rejection of me evidenced by your insecurity about dating me based on whatever you have read and didn’t like, i.e. you won’t date me and if you are too insecure to actually confront me about what you agree and disagree with, then I probably do not want to date you anyway. In this sense, I think dating is like politics, people want all of the services government has to offer but don’t want to pay anything for any of it, and want to blame the politicians who did exactly what they wanted for doing exactly what they wanted.

Continuing with the topic of deception and vanity, according to the SA article, women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older; by five pounds when in their 20’s, 17 pounds in their 30’s, and 19 pounds in their 40s. At least 13% of online male daters are thought to be married. In one study, only 1% of online daters listed their appearance as “less than average.” One recent study showed that men claiming incomes exceeding $250,000 got 151 percent more replies than men claiming incomes less than $50,000. I wonder what the stats would be if we made that $500,000 versus $25,000?

As stated, E-Harmony relies on multiple choice or rank from 1 to 10 type tests that are supposed to determine your personality profile and how compatible (read - alike) you are to potential mates. Sounds great at first glance. But this is no Briggs Meyers test. The questions are open ended, subjective, and the multiple choice answers are subjective as well. As SA points out, these tests have never been subjected to a controlled process where a large sample of test outcomes was verified in any way, such as perhaps by a team of psychologists each independently assessing the individuals in a double blind experiment in which the survey makers know nothing of the psychologists and the psychologists know nothing of the E-Harmony tests or test outcomes.

For any personality test that is used to match people up to be claimed to be successful, it would have to be shown that a high percentage of the romantic pairings were successful. In 2004 E-harmony did present a paper at a national convention claiming that married couples who met through E-harmony were happier than other couples. But the paper was never published, possibly because the couples in the study were all newlyweds (married an average of 6 months) whereas the couples in the control group (who had met by other means) were married an average of 2.1 years. E-Harmony claims that 236 of its members marry every day, which is equal on a yearly basis to about 4 tenths of one percent of the 20 million members on E-Harmony. When E-harmony recommends someone as a match for you, there is about a 1 in 500 chance you will marry this person. Given the average of about 2 matches per month, if you went on a date with every E-Harmony match, it would take 346 dates and 19 years to reach a 50% chance of getting married. If you went on a date every week, it would take over 8 years to get to a 50% chance of getting married. And I am quite sure that there has yet to be any study of how many people who do get married on E-Harmony stay married more than the average, which is not in itself very good, in that currently half of all first marriages and two thirds of second marriages end in divorce.

Think about it. How could an on-line test possibly determine whether you should be paired with someone just like you, someone similar to you, someone somewhat different, or some magic mix of alike but also different.

While a large company like Match.com may advertise that it has 15 million paying members, less than a million are actually paying customers, and most of them are in it for only 3 months at a time, quitting and going on to the next service if no results in 3 months. This matches up perfectly with my experience with E-harmony. I can’t tell you how many women I have spent 2 months going back and forth with questions and answers, multiple times because that is the way E-Harmony has designed it, just to get to the final stage, open communications, only to find out that my match is no longer available on-line. Unfortunately, many of these dating services have raised the bar so long and so high that few people are willing to put up with even the slightest imperfection in a potential mate. After all, it is a simple matter to go back and click on the next match, or the next wink, or the next e-mail, with tens of thousands of mates ready to fill the void. Why date anybody when you can simply wait it out for the perfect match?

The biggest problem with E-Harmony is that dating is done in complete social isolation, i.e. you don’t get to ask your own questions or answer in a narrative form, and you don’t get to interact in real time with anybody. All you get to do is ask canned multiple choice questions and answer canned multiple choice questions; you have given your potential mate canned “must haves” and canned “can’t stands”, and you would be hard pressed to find anybody who would disagree with any of these likes or dislikes; this is your dating life, at least until the last step before open communications. By that time, you have already had plenty of time and opportunity to find something wrong, some reason to not date this person and go on to the next one instead. A surprisingly large percentage of women do not give you their picture even if you have started communications and requested their picture. That is social isolation.

Now from my own personal experience, the most ironic thing about this is that many of the women who have closed on me without dating me, have actually given “I don’t think the chemistry was really there” as a reason for closing. Some of these women have never even shown me their picture. What chemistry? How could there possibly have been any chemistry? I’ve never spoken to, seen a picture of, or written anything addressed to any of these women who gave this “lack of chemistry” as a reason for closing. Ironically though, this reason is an honest one. Of course there is no chemistry. The E-Harmony automaton chaperone has made sure of this. One has to wonder though. I mean – maybe they are telepathic. Maybe I am telepathic. Maybe my pheromones managed to magically find them, or there pheromones found me, though they don’t know where I live nor I them. This would explain why there could be a lack of chemistry when we tried so hard to establish chemistry in the absence of anything to base it on.

There are only four reasons a person will close on you on E-Harmony. They are the chemistry one I just mentioned, “The physical distance is too great” – actually a good reason, “There are just too many things going on in my life right now” and “Other.” OK. Too many things going on in your life right now? I guess that’s why you joined E-Harmony, right? E-Harmony gives you a multiple choice of about 30 reasons for closing on a match, and every single woman who has closed on me has chosen one of these four. Again, deception; perhaps well intentioned in that they have formed a biased opinion from my personality profile or my About me, and are afraid they are going to “hurt me” by telling me what they really think, or maybe they think if they don’t tell anybody what they really think, nobody will ever know, and nobody will ever get hurt. Deception, vanity, naivety, and all this because E-Harmony is fundamentally a game, a game of social isolation, rather than an interactive open ended game of interactive honest communications, something that I am sure all of these women really want but seem to think can wait until they are full blown deep in a relationship or married.

Fortunately, there are some big changes forthcoming in this industry, and it is an industry. Possibly due to the fact that a recent phone survey of 2,000 people found that only 25 percent were satisfied with the online dating sites they had used. Engage, for example, is allowing members to bring friends and family with them online, all of whom can prowl the profiles, checking people out and matching them up. Members can also rate the politeness of their dates, as well as the accuracy of the profiles. This is the new community approach to online dating. If you think about it, why wasn’t this always the way it worked? I mean, when you buy anything online, from EBay to Craig’s list to Amazon, you look at the ranking of the seller, what percentage were satisfied with their purchase from that seller. Yet, not one major dating site (except Engage) offers this.

The next step, virtual dating, is already under development. You interact with a virtual person, an avatar, on a virtual tour of a park, museum, or whatever venue you both feel most comfortable with. You talk; they talk, in real time. You see the image of their avatar, and they see yours in real time. It’s like a real date without the anxiety and fear of worrying whether everything hinges on how well this goes. And studies have already shown that people who had this chance to interact with each other had more successful face to face meetings with their matches later on, on a real date.

The future of dating is interactivity, instant communications, and virtual reality as a veiled chaperone. The past is an impersonal all knowing omniscient predetermined preconceived automaton that does everything for you so that all you have to do is figure out why you are going to reject your match before you date them, and in a state of ambivalent arrogance, move one step forwards and two steps backward to your next potential reject.

As a final note, and to overemphasize just how vain people really are, in the first 3 months I was on E-Harmony I posted a picture of myself with my somewhat long gray hair and my somewhat pudgy middle section showing up in the pictures. (I do work out and am very healthy as evidenced by my most recent Physical where my doctor personally told me he could count on one hand all the diabetics he has seen in his practice with blood, heart, and cholesterol test results as good as mine.) While I advanced interest in several women and attempted to establish communications with them, only 2 women initiated communications with me. Then I went to a salon, got highlights for my hair (changed its color to brownish), got my eyebrows died and trimmed, and posted this new picture in a close-up without the pudgy middle showing. Since then, about a two week period so far, I have had 7 women express interest in me. Unfortunately, 4 of them were way outside my distance boundary, something that E-Harmony continues to ignore despite that fact I keep reminding them.

Could it be that women are finally reading my personality profile and find it appealing?