Shockingly, E-Harmony Found Electronic, Harmonious
We've ragged on E-Harmony, the online dating service accused of having a vaguely creepy religious aura, and several months ago, we were plucking e-Harmony's harp pretty hard.
First they seemed to be discriminating against the recently unwed, then hot redhead Canadian chicks, and nearest and dearest to our hearts, heavy drinkers.
Lending a dissenting voice, Danilo actually tried out the service instead of mocking it from afar based on hearsay and anecdote. He says he had a fairly pleasant, though not perfect, experience.
Contrary to other reports, he didn't even get a crucifix shoved in his heart.
Always greatful for an opportunity to contradict ourselves, we let Danilo's letter unfold after the jump like the wings of angels...
Danilo writes:
"As previously established with my Amazon television caper, I'm living the single life. There are plenty of benefits to being single, but it's a little less fun for people who aren't any good at meeting women. Like me.
The internet has always solved my other problems, though, so naturally I turned to it to soften the pain of my transforming into a blithering idiot each time I'm confronted with the sort of woman who interests me. At the very least, I thought, I'd be able cut past the standard introductory crap and confine my energies to the sorts of sophisticated people I enjoy.
After staggering through the thumbnail-filled electronic meat markets for a few weeks, I grew frustrated. It wasn't always easy to find interesting people and the ones I thought might be interesting turned out to be pretty dull. Women in Orlando, it would seem, have an unhealthy preoccupation with excessive drinking and the caps lock key.
It was with heavy heart that I dragged myself to eHarmony, having heard something favorable about it from a coworker. I'd read a decent amount of negative things from Consumerist on the same subject, so I'd avoided the place. Still, I was ready to try something different and thus plunged into an SAT-style personality profile hell.
Chiefly, Consumerist voiced suspicion that eHarmony was a Christian-driven morals machine that would endeavor to leave you loveless and miserable if you weren't an avid bible thumper. This doesn't appear to be the case. I'm not at all religious and eHarmony played matchmaker nonetheless.
But in contrast to the Match.com-style sites, eHarmony seems to be playing up a quality angle rather than one of quantity. After a few weeks, I've only been handed a half-dozen matches -- a paltry sum, compared to the hundreds you might find on Match. Still, while even some of those few eHarmony matches seemed pretty bland, one of them wasn't bad at all. In fact, thanks to eHarmony, my faith in women's ability to successfully combine attractiveness, intelligence and maturity has been enthusiastically restored, regardless of the outcome of any particular match I've found through the service.
So, Godless singles can take heart: they too can enjoy the benefits of someone's weird, mathematical people-matching scheme. It was definitely successful at figuring out the sorts of things that make people interesting to me. I'm nowhere near being able to tell if it can actually help you find your soulmate, but if you want some help finding something deeper than just casual sex, it certainly wouldn't hurt to give eHarmony a crack. Be patient, though -- if you've got a particularly offbeat personality, as I do, it might take it a few weeks to come up with a useful match.
As far as the girl who's pretty all right: It's a little unusual or maybe cute. I think we got on the phone at 10:30 PM on Saturday night, after a couple weeks exchanging messages and jumping through these hoops eHarmony gives you to better qualify your matches. By the time we hung up from that first conversation, though, the sun was coming up and it was past 6:00 AM but neither of us had noticed the passage of time. I'm the sort of guy who is wildly curious and speculative about life, philosophy and science and stuff and through speaking with this person I am reassured that, hey, women can be like that too and still be attractive. She lives a few hours away, but I'll see if I can grab lunch with her on Saturday.
-Danilo
www.danilocampos.com
Oh, btw, I'm nowhere near as hot as Tamsen is, but I'll attach a photo to save you guys a trip to your discount stock photo DVD."
Previously: • Confessions of a Former eHarmony Worker • eHarmony Discriminates Against the Bibulous • More eHarmony.com Discrimination Victims • e-Disharmony.com
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Comments:
Now if they would just stop flooding the airwaves with their commercials.
I find it funny that they advertise on Bravo, which isn't exactly a bible-thumping demograhic.
The old guy in the commercials gives me the creeps in a Heaven's Gate kind of way.
Pedro writes:
"I tried out the service after I saw it on your blog, and for starters there's no man seeking man option, so I don't know if that qualifies as discrimination."
Well it's a commercial website so i would guess that similar to manhunt.com or gay.com not catering to hetero matchmaking, eHarmony has every right not to cater to homo hookups.
This (and other) match making sites seem to want to cater to the middle stripe of america. If you're on the fringes of sexuality, religion, marital status, drug addiction, etc they really don't want to talk to you. The odd thing is that these are typically the people who would be looking for a mate on teh internets anyway.
When I was last single, I used e-harmony for awhile and found it to deliver quality women with good tools to weed out the strange ones and the bland ones.
They withold pics often until you've talked a bit using the service, so you meet a more diverse group than you would if you could see them at first.
They perport to base their matching on statistical data on what makes for sucessful marriages, so you get the following things for which the service is not well suited.
Who e-harmony is bad for:
Gays and Lesbians - They just don't try to handle that. They are a
service that is trying to figure out someone who would be a good person
to marry. If/When same sex marriage becomes a possible, and they get
some data in this arena, expect that feature. I can't tell if this is
bias, or just a lack of data (or both)
Short men and Tall Women:
Relationships that tend to last if the man who is at least as tall as a
woman. So if you're 5'5" and a man, don't expect many if any matches.
But I too met very intersting women through the service, by far a better experience than the other services. The can't stand/must have continuum was particularly telling, as that is the sort of thing you usually don't find out about a person until you've dated for awhile.
In the horrible eventuality that I am ever single again, I'll use it again (if it still exists then).
--Michael
Is there a site for "men seeking women who are straight but maybe open to a little, um, 'experimenting' from time to time"?
Because I think that would be pretty popular.
mariser, they're pretty handy but I'm not sure introducing me to cute girls makes them worthy of Most Favored Company status.
i'm a little confused about that "fringes of sexuality" comment, but whatever.
Danilo says: "I'm not sure introducing me to cute girls makes them worthy of Most Favored Company status."
are you kidding? what could be worthier?
::tongue firmly in cheek:: Tedsez, doesn't that describe all men-seeking-women sites? They probably just truncate it because it's so obvious that it doesn't need to be delineated. It's probably also understood that it's quite all right if those women have hot sisters, or even just any sisters. I have yet to date a guy--including the man I eventually married--who doesn't at some point ask me sheepishly if one of my sisters and I are "uh...into that." And we're decidedly average-looking. I think that as with so many things, my husband still holds out hope that with time, or possibly enough tequila, my sister and I will think to ourselves, "Lesbian incest? What the hell..."
etinterrapax--
Next time hubby brings it up, suggest an alternative:
Would he be into letting Mike, the friendly Container Store sales associate, in on the action?
I just masterbated. b4 I even made it to the comments. And then 'Lesbian incest'!?!? I wouldn't have had to even go to Tila Tequilas myspace!
After listening to this">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid="4803877"">this interview with the eHarmony founder, I'm still not convinced that everything is love and roses with eHarmony.
The guy just sounds like he's trying WAY to hard to convince people it's not a christian dating service. Plus, Terry Gross pretty much nails him on the gays and lesbians thing too.
Helfin writes:
"The "creepy old guy" is Dr. Niel Clark Warren, the founder of the service. He's an evangelical Christian with ties to James Dobson, which is one of the reasons the service tilts right. It was heavily marketed on religious radio before it went more mainstream. Salon did a piece on him last year: http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/06/10/warren/i... That link may be subscription, but it's an interesting read, and not entirely what I expected."
Robbie writes:
""Always greatful for an opportunity to contradict ourselves, we let Danilo's letter unfold after the jump like the wings of angels..."
watch your dangling modifiers... ."
"I'm nowhere near being able to tell if it can actually help you find your soulmate, but if you want some help finding something deeper than just casual sex, it certainly wouldn't hurt to give eHarmony a crack."
Hmm..? If there's no god, then what is the point in anything but casual sex? We have no more value as human beings than a dog or an ant. If there's no god, then anything "higher" than casual sex is just personal preference. If there's no god, then what's this nonsensical useage of sentimental language about finding soul-mates? Men don't have souls. It sucks that god doesn't exist...because without an ultimate Being behind reality...life is stripped of any kind of transcendent value.
glad you are having a good experience with e-Harmony, and thanks for posting about it. maybe you can submit them to the "Best Company in America" contest being run around here...