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…

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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
http://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.”

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Previously:
• Confessions of a Former eHarmony Worker
• eHarmony Discriminates Against the Bibulous
• More eHarmony.com Discrimination Victims
• e-Disharmony.com

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