(Copied in entirety with permission from “The Taco Traveler”, dated 20 April 2008. Thanks, Taco Traveler!)
No, you won’t be using eHarmony any more to search for the perfect girl. Not that you can search for anyone, anyway, but you know…. Or maybe you don’t? To explain: For a while, eHarmony is fun. It’s so easy and pressure-free. You spent 20 minutes, months ago, filling out a detailed multiple-choice personality analysis, then another 30 minutes to fill out your profile and upload some photos, and they magically matched you up with women who are supposed to be your perfect companion. Well… after eight months you met only one girl in person.
With Amy you raced through the eHarmony steps in two days and a couple weeks later you had an amazing first date. You spent four hours at Purple Cafe in Seattle drinking too much wine and eating too much steak and cheese and chocolate and then the kiss goodbye…. But on the second it was obvious to both of you that the wine and the nighttime was responsible; the chemistry wasn’t there in the daytime. You exchanged emails / phone calls / texts with only one other person, and with her the interest just sort of withered over time as she traveled one way, you traveled the other, and you both got tired of the effort.
You completely understand that your profile isn’t for everyone. You’re in Mexico eighty percent of the time and with your boys the other twenty. Most damaging: you probably don’t want more kids, but you like the sort of girl who wants kids. Or maybe deep down you want more kids but you just want the right girl to convince you. At the same time there are some interesting things in that profile, too. You’re adventurous, happy, travel-y and since you left the desk and office behind you’re in better shape than you’ve been since college, and your eyes aren’t nearly so puffy.
So, outside of the two aforementioned eHarmony “relationships,” here’s what a day on eHarmony looks like:
1) Wake up to six new emails describing new girls chosen for you because of your high mutual compatibility.
2) See that two of the six have already looked at your profile but chose neither to reject you nor contact you. Sickeningly traditional dating simile #1: as the man, you’ll almost always have to initiate contact.
3) Read through the profiles (or sometimes, admitedly, just stop on the photos) and determine whether this girl really is a compatible match. If she’s not, reject her (“Close” her) by selecting a radio button, clicking a button, and your scientifically chosen compatible match is gone forever. As for the radio buttons, select either “Based on statements in their profile…,” “Other” or “I’d like to pursue other matches at eHarmony.” Try not to select “Other” if they’re unattractive.
4) Reject any outright if, for the profile section “Share something only your best friends know about you,” she shows absolutely no creativity or self-awareness whatsoever and shares something to the effect of “Well, only my best friends are supposed to know that. Tee hee.” Unless she’s hot.
5) If she seems friendly, smart, outgoing, happy, adventurous, she knows how to construct a sentence and you think her pictures are nice (or maybe she just doesn’t photograph well?), send some multiple-choice / short answer questions sometimes tailored to her but mostly just the five you always send.
6) Glance at the list of the other twenty-five women in the queue who are stuck on “Waiting for her answers.” Close out any who haven’t gotten to selecting their radio button answers for at least 10 days. If she’s really got potential, send her a “nudge” but realize by saying “Hey, remember when I sent you those multiple choice questions ten days ago? Could you, um, answer them?” you’ll probably seem desperate. No, you can’t customize the message to make it funny or make yourself seem intersting enough to make them want to respond, either. That would bring too much personality into the process. eHarmony will create the message for you. You’ll never know what that message says; you were never nudged because like the rest of the world you’re almost always online and you never had a problem answering questions. Sickeningly traditional dating simile #2: wait X (or XX!?) days to respond, so you don’t seem too desparate.
7) Repeat #6 for the other three stages before you get to “Open Communication.” Read the final, congratulatory and cautionary message from the good doctor and begin falling in love, or not. Reach this stage with exactly three of the five-hundred and sixty three women chosen as highly compatible matches for you based scientifically on eHarmony’s 29 Dimensions of Compatibility.
8) Regret all the time you spent: the real-life girls you never met, the words you didn’t write, the hundred-million-dollar websites you didn’t create because you spent fifteen minutes a day (3 or 4 days a week, anyway) for eight months clicking radio buttons and wondering what everyone was doing instead of either rejecting you or answering your questions.
So… yeah, you could say that you’re frustrated with the general attitude there, and the fact that the scientific nature of the process makes it nearly impossible to develop any chemistry (heh) or generate any true excitement about the person (or, if it’s there, you certainly can’t sense it). What’s better? Well, because you can write, you love match.com where you can search for anyone in the world and browse through profiles. When you see a profile that seems interesting or makes you smile, whether she’s compatible or not, you can send her an email and let her know you liked her profile. Or, you know, you usually say more than that, but the bottom line is it’s a very well-populated site that doesn’t take the excitement out of the process by making it all just eButtony.
And yes, you realize that the second-person perspective is hard to pull off and can really get annoying.
TT
(Taco Traveler is a 40-year-old “Proud daddy, sailor, eater, kisser, poker player, drinker, scuba diver, golfer, Internet entrepreneur / developer. In that order.”)
More on eHarmony Blog