Lisa Miller of Newsweek gives us an update on our favourite relationship site:
… In June, a California judge will hear a plaintiffs’ motion for class certification in a case that accuses eHarmony of discrimination against gays and lesbians. eHarmony does not reject gays—it simply doesn’t accept them: the only choices on the site are “man seeking woman” or “woman seeking man.” A company lawyer explains that eHarmony makes matches based on unique scientific research into what makes heterosexual unions work; it hasn’t done the same kind of work on gay unions, though it doesn’t rule out such research in the future. While this explanation may be true, it also sidesteps the real problem. eHarmony was founded eight years ago by a conservative Christian who had a passionate interest in the benefits of shared values in heterosexual marriage—and he sold this formula within the Christian ‘world. (Warren was not available for comment.) Today, the company desires to reap the economies of scale offered by a mainstream clientele, and in the wider world, shared values are not as easy to compute.
Read the rest of the article, dated 26 April 2008
Other facts from the article:
- “eHarmony had 20 million users since its founding in 2000.” (Time to update our membership growth chart.…)
- “A company spokeswoman boasts that 236 eHarmony users marry every day.” (Three significant digits; more accurate than what the New York Times said, which is what eHB uses for our javascript Marriage Counter on our homepage.)
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