TheDate HornyMatches

eHarmony has been all over the television for a while now, we’ve all heard of it. I saw the ads on tv and decided maybe this cat really knows where its at. 29 proven dimensions of compatibility. This must be a good thing.

It’s the most comprehensive approach to the matching game I’ve seen. Initial contacts come from a pool of matches they provide you - you pick from a list of initial questions to ask to which they respond with answers and five questions of their own. Then 10 ‘Must-haves’ and 10 ‘Cant stands’ and so forth and so on until contact through their internal email is reached. The problem with this of course is the matching engine is so consistent you end up having the same questions and preferences exchanged with virtually every match. It becomes more of a process rather than an adventure. Which brings us to the downside.

It’s the most expensive of the sites I looked at. The interface is completely inane, and was obviously never tested with large amounts of information or limited bandwidth. Once you get some data in there to manipulate, it becomes cumbersome in every sense of the word.

You can never see more than 5 new matches at any one time. If you have 10 new matches, you only see the first five. Click on one and it moves into the ‘current’ list, and its place is taken by your number 6 match which you didn’t even know existed. So you must deal with your matches in the order they come to you. Once in your ‘current’ list, you can still only see five at a time and must scroll through page after page. And if you decided to delete the ones off the bottom for whatever reason, get ready for navigation hell. The list resets to the top with every operation so you will spend some time just clicking on the ‘next page’ button. If you’re on dialup, forget about it.

Now let’s suppose you or someone you’ve been in contact with decides to let their subscription lapse. There are no notifications sent out and if someone tries to contact you from their list, all they get is a black hole for a response. No ‘this member canceled their membership’ or anything, you are just left to assume you are being ignored. In other words, if you get 5 matches and all 5 cancel tomorrow, you’ll never know. You’ll just never get a response from your contact. I might add that of the list of reasons for closing contact with someone, none of the exhaustive list of items is “I am canceling my subscription”. You must always say they aren’t good enough for you in some way or another or you are just disinterested in the entire scenario.

The test you take upon signup looks a lot like an MMPI-type test. For the uninitiated, MMPI is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, pretty much the standard of inventories from a couple of decades back. It’s an annoying test to take - there are probably 25 unique questions but they’re phrased 5 different ways over the course of the test to weed out false responses. All fine and good, at least it’s not a free-form essay written by the user; but, it does take an hour to complete. An annoying after effect of this is that EVERY match will be the same type of person. Out of 50-something matches I received over a month’s period, all but one were divorced with children at home. Apparently my personality meshes well with divorcee mom’s. This is an assumption since not one of the matches I received had their actual test results public.

Bottom line, you can get too technical with this stuff and I think eHarmony.com did just that. Sometimes, you just can’t screen human response.