eHarmony

eHarmony Review by Wish to Remain Anonymous, December 28, 2008

• Quality of Matches
• User Friendly
• Value
• Overall Rating

Guess what? You are not alone in your quest to find true love. In fact during the past 3 years, I’ve tried to make a success of the eHarmony online dating service.

Quite honestly, I’ve tried the lion’s share of online dating services. On one hand I’ve had some fun and interesting results. But on the other hand, it has been disastrous.

But don’t worry. By finding out what didn’t work, it was easier for me to latch on to what did work.

In my opinion, Internet dating isn’t much different from your usual meet and greet.

Although eHarmony does its best to match you with people that have similar interests to you, they can only go by what a person tells them.

And, what I’ve found that people in the online dating world tend to try to make themselves be who the other person wants them to be.

In a nutshell, people in general find it hard just to be themselves. And that my friend is where the problem lies.

So, the real kicker here is finding someone who is real. The best ways to make that happen is to start within yourself.

With eHarmony, they encourage you to post a current picture of yourself. This idea is right on the money. Believe it or not, profiles with pictures are what capture attention.

If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. When I posted my profile with no picture, I rarely received any open communication from the matches that were sent to my email box.

Truth be told, that was very discouraging, and I felt as if I had wasted my money.

But, as soon as I decided to bite the bullet and add a picture, more and more men opened up to the possibility of getting to know me better.

I guess it’s true what they say…a picture is worth a thousand words.

On that note, I’ll leave you with the craziest match that came my way.

Thanks to my wonderful father, I’ve always been a tall girl. Literally, I’m 5 feet 8 and thin as a rail. In my email box one day was a match for a guy I’ll call “Peter.”

Now everything about Peter was right on the money, until I looked at his picture. He was 5 feet 3 for one and weighed nearly 250 lbs. My first thought – “a fish and a bird may fall in love…but where will they live.” There was no way anything between us could work.

I laughed at the thought of us going out together. We matched on paper – but physically we both would have felt like fish out of water.

So, be easy with all of this and laugh – a lot – if you want to succeed.

eHarmony Review by Brenda Estel, January 5, 2009

• Quality of Matches
• User Friendly
• Value
• Overall Rating

What You See Is What You Get!

Before we go any further, I want to set something straight – quite a few of my good friends have used eHarmony, and for the most part they are satisfied with their results.

I know you’re probably skeptical. Right? Aside from that, one thing’s for sure, many people find true love through this site. Believe it or not I wanted to experience this type of happiness for myself.

Here’s something else you may not know: This online dating service is based upon Christian principles. As you might guess, the main goal of the site is for singles to enjoy serious relationships.

Plus the expectation is that you will fall in love for all the right reasons.

Get this: when you go to the website and sign up, you’ll have to muscle your way through what seems like thousands of questions.

And that’s just the beginning. You’ll be grilled about your family, your job, your future goals, your hobbies; I could go on and on.

But that’s not all. Far from it. Each answer requires you to rate yourself using a scale. Make no mistake about it; registration will take up a good deal of your time.

Let me share a secret with you. It’s important that you include a current picture when you create your profile.

But, I’m telling you, anyone who reads your profile will want to see a picture of you at some point in time.

Now, let’s take a closer look at what happens when you get a match. More than likely, in the beginning, you’ll have to wait for eHarmony to send you a match.

Don’t worry. It’s pretty simple. You’ll get an email with the name of your potential match. Consider this your first introduction.

Now, here’s all you do: View your match’s profile to see what you think. If you are completely turned off, you can “close” the match. Actually, you have the option of closing the match anytime during the process.

Most important of all, both of you have the option of beginning communication. Ok, you might be asking just what this means.

Quite simply, communicating involves a set of multiple choice-open ended questions. Included with that is your likes and dislikes.

All of these questions are responded to through eHarmony email on the website.

One thing I want to stress is the fact that your match still does not know your last name, private email or phone number.

Only during the last stage of open communication can you give out this information and set up a date. The choice is yours.

eHarmony Review by Stephanie Z., February 20, 2009

• Quality of Matches
• User Friendly
• Value
• Overall Rating

Simply put, eHarmony has a unique approach to online dating. In fact, with breakthrough technology, over four million people have joined the site in order to find romance and love.

With me, eHarmony was a hit and miss situation. At first, once I made through the initial open communication, I went on around 18 first dates. Surprisingly enough, 16 of those dates never made it to first dates.

Why do I say this? The problem was that we had absolutely no chemistry. Now, don’t get me wrong…we matched perfectly on paper – however in person, we just couldn’t pull it off.

Needless to say, anytime I received an email from eHarmony, my heart would fill with expectation. You know what I’m talking about…that feeling in the pit of your stomach. My breathing would speed up. My pulse would race. For all these reasons, I would be eager to take a look at the match eHarmony had found for me.

I didn’t feel as if I was looking for a needle in haystack. Instead, I felt confident in who eHarmony would send as my potential date.

Now at this point, if his profile captivated me, I jump in with both feet and start the communication process. On the other hand, if I felt “ok” about him, I’d wait for him to contact me first.

During communication we spend time answering each other’s multiple choice-open ended questions as well as sharing our likes and dislikes. The messages are sent through open communication on the eHarmony website.

If all went well, we would exchange real email addresses and keep the lines of communication open. Furthermore, as we continued to communicate, we could tell right off the bat if we had the same interests, sense of humor, and background.

Now, here’s the next step: Lunch, dinner, or drinks after work. Meanwhile the excitement was building, and I would begin preparing myself to meet Mr. Right.

But here’s the kicker: Often times the guy would be feel an attraction toward but I would feel nothing.

Then during other times – I’d be the one who ended up with pie on my face.

Oh Wait! I almost forgot! You have to beware of those men who have without a doubt lied on their questionnaire and during open communication.

To cut short my long story, when you meet them in person, their actions are completely opposite to what they said in their profile.

The truth is, with eHarmony all that glitters is not gold. But, the site is definitely worth a try. The other 2 dates I went on resulted with one becoming a close friend, and the other became my boyfriend. We’ve been together now for nearly a year. Try it and see for yourself.

eHarmony Review by Calgal, April 25, 2009

• Quality of Matches
• User Friendly
• Value
• Overall Rating

What makes eharmony different from other internet dating services I have used is that they do all of the researches and find the matches for you. It’s great for busy professional like myself. But you would have to spend the time and be really true to yourself to answer all of the questions about yourself as well as what you want in your potential partner and what is important to you when you sign up.

After you sign up, you would see a list of all of the matches in your account and they would continuously add new ones. Both parites would receive each other’s information in their account at the same time. Ether one of you can initiate contact, or choose to close the file if you are not interested. So if you see that the file is not closed, it’s an indication that the other party is at least somewhat interested or thinking… even if he didn’t initiate contact. That would eliminate the anxiety of whether to initiate contact or not, not knowing if the other party is interested.

You can choose to use Guided Communication (which is a series of mutliple choice questions you can just send to each other to get each other acquainted) or Fast Trak (which is directly communicating with each other through their website – you won’t need to reveal your email address). They also have a way for members to connect each other on the phone without revealing each other’s phone numbers.
One thing really nice about eharmony is that people cannot copy and save the file of your pictures from your profile. They can’t just search and browse your profile and pictures either. That’s especially nice for those of us who appreciates privacy. You can select who do you want to reveal your pictures to, and at what stage. After you reveal your picture and if at some point you decide he’s not the right match, you can choose to hide the picture at that point. And you can go back and forth on this, you have total control.

I have to say that the guys eharmony matched me are very compatible in personality or interests. I get along very easily with the guys they match me with. These are guys I could be friends with, even if it didn’t turn into a romantic relationship. But of course, phyiscal attractiveness is all in the eyes of the beholder. There are plenty of guys I was attracted to, but others not.

They are a little bit more expensive than Match.com ($2 more a month or something like that), but I think it’s well worth it as I don’t have to spend so much time into the initial searching and screening the right guys. eharmony does that for me. All I have to do is to read their profile, look at the pictures, reply if I am interested, and close the files if I am not. I still have not found “the one’ yet, but I am keeping an open mind, making myself available (that is having my profile available online), and happily dating…

eHarmony Review by gee_whizz, September 10, 2009

• Quality of Matches Not Rated
• User Friendly Not Rated
• Value Not Rated
• Overall Rating Not Rated

I’ve tried eHarmony several times over several years (once even signed up for a full year!) and, in fact, I’m an “active” member at the moment. During this time several things have come to be apparent – the most notable of which is that I’m still unattached (in spite of being, by all reasonable standards, a good catch).

eH very obligingly puts a variable number of matches in my inbox each day (some days there are none and some days as many as twelve). My impression is that most of these matches are people who haven’t joined (i.e., paid them money) and I am the carrot to entice them to join. I say this because many of the profiles are only begun – as if someone started and then got bored. The second is that so many of them prove to be dead links. So…maybe 20% are real possibilities. Of those, the ones with no photo posted or one of those, “I’ll show you later – after we’ve had a chance to bond”, are out. Let’s face it, men are predominately right-brainers and thus very visual. Besides, I posted mine – if you didn’t what are you trying to hide. That leaves maybe one or two a week who are real prospects. But again, let’s face it – I have two professional degrees and routinely do endurance sports – so how does eH apply all their criteria and come up with a school-bus driver who must weigh 250 pounds and is from Florida as the potential love of my life (for the record I weigh 170 pounds).

Let’s face it folks, Dr. Warren and his eH hoopla is a scam. Sure I’ve met some nice people as a result of being a member – but I meet nice people every day in real life too – so how does that make them unique. But find the love of my life there? Sure, I believe that, so pardon me now while I go out and throw some more money away on lottery tickets.