My experiences with eharmony.com

Lonely hearts welcome aboard! Being that I recently split with my wife of 8 years (longer than I thought we would last – probably about 2 too many) I decided it was time to get back “in the game”. I really had no desire to date anyone at my job (work place romances BAD! BAD! Especially when you are a manager) nor do I wish to troll the local pre-A.A. meetings called bars. So that pretty much left blind dates through friends (oh, lord) or the good ‘ole WWW. Neither was that appealing but the www seemed a little more adventurous for some reason. With that decided now came the decision of which site. AdultFriendfinder? – no, too porno and I don’t have Spitzer type money. Match.com - maybe, but their ads make them seem like they take all the eharmony rejects. Why not just go for the gusto with eharmony? Plus they say I can look at my matches for free (I guess that is a big deal). Ok, eharmony it is. Ladies here I come!

Sign up was easy, a little too easy if you ask me. A couple of plusses I learned early was that there are only 2 guys for every 3 women on the site and eharmony is more of a site of desperately lonely people looking for relationships than hook-ups. Ok they are not desperately lonely. I’ve never been a dating type guy; I’ve always looked for relationships (some weird sadomasochistic thing) so this seemed perfect for me. Eharmony has you go through some profile stuff that seemed pretty routine i.e. – age, likes, dislikes, what you want in a mate, what your friends say about you, and on and on. They do give you a personality profile that is pretty interesting and a little bit of a “Wow, I guess that is me – I didn’t know I was like that.” Once you are done – Bam! You’ve got matches. At first this was relatively exciting to see. But I got over that real quick. All you get to see is their profile. Which is O.K. but it is a little bit of having cake with no frosting. I want PICs! Well, to see pics (if your match has any) you have to pay the piper. I guess this is where eharmony gets you – See her profile, doesn’t she seem nice?, don’t you want to meet her? Well pay me! So, after a couple of days of mental debate, I paid - $59 for a month to see if it is worth it. Bring on the ladies!

And come they did. Eharmony matches you with other people based on 29 different things and sends you about 6 to 7 matches per day. Once a match comes thru you can look at their profile, look at their pics, send them an icebreaker (uh, no), view their personality profile, start communicating with them, put them “on hold”, or close them out (later sister). I realized right then and there that you are laying yourself out there for your matches to pick you apart (because that is what I was doing). But I am getting ahead of myself – let’s talk about these options – I’ll save the profile for last.

The icebreaker. I guess eharmony wants you to use this if your interested in one of your matches but don’t want to start communicating with them. O.K., whatever – seems like a waste of time. Through this option you can send little silly messages like: “I just wanted to say hi!”, “Your profile brought a smile to my face”, “Your profile got my attention. Let’s chat.” Sorry, not me.

The personality profile. This is the in-depth look into your match. 9 times out of 10 they have them closed so you can’t see them. When they are there they are nice to look at and get a good idea of who your match is.

Start Communicating. In this option which is part of the eharmony's “Guided Communication”, you pick 5 questions from a list to send to your match. Then you wait for their response.

On Hold. This is where you put someone while your deciding whether or not to communicate with them. Again, it seems that this is a waste of time – either communicate with them or close them out.

Close the match. This is where you give the adios to your match. At first this option seems kinda cool because of the power trip. You are the Caesar giving the thumbs up or thumbs down – “Take the filthy wench away!”. But, you will soon realize that your matches are doing that to you too.

Profile. This is the place where you can get a brief description of the match and what they are looking for. Very scary because here is where you lay it on the line. This is more than likely the place where your match is making their decision about you.

Well that is it for now. In part two I will discuss how the communication works.