Stephanie Manley

Dating sites can  be a great way to meet someone special.  If you are a working adult with activities, friends, and a social life, you think it would be easy to meet members of the opposite sex. My married friends seem to think that this is easier than falling off a log.  I assure them, dating is difficult.  Personally my first requirement is the employed look, that may sound cynical and cruel, but if you are roughly equivalent to my age, you should have a job.  Period.  I am smart enough not to date anyone at work, and after you date the single guy in church, and you have already went through the single people in your circle, guess what, you are onto online dating.

E-Harmony was my least favorite dating system.  There are several reasons why I found E-Harmony less than satisfying.  First off these commercials would lead you to believe that every time someone joins their service that you are going to find your perfect match.  They match you on like a zillion compatibilities.  In my experience we had similar likes and dislikes, but that doesn’t account for the baggage that they come with.  First off I will say I got matched to literally hundreds of others around where I live.  You would think that is wonderful, awesome, it is!   The problem with being match with the people there, is that chances are who you are getting matched with isn’t a member, so they will never respond to you.  Nice.

For me, for every 100 persons I was matched to resulted in an actual date.  Not a relationship, but a date. I was matched with nice respectible, employeed people.  My problem with this is the results are demoralizing.  100 matches to 1 date.  The numbers just aren’t in your favor.  People close out on you long before you would ever figure out you were or were not compatible.  So we will move past there, my first date with someone on E-Harmony was with a recovering alcoholic.  I personally did not have a problem with someone that was trying to recover from an addiction.  I had a problem with that person requesting to meet in a bar, and then telling me this after I started drinking my drink.  How was I to know this was a sensitive issue?

My next date was with a nationally ranked Go-Player, being a bit if a nerd, yeah, I know what this is, but I am not a Go-Player.  We had a wonderfully awkward lunch, and then really didn’t know what to talk about, so I asked him about this game.  I learned, or rather I was told more than I ever wanted to know.  He was a nice person, there was no chemistry. 

My third date with someone I met on E-Harmony, was another nice professional man. Intelligent, sense of humor, a professional working man.  I thought yes, this will work.  We went on our first date, and then suddenly he asked how our relationship was going.  Relationship?  Relationship?  It was a first date, a first date hardly counts as a relationship.  I tried to exit out of that one ASAP. 

My frustration with E-Harmony is their matching process.  The fact that you get matched to other people, I am sure that many of them are nice, and wonderful people.  Since they aren’t members, you will never meet them.  I really found that out of 100 matches, one connection moved onto a first date.  I thought this was frustrating.  So at this point I really don’t highly recommend this service.  If you are looking for a place where you can be exposed to lots of potential people I would go with Match.com or another site with greater visibility.  You want a place where you have a chance at optimizing your chance for connections.  Personally for me, the 1 in 100 odds isn’t good enough for me to recommend their service to others.