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.
About Stephanie Manley
While hope my spring eternal, one of my greatest complaints about eharmony was a mass of people that weren’t really members. So out of the 10 people you got matched to, 1 of them maybe have been an active member. It may be a fabulous thing to build up a large membership basis, but it would be nice if dating sites would match you to real active members.
I agree you often find love, friendships when you aren’t looking
Often the things of most value are found when you aren’t looking for them. I can fully attest to that.
eHarmony is a weird dichotomy of precise psychology, a business model that requires a high degree of interaction, and that elusive chemistry we all want.
I was on eHarmony, off and on, for several years. I have met a lot of nice women on the site, some are now friends, but I have not found “the one”. I have not been on eHarmony now for well over a year and a half.
My impressions are that, while the site has excellent questionnaires to determine one’s’ preferences, and those of potential mates, it appears from the matching function that this information is rarely, if ever, used to match two people together. I have been “matched” to some people that, when we met, I had to wonder what the matching system was keying off of- thin thread was being used to draw a link in compatibility? Sometimes one would have an “ah-ha!” moment, and it would be apparent- some potential interest in some esoteric past time… It was text-matching something commented upon in one’s bio, not exactly resounding compatibility matching.
As Stephanie has commented, she wants RESULTS, perhaps by volume (more dates). I know my complaints to eHarmony were that I had too much volume- (as of the last time I looked at my closed matches, there were some 1600 in there, and no, I did not close all of them – some ladies decided to close contact before we had a chance to even say “Hi”). I just couldn’t go out on dates enough during the week to keep up with the new matches- how could anyone reasonably be expected to keep up with 5-8 new matches PER DAY? That’s a lot of typing, back-and-forth questions and answers, and a lot to keep straight. I told eHarmony that I’d rather have only one match a year that was exactly right (whatever that might mean
) ), as I have time for people who are very close to what is best for me in a mate (and of course, myself, for the other person), but I don’t want to consume all free time working through a huge number of slight potential mates.
What dating all boils down to is a numbers game- the old adage one has to kiss a lot of frogs to find one’s prince (in my case, princess) is really true. One has to put one’s self out there, and meet LOTS and LOTS of people. Have I been successful? To varying degrees, but I’d say at this moment I’ve been close, but no cigar.
Hope springs eternal, however. The big point here is don’t give up. Keep trying! One never knows when one will meet “the one”, as the other comments here attest.
I firmly believe every encounter/date prepares one for meeting the right person. Perhaps God is not quite done preparing us for our mates, or our mates for us. All in good time. Enjoy life, do the things that make your heart sing. At some point, God will place us on a path that will intersect with that person best suited for us, and we, them.
Good luck and God bless.
Never tried E-Harmony – but I can give Match.com a thumbs up…met my now-husband through that site. I think the trick to online dating is having several conversations over the phone first before setting up an in-person date. The way I figure it, several phone calls is a heck of a lot less work and gives you an idea if there is ANY chemistry…rather than wasting time and jumping right into an actual date and finding out you’ve got nothing in common then having to figure out a way to make a hasty exit.
I had those experiences also…..O.K., so one date was okay but not my cup of tea. We went out to dinner and that was it. Then on a date with someone else, the DC snipers shot some man at a gas station right next door to the restaurant we were eating at. I was afraid to leave the place so the poor guy had to go and get my car and pull it up to the restaurant door. Nothing happened again with that guy either. A 3rd date was friendly and fun but after a few drinks, we parted ways. Finally, NOT looking for any dates online I met my husband whose a great guy!