Beware: eHarmony sucks... Free Dating, Singles and Personals

Beware: eHarmony sucks... Posted: 9/20/2009 11:35:09 AM
I just wanted to introduce myself as a newbie on this site and I thought the best way to do that would be to participate in the one discussion that I can relate to and the one that brought me here in the first place. My experience with eHarmony is very much like everyone elses here. I found myself being matched with women whom either had nothing to say in their extremely abbreviated profiles or who couldn't put a coherent sentence together if it depended on their lives or who were so boring and sedate that their profiles almost gave me cancer. But my biggest gripe with eHarmony is the overwhelming pressure of conformity. I think it is very misleading to put together a site that proclaims itself to be a place for people who are serious about finding the right person and then force that person to shoehorn their personality into a profile through point and click questions and pre-formatted answers. I think in order to find the right person it is imperative to put your real personality, your whole personality, warts and all, out there. But not only does the format of their website make this challenging at best, but the labeling and denigration that follows when you try to be honest with others about yourself, is crippling. The people on that website seems to delight in pigeon holing your personality based on the most insignificant part of yourself that you have the temerity to reveal. For example, I once posted a thread on their message board about how much I despised the people who use "other" when closing a match when there were so many other options to choose from (almost 20 of them I think). I was called crazy, passive aggressive, by people who at the same time said that they felt that using "other" was appropriate because the answers provided did not allow them to say the exact demeaning, mean spirited thing they wanted to say. Nothin' like being judged by a bunch of dysfunctional a-holes who can't condense a serious of thoughts or impressions into a single sentence. No wonder these losers are single. As for the lack of customer service I think it comes down to the fact that customer turn over is their stock and trade. After all how can you keep people interested in a dating site of you keep recycling the same old faces over and over again. In the end I cannot in good conscience recommend eHarmony to anyone. Their focus is not on helping you find the right person but instead it is on cajoling people into paying to communicate with other people that a computer program has determined are compatible for them, whether that is the case or not. I can't see myself ever being successfully matched with anyone on that site for the simple reason that I cannot understand why any thinking, emotionally mature adult would surrender their pursuit of love along with their understanding of what and who they are attracted to into the hands of a computer and allow it to decide who is best suited for them. If I am going to use on line dating I alone am going to determine who I am attracted to. But I will give them props for their advertising campaign. It is one of the most effective I've ever seen. Heck I consider myself an intelligent and articulate man and it suckered me. But I guess it comes down the fact that I believed that anyone who profits by the worlds most universal dream must be sincere in its claims. As the Who said, I won't get fooled again. Just one question in closing, if eHarmony has matched so many people successfully (as they claim to have) why do we keep seeing the same 5 commercials over and over again?