Lately, I've been seeing a lot of letters, chatter, and blog posts around a central theme:
"I don't like a lot of the eHarmony matches that I've been paired with."
To which I reply: Well... duh!
In a way, I suppose it would be nice if a giant computer program could effortlessly match men and women with people they'll like and get along with.
But, human nature doesn't work that way. And even eHarmony never claimed that their matching algorithms predicted romantic chemistry.
It's just giving you a list of people, and stating that, according to it's psychological testing, if you and this person hit it off... you'd have better odds of having a good relationship than if you had drawn a random woman out of thin air.
There are going to be ones that you just won't hit it off with. But, with eHarmony, the odds that we'll get along (at least as friends) do seem a little better to me.
And, in the end, blaming eHarmony for this is like criticizing match.com for listing ugly women. Or blaming the bar for the fact that, after you've struck a conversation with a group of women, the obnoxious one is the one that is trying to monopolize your attention.
If you're not interested in a woman, there's a simple solution - don't approach her.
And, unlike most other venues, when you hit "Close match" on eHarmony, the woman that you don't like goes away. Forever.
You're not a robot. A computer can't tell you who you'll hit it off with.
But it can narrow the field to a more manageable list.
And if you disagree... no one's forcing you to continue your subscription.
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2 comments:
I gotta disagree with your central premise. I have absolutely no proof for this, but I think that outside of the requirements you specify (ethnicity, age, height, etc), eharmony does VERY little, if any, filtering. I would love to see the list of women they aren't matching me with. My hunch is that it's just like any other dating site - you specify your requirements and they give you a long list of matches. The only difference with eharmony is that they slowly send you matches rather than all at once. I truly believe that the only filtering that takes place, based on their questionaire, is when they deny membership altogether. It's a HUGE conspiracy. :)
But yeah, no sense it complaining about matches, just close.
According to statements made by their research director, eHarmony claims that, for a match to take place, their models must predict an 80% chance that you'll be in the top 25% in measures of relationship satisfaction. (A figure that I used for my "how many dates will I get" predictor.)
So, according to those claims, you're not seeing ABOUT (the actual number is likely to be lower) 75% of the people who would qualify on your self-selects alone.
Could they be blatantly lying? I can't prove that they're not.
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