I signed up for eHarmony a few years ago, but never bothered to finish filling out the questionnaire. I’ll still receive some interesting articles from them via email, but one such recent article made a claim that I find completely unbelievable:
The article can be found here. Doesn’t 200 marriages a day seem like a lot? I’d be hard-pressed to believe that one marriage a day occurs between people who met on eHarmony. If someone called on eHarmony to prove this statistic, do you think they would? Is there even a way to call them on it?
By the way, 200 marriages a day is 1400 marriages a week, 6000 marriages a month, and 73,000 marriages a year. :eek:
That has got to be a typo. I could begin to believe 200 marriages per year. Of course, eHarmony heavily selects for people who are looking for marriage, so I might even go for 200 per month.
Interesting you should say that. The About page claims 236 people getting married, but the article claims 200 marriages. Sounds like it’s either a typo or eHarmony was hoping people wouldn’t make the distinction. Either way, even if it is just 118 marriages, that’s still a hell of a lot, and I’m :dubious:.
I dunno. Maybe there’s a large, secret Animals and Objects section that we don’t know about, but you may get refered to based on your compatability survey.
The numbers there don’t match up, though they do mention doing the poll in conjunction with eHarmony. This poll was dated January of 2006, while the one cited by eHarmony above is dated running for a year till March 2007. I did an archive check for 2007 and nothing turns up.
Maybe that poll was private? Seems odd it isn’t on the Harris Interactive website.
236 marriages a day (or even 118 marriages a day) seems excessive. The claim to have had over 20 million registered users since inception in all, U.S. and abroad. Not sure how that translates to 236 marriages. I note Harris polled ~7000 Americans and extrapolated that to the population as a whole, presumably by the same techniques they extrapolate the results of any poll they conduct.
Eharmony was founded in 2000. Since then there have been ~3000 days. With an average 236 people getting married each day (don’t jump on me yet, stats geeks, I’ll revisit that) , that would be about 700,000 people married. Say the 20 million users are half US half outside the US. That would mean about 7% of eHarmony users had gotten married through it. Pretty good stat but not outrageously unbelieveable.
Also, if 236 ppl a day are getting married now - well, that number was likely considerably lower in past years (in the year 2000, frinstance). So the average over the 8 years, and hence their overall percentages could be considerably lower (and more believeable) without negating the “236 a day” stat.
I don’t know about eHarmony, but I do wonder about the math ability of its publicity-hired arm.
I have never figured out exactly if CA governor Gray Davis increased the car registration fees 3x or 300%, because the local reporters were so math deficient that they couldn’t decide on which it was. I’m convinced they honestly didn’t know there was a difference.
This is what makes me wail like a coyote when the IDIOT science reporters from the mainstream media try to claim that their lack of understanding of science is what qualifies them to tell the “normal” people about science.
According to this site, there were about 2.2 million marriages in 2005 in the United States.
So, assuming the 200+ per day figure is for the United States, it would seem that e-harmony is claiming credit for about 3% of American marriages.
Which sounds high to me, but not outrageously high if one assume that a large percentage of couples meet on the internet and that e-harmony is the leading provider of internet dating services.
There was a thread some time ago about e-Harmony. Note the use of the term “blessed” in the OP. The founder has a degree in theology or something. e-Harmony is biased for people who are strong churchgoing types with very conservative, traditional attitudes about marriage, family, and so on. So if you fit their criteria, there’s a good chance you’ll meet others with like attitudes.
If you’re like my niece, however—has a doctorate, atheist, opinionated, self-sufficient, liberal—they won’t even take you on as a client.
Increasing three times generally means that you keep what’s already there, and add two more. Multiplying by 3. It comes out to an increase of 200%
If you increase by 300%, then you’re increasing it fourfold (4x).
It’s not the numbers that are tripping people up, it’s the conventions attached to particular usages, whether you’re looking at the totality or only the difference from what was there before.
The other misrepresentation in the statement is that it doesn’t say the couples met through eHarmony, just that they are members. Perhaps they joined years ago, still have active accounts, but later met and married someone in the real world.
ETA: DUH. Nevermind, I really didn’t read it right I guess!
