I took their quiz, said I was an atheist and was accepted and matched with several people.
I never used the site much since I started dating my now-husband soon after I opened the account, but they did give me some real, actual people who contacted me.
You don’t need e-harmony.
The Shroud meet tobymonster. tobymonster meet The Shroud.
There…ignorance fought!
I filled out the eHarmony questionnaire just for fun one day, as I was curious about how detailed it was and what questions were asked. (I must have been bored.) I answered all the questions honestly, including being an atheist, and I got rejected by the service.
Good thing I’m already married.
That blows. I wonder why they rejected you.
Nevermind.
Well, I can see that it isn’t really that big a deal. It certainly turned me off from their service when I was single, and I suspect I’m not alone. I’m guessing that they do cater to a conservative clientele as a result. That would be my assumption about a service that excludes gays. You are right, it is not time to break out the torches. Actually, it almost never is, but this in particular isn’t nearly as outrageous as I felt it was a few years ago.
I must admit, I don’t really know how these services work. I’m surprised to find that people with completely incompatible profiles can view each other. That sounds much more like social networking than match making.
Lawdy lawdy lawdy.
I suppose one could argue that they’re catering to conservative clients- but this does take the bite away from what I was saying.
I’m on eH and they send me matches all the time from women who self-identify as “neither religious nor spiritual” which I assume to be their euphemism for atheist/agnostic.
I self-identified as “spiritual but not religious” but said that it wasn’t an important criteria for a match. The vast majority of the matches they send me are SBNR, with a smattering of Christian, neither/nors, and the occasional Buddhist.
So as to the OP: hooey.
Years ago I was on eHarmony. I clearly stated that I was Jewish. They did not reject me, and I was sent some matches. They didn’t work out, but that’s another story.
I suspect there is a response filter for depressed and emotionally distraught people that bars them for joining the e-harmony cohort. This may seem unfair, but it is practical if you are a member and are looking for a population of relatively emotionally stable peers to start long term relationships with.
When I tried it out, the problem I had wasn’t that I got rejected. The problem I had was that even after an hour of asking me questions, it still managed to come up with a personality profile for me which was simultaneously less accurate and more vague than the typical horoscope. I figured that if that’s the best they can describe me, then I’m not too interested in who they’d think would be a good match for me.
That, and the fact that they charge about five times as much as any other matchup site, and dodge the question of why.
I think the answer to why they charge so much is simple. It helps stratify the clientele. Members are either desperate or well off. Simple questions will probably distinguish the two. Their selection process probably has less to do with a good algorithm and more to do with the fact that the types that go there are easily sorted. In fact, they seem to reject anyone that they can’t easily sort.
My friend has a funny story about e-Harmony matching her up with a guy that she knew and actually loathed.
e-Harmony also claimed that she and I had identical personalities, which was ridiculous. It’s a weird place.
eHarmony rejects a lot of people because they fill out the questionnaire inconsistently. There are a lot of myths and rumors that they discriminate against groups or whatever, but no one has ever shown it conculsively, which would be pretty easy to prove just by filling out all the questions except one in different profiles. They do (sort of) discriminate against gays, but they realize there is a big market and made a gay dating site.
The reason for almost all rejections is that people overthink the questions or just fill them in at random. If you pay attention, the quiz uses a standard personality profile type test – go through it and look at the questions. You’ll notice they repeat each question several times. There are also truthfulness test questions, though there are less in the eHarmony profile quiz than in a lot of other tests. If you answer too many of the same question in wildly different ways, or you have too many “dishonest” answers, the system will reject you because it can’t fit you into a proper profile.
A lot of people, when they take these tests, read too much into the questions, and thereby have too many inconsistent answers. Imagine if someone said they are a very happy depressive who is interested in settling down in a predictable wildly spontaneous seriously casual relationship. That’s a problem that the site’s matching features can’t handle.
The system is somewhat crude, and the matching might or not work well. But I’ve never seen a credible accusation of bias towards conservatives or liberals or professionals or certain religions, other than the aforementioned same-sex matching. They might filter out seriously mentally ill people, but again, I’ve not seen any real evidence of that.
Missed edit:
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_Response_Theory for a much more detailed starting point about how these tests work.
Yabbut what if TWO people said that? eHarmony could be missing out on some serious coin.
That’s true of all tests like this. And i drives me nuts, as sometimes the inconsistency is just because you asked the question differently. It’s hard to figure out the right amount of thinking so that you won’t accidentally mess up, but also won’t overanalyze the question.
I think my insistence is one of the reasons my psychologist noticed I had OCD.
I remember there was some such website years ago I’d filled out responses, and it actually suggested to try one of their sister sites instead of saying “we can’t work with this!” and nothing else. It may have been adultfriendfinder, but I’m not sure.
Deep Compatibility :rolleyes:
Chemistry.com used to run ads centered around the fact that it accepted people who were rejected by eHarmony. That might be an option. Of course, then you’re fishing in the dating pool of people who have been rejected by eHarmony. :dubious:
Apropos of nothing, I once was looking up some articles about eHarmony on some site, and the Google ads on the page included one that promised: “Meet Bipolar Singles!” There’s a service for everyone, I guess.
Yeah, my basic understanding of the service is that if you ask enough random questions you’ll get 80% of everyone giving more or less the same answers, and 20% giving odd answers. You can class these as regular and “special” people. Probably half of the 20% are special because they are more interesting. The other half is special because they are crazy or otherwise mentally ill.
Either way, if you get rid of everyone interesting, you can more or less match any two people together and they’re liable to do decently well with one another because basically any two regular people can get along well enough.