The End of an eHarmony Era

So, the countdown has begun . . . I officially have only four more days left on my eHarmony subscription before it expires. A large part of me says good riddance to this money sucking, hope-draining total letdown of a service. Let me provide you with some statistics: I have been an eHarmony subscriber since April or so. In that time, eHarmony has matched me with over 200 guys. Out of those 200 guys, I have met three of them, gone on four dates, and had one almost date with a weird guy who my intuition told me to call and cancel with.

Is the problem me? In many ways yes. I tend to agonize over small details like, why doesn't this guy understand the difference between 'to' and 'too'? and why is this guy afraid to upload a decent picture of himself?, which in turn leads me to either close the match or ignore his profile.

Of course, there are other things too that are not in anybody's control such as where a person lives. The truth is, you can both live in the Dallas area, but it still might take an hour to meet that person, depending on where they live. One hour is practically long-distance, and nobody is looking for that sort of relationship.

No, in the spirit of the "it's not my fault" mentality, I blame my failure on eHarmony itself. I used to think online dating was the most wonderful concept. If you think about it, with online dating, it is presumed that all others on the service are single, unlike at a bar (or a dog park, in my case) where you see a really hot guy, even talk to him, but he may have a GF and you are out of luck. A person is also free to assume that for a paying service such as eHarmony, and also for a service that markets itself on matching people based on their personality characteristics, that one is getting access to quality people who all have the same goal: to find someone they are compatible with, that they have chemistry with, and that they can see themselves with in the long term.

I was wrong. The concept itself is counter to the way humans are programmed to make connections. The fact is that having access to all of these single guys while being forced to form an initial impression based only on their profiles is nothing short of an impossibility masked as opportunity. You can't win that game. Since a person is unable to use normal senses of sight, sound, and feeling, they must therefore make a judgment about the other person based solely on the words and pictures that the person has provided. With all the time in the world to peruse profiles, evaluate the meaning and undertones of a description, and then finally conduct and respond to questions and emails with as much time as one wishes, of course, a person becomes picky and lazy at the same time.

The truth is that NOTHING can replace human contact as a first impression. I am quite certain that many of the guys whose profiles I chose to ignore or not email, I might have had a connection with in real life, but for whatever reason, due to their picture or the way they described themselves, I had to make an assumption about that person, whether wrong or right, that we were probably not compatible. When two people meet in real life, they converse and react based on visual and audio queues which help guide the conversation and prevent word vomit or TMI. However, sentences in a profile can easily be misinterpreted because there is no other way to understand the words on a computer other than to take them at face value.

It kills me that I paid for a service for which I had no return on investment. The only good thing to come out of it was the realization that I am not the only one in the "still single and 26" boat, and I am not the only one who fell for that deceptively optimistic eHarmony commercial featuring "real subscribers" who are now happily coupled.