First off, everyone reading this needs to understand that the author is giving you this information as entertainment only; and that you are responsible for your own actions, and that my experiences described below are my own personal experiences and I do not claim to know what the typical results are for anything that I will now type about.

Sorry about that, but after paying for online dating memberships I don’t have enough money left over to get sued! ZING!!!
Now that I should be a little safer with the legal crowd, here we go!!!

My personal experience on e-harmony was very disappointing; and frankly a bit of a waste of money in my case. I will not say that the site can not work, and I will say that it may have done a very good job for other people, but given what I have experienced over the course of a six month membership I would only recommend the site as a supplemental approach to meet women that either are not on other dating sites, or not online; albeit a relatively expensive one when compared to other sites.

The hard facts:
I bought a six month membership after trying the service on and off for a few months, I came to this decision because the site made several comments to me along the same lines as this one: “finding the right person for you can take time, but with more members than ever registering with eHarmony every day, we believe your special someone is out there. We urge you to be patient, consider all your matches, and stay positive. When you finally find the right person, it's so worth it!”
- E-harmony Customer Care, in an e-mail to me the day my six month membership expired.

I had a total of 339 matches over the course of my memberships. Of those I had met 2 in person (For the purposes of staying factual with this argument I will consider meeting someone in person a success.) meaning I had a success rate at e-harmony of 169.5 to 1; or 0.5%.

I also had memberships on other websites during the same six month time frame, (I will not give the name of the websites so that people do not argue or think to themselves that this is an advertisement for those sites.) on which I took the information that I TYPED in to e-harmony in the “introductory information” portion of my profile and combined that information into one cohesive description of myself. So any difference in the two profiles would be the wording I used to stitch the portions I decided to use together, and the lack of e-harmony’s matching system and questionnaire. Arguably, that left e-harmony with a clear information advantage on the subject of my personality over the other sites. On the most successful other site I can not tell you how many matches they gave me, as I shopped around myself, but I can tell you that from the time that I put my profile together as I mentioned above and the time my six month membership on e-harmony expired I had e-mailed 34 women, and met 3. I don’t think I even have to do the math for you to see an advantage; but I figure that it helps to drive my point home. This would come to a success rate of 11.3 to 1; or 8.8%. Oh, I forgot to mention that this site which I had the most success on is a free site; meaning, it costs nothing to put up a profile, e-mail, or use any of the services that I used to get these results.

What I did not like:
The biggest complaint I have with e-harmony is the fact that you do not know how many people that you are matched with are paying members, and as of the time I am writing this e-harmony does not allow people who do not have a paid membership to contact a paying member outside of what they call an icebreaker; so I do not even know how many of those seemingly lovely women that I was matched with actually wanted to communicate with me; but were not able to do so because they were not willing to pay the price for the membership. In all fairness to e-harmony, there is every possibility that every person that I was matched with did have a membership and simply did not wish to communicate with me for their own reasons, as I have no physical proof that they all did not have memberships, and a number of women did in fact contact me through the site, but than either closed communication with me, or I did with them (In affect telling you they are not interested, which on e-harmony means you can only send them a farewell message from a list that they wrote.); but if this is the case, than it is quite clear that it is not the site for me personally!

In conclusion; I would only renew my membership to e-harmony if they were to change two things:
First, I would want some kind of message on the top of the profile of anyone that is matched with me that clearly states in the same font as the “introductory information” that this person is not a paying member. Second, allow non paying members to use every feature on the site to contact any paying member that contacted them first is able to use.