Back when I was doing the online dating thing I gave eHarmony a try. Match was kind of like an online meat market, but eHarmony promised real compatibility based on a supposedly sophisticated personality profiling test. Rumor had/has it that they even reject people once in a while for flunking the profiling test which is or was supposedly the same one used by the FBI (this was some time ago, maybe that claim/rumor has changed).

I wasn't really ever happy with eHarmony. I kept getting matches assigned to me that were much older (at the time I wasn't gonna entertain that) and very "stuffy shirt" kind of people that I thought I'd have nothing in common with (me with degrees in the arts).

Anyhoo the real failure of eHarmony was apparent when they matched me up with a vivisector -- yes, I kid you not. At the time I was vegan and occasionally went to the circus to hand out leaflets protesting the cruel animal training practices. Get this: They match an animal welfare advocate with someone who experiments on animals for a living. Ya think their "sophisticated" test would've caught a huge error like that, but obviously it didn't.

Me being the open-minded type, I looked at the man's profile and sent him a nice note. I told him I wasn't really comfortable proceeding. I didn't say anything nasty as I understand people have feelings. I simply told him I advocate for animals in my spare time -- like saying I play badminton... same tone. This guy flipped out on me and sent me a scathing, frightening rant. Nevermind that he didn't know me or how respectful and "proper" my advocating activities were (like bailing dogs out of the pound on their execution day). This guy went berserk. I gotta tell ya, there's a real good reason he was single... dude was imbalanced, which was quite evident from his freaky note to me. Now, I should've probably picked up on it earlier from his profile which had some bizarre elements as well (he adopted an infant daughter from Asia as a single man and referred to her as his "princess" numerous times -- something like 10 -- in his profile. It was beyond a reasonable amount and not "normal"). But his irrational, bizarre rant was the proverbial last straw... I had enough evidence the guy had a screw loose in his PhD-addled brain.

So, eHarmony failed on two counts really. They made an extremely poor match -- their profiling test matched up a vivisector with an animal advocate. And, despite the supposed protections in their profiling test to weed out imbalanced people, they also let a guy who appeared to be a psycho through and unleashed him on innocent women.

I'm sure there are some people out there that are glad they used eHarmony and are happily married. They probably live in Cleveland or Little Rock. I can just tell you from my experience however, that it's not any better than any other service out there. And, funny enough I did meet my boyfriend online and it wasn't on eHarmony. It was on another service during a 3-day free trial period and I chose him myself... sent him a "wink" and the rest is history. I liked what he said in his profile and that was that.

There's something to be said for being your own authority and not letting a machine or algorithm choose your mate for you.