Reviews of eHarmony

I have to give eharmony 4 stars because I am married to the one and only person I every communicated with via the website. I don't know how it happened but when I filled out the questionaire they sent me 3 guys within the first 24 hours. It was the usual drill, you couldn't communicate without joining and they had some special where you could join for 3 months for 49.00 or something. Anyway, this one guy's picture just spoke to me and I joined just so I could communicate with him. He lived like 2 hours from me. Anyway, we went through the whole tedious process and emailed and talked on the phone for a couple of months. Finally we met for dinner, never went out with anyone else after that, and got married a year and couple of months after our 1st date. I can't address many of the issues people are complaining about because my experience with eharmony was limited but I notice that a lot of people say that they recieved messages saying that the person with whom they were corresponding suddenly decided to cease communicating for no apparent reason. This happens when the other person's subscription expires and they don't extend. My husband and I were communicating independant of eharmony when his 3 month subscription expired and eharmony sent me a message saying he had elected to stop communicating with me. Of course, at that point it didn't matter but I didn't think it was very nice of them.

I could give eHarmony 5 stars, since I met the person that I'm probably going to marry on it, but I believe in objective reviews, so it's only going to get 3 stars.

I've been on eHarmony 3 times in the past few years. The first time, I got nothing. To be fair, I lost a LOT of weight in the last couple of years, and I'm much cuter now than I used to be. Attractiveness is, unfortunately, a necessity for most people. I recognize this, so I can't hold it again eHarmony.

Now that I'm cute, I figured I would try again. The second time, I met someone off the website, but started dating someone else that I met at a wedding, so I stopped seeing the guy from eHarmony. To be honest, he was a nice guy, but there was no chemistry for me.

The most recent time, I met someone off the site within a week. He was in my first set of matches, and he seems to be perfect in every way (for me, at least).

So... let me give you the objective rundown on eHarmony. It's irritatingly slow and it's REALLY expensive. The best way to deal with the expensive part is to try to find a coupon that they email out. If you haven't been on the site before, you won't find one, probably. So... shell out the money for ONE MONTH. Then CANCEL before the second month (no, it's not hard... in fact, it's really easy... I'll get into that in a second). They will send you a coupon within a week. They are CONSTANTLY sending coupons. Then it's like $50 for 3 months, a WAY better deal.

About cancelling... I've NEVER had a problem. The 1 year, 6 month, and 3 month deals are non-renewable (at least, they used to be, and I believe they still are). That means if you sign up for one of those plans, you are stuck with it, but you won't have to pay more at the end of the time. If you sign up for a month, YOU WILL GET CHARGED EVERY MONTH. I see so many people complaining about this. IT'S LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WHEN YOU SIGN UP! Just be aware of that! It's not complicated.

Now... about the slow communication. There is really nothing you can do about it. It's ridiculously slow. You have to go through like 5 communication things before you get to write emails. Someone could easily lose interest after you've invested a fair amount of time responding to them. Just deal with it and move on to someone else.

You will get matched with people who aren't members. You won't know who those people are. Nothing you can do about it. Just try to open communication and hopefully they will respond. That's the only advice I have on this one.

I personally have no problem opening communication with guys. I opened it with my boyfriend now. He said he never had a girl do that before. I don't see what the problem is. If I thought someone was vaguely interesting, then I would give it a shot. If not, I would close them out. I had at least 30 people I was trying to communicate with. Of those people, I would say maybe 7 to 10 actually wrote me back. A couple just closed me out.

People will close you. It sucks, but it's true. I hate the "I just don't think the chemistry is there" reason. How the hell can anyone know that from reading a profile? I've closed people because they didn't fit my idea of religion (I'm not religious and I just can't be with someone who is REALLY into their religion). I would never tell someone there is no chemistry, however. I just use the "other" reason. It seems to be the nicest.

Now about matches... I think you really need to live in a metropolitan area if you want a lot of matches. Everytime I was on eHarmony, I had over 100 matches. I live in Southern California. Most of them were near me... a few were up to 120 miles away. Now, I don't like long distance relationships, but if it's someone perfect, I will give it a try. If you don't live in a large area, you're going to have problems on eHarmony. You will either need to look far and wide, or just deal with the few you get. Oh... and btw... it's not eHarmony's fault if you don't like how someone looks. When you pay for a service like this, you are taking a gamble. Sign up for a month and if you don't like it, cancel. If you do, cancel anyway, and then get the coupon so it's cheaper. So... gamble away, but please realize it IS a gamble, and don't blame eHarmony for its members.

So does eHarmony really set you up with people who are compatible with you? I have no idea. I haven't seen a difference between people I meet on the street and people from eHarmony. I think it takes time to really know. But then... what is compatibility? I've been asking myself that.

My boyfriend and I have nothing in common. I swear. Nothing. The only thing we have is similar taste in 80's music. He is a work-out freak. I had gastric bypass 2 1/2 years ago. He loves stupid comedy movies. I hate them. I'm a theatre freak. He has been to 2 musicals in his life... and one of them was only because I was in it. The list like that goes on and on and on. And yet... we get along perfectly. We want exactly the same things out of life. So... maybe there is something to this "compatibility." I don't know... I have no idea why we were matched, but it seems to work.

What I honestly think? I think it's luck. I think you could meet someone at a bar, or at the park, or whereever. I think this time I just got lucky. So... if you think you can afford it and want to GAMBLE (because that's all it is, like everything else in life), then go ahead and you might meet someone perfect for you.

If you go into it thinking that you will definitely meet the person your dreams, you will probably be sorely disappointed. Take it for what it is. It's a dating website. The main difference between eHarmony and Yahoo and Match is that the guys seem to be way more serious about relationships. It's time consuming and expensive, so it seems to weed out the non-serious guys. For that reason only, I recommend giving it a try.

It should be zero stars, but I digress . . . I've been thoroughly amused with eHarmony's offers to my email box about "3 for 1 offer" . . . "offer has been extended" . . . "last chance to take advantage of savings" . . . and all other sorts of teasers to rejoin eHarmony after I let the trial subscription lapse over a year ago. And ever since then I get several offers, every month, from eHarmony to rejoin . . . that it is an extended last chance. And they have been extending those "last chances" to me over a dozen times this past year. And I always thought that after the deadline of a "last chance" had passed, then nothing more would be heard from them . . . not the case at all. What a joke!

I am an attractive, fit, 45-year old professional woman who lives in the Houston metro. I agree that eHarmony was a total waste of time and money. And speaking of money, it also took a phone call to cancel my subscription and get my refund. All of my matches (a whopping total of 3 men) lived way outside of the Houston area in some bo-punk town I'd never even heard of. They sent me one match that lived in Corpus which is a five hour drive. It was obvious from their pictures, my so called matches did not take care of themselves, which to me, is very important. I don't think this website matches people up in any meaningful way despite of their advertised 29 point personality criterion. The next week, I received another four matches that were also outside of the Houston area. All of these men either looked like Santa Claus, one of the members of ZZTop, or half werewolf. Sorry friends, but I'd rather go alone to the party than show up with someone like that. I am not a superficial person, but could never find chemistry with someone that doesn't take care of their physical appearance.

This site is a complete waste of time and money.

There's no way to search for matches you may be interested in. Not everyone wants someone with their exact personality traits. After 3 years of using this off and on, I can say I've had a grand total of about 3 different women I was able to meet in person. The vast majority don't pay for the service, so they can't respond. The site will not tell you that your 15 matches are not users, tricking you into forking over your money and then getting zilch responses when trying to contact the matches. And while I can't blame the site, the women I've met are extremely shy and barely talk in person. I can see why they're using this website.

The site also suffers seriously from crashing and slowness. Routinely, it doesn't even work at night or "all member pictures are unavailable" suddenly appears for the duration of the evening. I don't know where all their money is going but it's not into hardware that runs the website.

Use your $60/month to go have a nice dinner, rent some videos, go spend a day at Disney. You'll get more value of of that stuff than this waste of time. Also, try meetup.com. It's free, for the most part, and will help you find social groups with similar interests. I'd give that site 5 stars even though it's not really a dating or personals website. It's more like real life. Meet some folks. Have some fun. And just get to know people.

The message is to Jenna from CT. you posted your comments on 03/27/2007. I'm taking a long shot here. I live in Florida first off. You seem to be very interesting to me. I would love to have conversation with you. I to wanted to search dating services online. I started with true.com by accident. In any case when I saw the credit card form I started thing hmmm baby I should review search through google first. Holy cow did they get slammed. Well A few weeks later I get all these email from them and I see how they tempt you to join. Well this morning I thought about eharmony which brings me here. I sure hope you read this. I hope you email me I'm white 45yr old white male in good shape. I'll tell you more at jfseeking@gmail.com. Yes I created this email just for this reason.

Jerry

I couldn't agree more with wonderland from nyc... Although I do believe his review might be a little harsh, I agree that many people are expecting eharmony to match them up with someone who is a "perfect person" that will solve all of their life problems, they will ride off into the sunset and live hapily ever after. The reality is though, that eharmony will try to match you with YOUR perfect person based on who YOU are. If you are truly looking for your match, ask yourself if a 5'10" blonde bombshell is really what you are looking for. I had similar statistics as wonderland... but I do think more men post photos than women-- only a few of my matches didn't have photos. (maybe more women are worried about being judged solely by their physical appearance)

As for me, I did find my perfect person on eharmony. I think it worked so well for us because we both have a strong sense of self and knew what we were REALLY looking for in a partner. If you hate sports would you want to spend your life with someone who looked like a model but lived at the gym? Or if you love being outdoors, hiking, camping, etc. would you really want to be matched up with a woman that couldn't survive without a hairdryer and stiletto heels?

If you're looking to shop around by photos and find someone that looks good on the surface and might be fun to date but don't really care about a long term match you're probably better off mentally and financially going to myspace or true.com. But if you're really looking for true compatibility eharmony gives you just that. And actually there are quite a few attractive people on eharmony too (my perfect match is very attractive!), and the best part is that they are attractive AND compatible on many deeper issues. (values, family, religion, motivation, career, etc.)

Eharmony isn't going to be your savior and match you with someone "out of your league" that you couldn't get on your own. Same dating standards apply as do in "real life" before the internet. The only thing is that eharmony weeds out all of those that you could and would probably date but would realize in time that you have some compatibility issues.

As for the technical difficulties, I had none. Never had a problem canceling my membership, always got my communications, etc. I hate to point out a reality but the closed match because they "never received an e-mail" has a strange parallel with girls (or guys) that give out the wrong phone number at the bar... then someone tries to call and finds "this number has been disconnected." Complaining to eharmony about not getting an e-mail would be like calling AT&T and complaining "THE NUMBER SHE GAVE ME WON'T WORK!"

Apparently I'm some sort of bizarre mutant with nothing in common with the rest of humanity since eHarmony cannot find a single match for me...well all I have to say is "I am NOT an ANIMAL...I AM A MAN!"...oh well, back to the bell tower!!.

After answering over 400 questions about almost everything under the sun, I received a message stating that eharmony would not be able to match me due to my answers... I am just a normal, down-to-earth, go- to- work everyday black female looking for love, and I answered the questions as such. I don't worship the devil,I'm not a lesbian or bisexual. But somehow, my personality was too unique to be matched on eharmony. I guess honesty is not what they're looking for when you answer the questions. I think your answers must precisely fit the personality types that are obviously already set in the system. What a waste of time.

It's not really horrible but it's certainly no better than any of the other internet dating sites out there and Eharmony charges two or three times as much as the others. The men I was matched up with all lived more than 30 miles out of my area. Most of them closed the match stating "I feel the physical distance between us is too great." I certainly agree, yet Eharmony insists on making these long distance matches. Also, in spite of Eharmony's claims that they will match you with someone who loves you for who you really are, all the men I was matched with, according to their profiles were looking for a tropy mate, the Barbie Doll type. Like I said, no better or worse than the other sites but not at three times the price.