Finding true love online

I know of about two online dating sites: match.com and eharmony.com. For the longest time, I was under the impression that eharmony was a more serious site because they had a detailed questionnaire that you have to fill in before they generate matches based on some complicated algorithm that takes into account the 29 or so aspects of your personality. I have, on several occasions, wondered what that questionnaire was like.

A couple of days ago, a friend told me about this friend of his who was deemed "undatable" by eharmony's quiz. Wow, that sounds pretty serious. I also learnt that one can take the quiz and sign up for a trial subscription (limit of 10 matches) on eharmony -- in other words, I can take that very informative quiz for free if I wanted to. eharmony's advertising campaign (it's scientifically proven online dating!) worked: I found myself spending about an hour, answering 12-15 pages of questions (I almost gave up), and getting several matches. But I jump ahead of myself. For those who have never tried online dating sites, I thought it would be interesting to give a few more details so that you can find out what you're missing out on. My roommate suggests that I try match.com, meet up with a couple of guys and write a comparative article on these dating sites and the results. It sounds like a little more trouble than I'm willing to go through. But I've done the first part of the research, and I present you here with the preliminary findings.

The first thing that struck me was that eharmony only allows you to be a "man seeking a woman" or a "woman seeking a man". No queers. I wonder if you can sue them for discrimination. I was next disappointed by 3 pages of words that may describe me, ranked on a scale of 1 through 7 (1 being not at all, and 7 being very). I should have kept better notes about what followed, but I didn't. There were a couple (or maybe 3) pages on activities that I may find interesting (ranked again from 1 through 7), some short questions on what I'm most passionate about, and who has been a big influence on me, and what I can't live without and am thankful for, what my strengths are and what my friends think of me. Of course, there needs to be a few pages on what I think is important in a partner (again ranked on a scale of 1 through 7), what I am willing to accept for religion, drinking habits, smoking, ethnicity, whether I want children, my height, age and all that mundane things (no, they didn't ask for my weight). And finally, there is the page where I say that I accept their terms and conditions and they give me my personality profile and find me some matches.

First thing about the personality profile -- they don't give you a report in 20 parts. No. Instead, you get a report that describes you on 5 different levels: agreeableness, openness, emotional stability, conscientiousness and extraversion. I basically found out that I am who I thought I was (what a relief!) -- rather moderate in all aspects except for extraversion (I'm reserved in case you didn't know). From those 12 pages of question and answer, I got out about as much information as I would have if I had taken some random online quizzes -- since you are described by 5 criteria, you probably need to take 5 quizzes. Of course, those short questions I had to answer were displayed on my profile page for my matches to read and find out more about me. The next thing to do was to see my matches to see how well the matching algorithm worked.

I came up with 6 matches -- 3 asian and 3 white guys. It seemed to me that the asian guys were very brief with their short answers (about 1-2 lines) while the white guys wrote short paragraphs that were more descriptive. If you're a guy reading my blog and you ever try these dating sites out, my advice to you is that more is better. Write freely, and make sure you write well. While everyone is going to sound like a SNAG (is this term still used these days?), at least you won't get thrown aside immediately based on the fact that there are other guys who seem more open and interesting. Enough said.

In general, my matches were people that I wouldn't mind meeting, although the asian guys weren't as interesting because they wrote very little, and very concisely. Perhaps if you had a different criteria, you would have a different opinion. There was an obvious mismatch, and he must have realized it to because he closed communication with me the next morning. I was not impressed with spelling mistakes (typos are fine, like putting in an extra letter somewhere) -- one guy claimed to have been a playwright, except he spelt "playwrite". I might have considered clicking the "start comunicating" button, except that spelling mistake put me off. I pretty much ended my eharmony session on that note.

This morning, I woke up to find 7 e-mails from eharmony.com: 6 telling me that there was a guy they wanted me to meet, and 1 telling me that a certain Mr T wanted to start communicating with me. I actually used a real e-mail address with eharmony.com because you communicate via server e-mails, and I didn't want to bother with checking a fake e-mail account.

There are 2 options for comunicating on eharmony: guided communication, or open communication. The guided comunication process involves 2 rounds of mutual Q&A's, and sending a list of Must-Haves and Can't-Stands in between, before moving on to open communication. The fast track version is jumping straight to open communication. Mr T chose the guided communication track.

As far as the 1st round of Q&A's go, it seems that he selects 4 closed-ended questions from a list and sends them to me. If none of the above answers work, I can fill in a 4th blank answer. I think that the 2nd round of Q&A's probably involve selecting from a list of open-ended questions. It's quite like a beauty pageant, with different rounds and chances for elimination. So far, I like the guided communication track.

Since I wasn't aware of the option to close communication immediately last night, I now have to deal with my new cyber friend. I started using eharmony.com to see my personality profile (disappointing), and to see how it was possible for a guy to be "undatable" (seriously, ouch). Should I actually communicate with Mr T? There are several more layers of screening to go, and I could eliminate him, or he could eliminate me along the way. But what if we actually make it through the 2nd round of Q&A? I wasn't planning on looking for anyone, and it seems that people who sign up with eharmony.com are looking for more than just dating partners. Maybe I am over thinking this. It would be fun to try it out. I don't know.

So far, the online dating experience has been rather interesting -- I do think that it is a good way to meet a specific group of people with the same goals. In fact, it is efficient. I might actually try online dating someday, maybe someday soon if I decide to carry on communicating with Mr T (I'm using the word "communicate" a lot because it's eharmony jargon). But I've used up my 10 matches limit on the trial subscription, and that's about as far as I want to take it for now. Now what should I do with Mr T?

Addedum: It turns out that I can't start communicating unless I subscribe. I guess that's it with Mr T then. I closed communication, and I would like to tell him the truth, except I can't actually say more than check a box. I checked the box that said "Other" for reasons I'm closing communication since I can't write my own reply.