I hope some of my previous posts over the last few weeks have piqued your interest in online dating. Today I’ll explore some comparisons between the major dating services.
These can be broken down into two major categories: 1) those that match you with other people and let each of you know about the match, and 2) those where you can browse and contact people you’re interested in. EHarmony, Chemistry (a service owned by Match.com), and Perfect Match are examples of the first kind, and Match.com and Yahoo Personals are examples of the second kind (although I understand that Perfect Match has recently added a browsing option as well).
So which to choose? A lot of people are members of several services. I think this makes a lot of sense. The cost isn’t that big an obstacle to most people, and I think the potential reward is worth the added cost.
First let me point out that EHarmony is a bit different than the other services. First a practical matter. The EHarmony personality inventory has hundreds of questions and will take hours to complete. If this deters you, choose another service. But if their methodology works, it’s a great investment of time. After all, in the time you can spend on one bad date you can complete this inventory.
EHarmony bases its matches on theories it developed from observations of couples married for a long time. Many people have logged on to EHarmony for the first time and been aghast at the matches they were sent. This is because EHarmony purports to match purely on such things as personality and temperment. Appearance, style, and similar things do not enter into their matching.
It’s your job to select for those things. And is it really that hard to log on, go through a few profiles and either click the delete button or the button that indicates you’re interested?
Another interesting thing about EHarmony is that it is the only major online dating service that has more female members than male members. This is a major attraction for guys who are tired of writing emails to girls on Match.com and Yahoo Personals and getting few replies.
No one outside the EHarmony service actually knows if its methodology works. They won’t divulge their methodology and they selectively release their results, which makes it impossible to evaluate. But I suspect one thing is true about EHarmony members: if they go to all the trouble of completing the personality inventory and paying the fairly hefty fee, they’re likely to be very interested in a relationship. They’re not likely to have created a profile on a whim.
This is not true with quite a few people who create profiles on other services. You don’t have to pay to post a profile on Match.com or Yahoo Personals. I’ve known quite a few women who created profiles and didn’t pay to join. They can generally engage in very limited contact with people who contact them. For example, on Yahoo Personals, nonmembers could use the flirty little one-liners, but couldn’t send messages. This meant that another member might send them an email and they could reply only with a one-liner, which was not responsive to the email. After awhile I became aware of this and sent my phone number to the nonmembers.
This is especially annoying to guys because many women I’ve known adamantly refused to pay for a real membership. Since they were hot women, lots of guys contacted them, but few got through. Hmmm, this may have been a good thing, since I got through.
The major disadvantage of the systems that send you matches is volume. You might get one match a month up to several a day. But with the services that allow browsing, you can look at as many profiles and send as many messages as you would like.
I’ve noted a major annoyance with online dating: sending lots of emails and getting few replies. I suspect that guys will have a far better response from the sites that send you matches rather than the sites that allow only browsing. This is because of simple applied psychology: if an attractive woman on Match.com receives 2,000 emails a year (and I’m not making up this number), while an attractive woman on EHarmony receives 500 matches a year, only 400 of whom indicate an interest in her, she’ll be more likely to really look at those 400. If you’re one of 2,000 emails a girl receives, your profile has to immediately show big value to the girl for her not to just delete it.
Elizabeth Wasserman wrote a good article in The Atlantic magazine about online dating. Here’s the link:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200602u/online-dating
I’ll continue this comparison of online dating services later this week.
