Does eHarmony work, and is it worth it?

[Lakter]

Hi. 

I'm wondering about eHarmony; it seems to be more of a 'proper' seeming dating app, rather than the usual ones of Tinder etc. but it's so expensive; £110 for six months, 160 for a year etc. At times, I seem to be going round in circles on Tinder and the other apps like Bumble and Hinge. 

I used eHarmony as a free account/without a subscription a few months ago - you can't message anyone on it without paying, but they had this really good 'icebreaker' thing that would let you find out your common interests with someone. I had a few message requests after we did those, but I couldn't view them as I wasn't a paid member. 

Would anyone with any experience of it know if it's good? Or if you've known anyone with experience with it, what did they say about it? Is it worth the price that they charge? 

[Foxhall]

I used it for a while when I was at the online game,

the icebreaker thing you mention- yes they have almost like a bank of questions which you can ask the perspective dates,

helpful perhaps if your struggling for small talk, indeed some questions good to memorise for an actual date too,

I did not get a whole lot of dates out of it, three I think, 

its probably a reasonable site though- the clientele are more likely to be looking for a serious relationship than a quick bit of play. 

you will probably have to be prepared to be a little patient with it though to get any results.

[SumGuy]

eHarmony worked for me, did get dates, and did meet someone who was amazing and we were together for some time.  It was the first OLD site used so the fact it did matching for you, you couldn't search wen I was on about 5 years back, was actually nice.  It did have a habit of ignoring my distance parameter.  Match ended up being much better for me in getting dates with women that were near and amazing, my girlfriend and I met through Match.

As to free sites, never did Tinder, but all the free sites were crap where I live.  Tinder where I live is a hook up oriented site mostly for people much younger than me, I'm 50+.

[d0nnivain]

I used it years ago.  I searched around for a coupon & got 3 months for a very reasonable price.   Get a short membership.  As you near the end, the system will offer you incentives to renew so it's cheaper then a long commitment up front.  

It takes a long time to fill out that questionnaire but IMO that weeds out the people who only wanted casual.  I could get casual in any bar; I didn't need to pay for that.  I wanted serious, marriage minded & highly educated.   Everyone the system matched me with seemed like they were those things so I can't fault the algorithm.  However none of them floated my boat.  Every guy I met was not somebody I would have gone out with had I been introduced to them in another fashion; all seemed socially awkward to me & lacked that j'nai c'est qua I was looking for.  They were all perfectly nice, well educated people but something was off.  

Here are the other problems with e-harmony. 

1.  You don't know if the people you are initially matched with -- those people who the cite sends you -- are still active paying members who can communicate with you.  After my subscription ran out I got daily e-mails telling me I had new matches which indicated to me the cite was still sending my picture / info to men.  If those men liked me & reached out, I didn't know about it because I was off the system.  To soothe my bruised ego I consoled myself with the idea that many men I reached out to may have been off the system even if the cite was still sending me their info. 

2.  You used to have to go through these preliminary steps of asking pre programed  Qs -- two different times -- more then 24 hours apart -- before you could directly communicate with your match.  So from like to direct unfiltered email took at least 3 days.  

3.  There is no way to search the whole database.  You only get to see the profiles of the people the algorithm says you match with.  You can play with the filters -- changing your acceptable age range & geography.   When you set your geography my recommendation is that you make it big enough to include the nearest big city to you.  ironically I made mine large enough to include NYC but got more matches from eastern PA.  

[Lakter]

50 minutes ago, d0nnivain said:

I used it years ago.  I searched around for a coupon & got 3 months for a very reasonable price.   Get a short membership.  As you near the end, the system will offer you incentives to renew so it's cheaper then a long commitment up front.  

It takes a long time to fill out that questionnaire but IMO that weeds out the people who only wanted casual.  I could get casual in any bar; I didn't need to pay for that.  I wanted serious, marriage minded & highly educated.   Everyone the system matched me with seemed like they were those things so I can't fault the algorithm.  However none of them floated my boat.  Every guy I met was not somebody I would have gone out with had I been introduced to them in another fashion; all seemed socially awkward to me & lacked that j'nai c'est qua I was looking for.  They were all perfectly nice, well educated people but something was off.  

Here are the other problems with e-harmony. 

1.  You don't know if the people you are initially matched with -- those people who the cite sends you -- are still active paying members who can communicate with you.  After my subscription ran out I got daily e-mails telling me I had new matches which indicated to me the cite was still sending my picture / info to men.  If those men liked me & reached out, I didn't know about it because I was off the system.  To soothe my bruised ego I consoled myself with the idea that many men I reached out to may have been off the system even if the cite was still sending me their info. 

2.  You used to have to go through these preliminary steps of asking pre programed  Qs -- two different times -- more then 24 hours apart -- before you could directly communicate with your match.  So from like to direct unfiltered email took at least 3 days.  

3.  There is no way to search the whole database.  You only get to see the profiles of the people the algorithm says you match with.  You can play with the filters -- changing your acceptable age range & geography.   When you set your geography my recommendation is that you make it big enough to include the nearest big city to you.  ironically I made mine large enough to include NYC but got more matches from eastern PA.  

I saw an offer earlier on today, on my old account and after I posted this topic, of a much reduced price for a membership. It was so much better than the prices I originally saw; about £3.50 a month or something, maybe more, for a year, and the other two time periods were much reduced as well. I made a new account just to start afresh and now they've made me an offer of a reduced price for the year's membership, but not as reduced as it was earlier - the first month is half price, then normal price after that. I have 25 hours to accept it. I wish they'd give me the offer that I saw earlier!

Edited January 20, 2021 by Lakter

[Lakter]

1 hour ago, SumGuy said:

eHarmony worked for me, did get dates, and did meet someone who was amazing and we were together for some time.  It was the first OLD site used so the fact it did matching for you, you couldn't search wen I was on about 5 years back, was actually nice.  It did have a habit of ignoring my distance parameter.  Match ended up being much better for me in getting dates with women that were near and amazing, my girlfriend and I met through Match.

As to free sites, never did Tinder, but all the free sites were crap where I live.  Tinder where I live is a hook up oriented site mostly for people much younger than me, I'm 50+.

Glad it worked out for you on Match! I see so many bad reviews on dating apps on my phone's app store. Tinder's alright, it's just full of time wasters - people who have a conversation with you, say they'll meet up and then never bother. You can sometimes tell who these are by the way that they communicate with you. I've found Bumble to be better, but you get fewer matches on there.

[Lakter]

2 hours ago, Foxhall said:

I used it for a while when I was at the online game,

the icebreaker thing you mention- yes they have almost like a bank of questions which you can ask the perspective dates,

helpful perhaps if your struggling for small talk, indeed some questions good to memorise for an actual date too,

I did not get a whole lot of dates out of it, three I think, 

its probably a reasonable site though- the clientele are more likely to be looking for a serious relationship than a quick bit of play. 

you will probably have to be prepared to be a little patient with it though to get any results.

Ah right. I really liked the icebreaker thing, it's something that no other app I've used had.

Yeah, the people who use it seem to be more after a relationship.

[d0nnivain]

19 minutes ago, Lakter said:

 I wish they'd give me the offer that I saw earlier!

Email them & ask for it.   They want your business so have no reason to say no

[SumGuy]

17 hours ago, d0nnivain said:

Email them & ask for it.   They want your business so have no reason to say no

Exactly, when I cancelled eHarmony and late Match their reps both reached out to me to offer me deals to sign back up.  With pandemic they are even more motivated to give you a deal.

[Ellener]

19 hours ago, SumGuy said:

It did have a habit of ignoring my distance parameter. 

I didn't consider how much of a thing this would be, the distance, but it's huge since Houston is huge! 

I once did eHarmony's personality testing @Lakter it was remarkably accurate.

[Wiseman2]

There's sort of a backlash from the initial flurry and ease of Tinder. 

[Cookiesandough]

I don’t think I would. If people can find love for free, why pay $29.99or whatever... 

Edited January 21, 2021 by Shortskirtslonglashes

[Lakter]

4 minutes ago, Wiseman2 said:

There's sort of a backlash from the initial flurry and ease of Tinder. 

How'd you mean?

[Lakter]

55 minutes ago, SumGuy said:

Exactly, when I cancelled eHarmony and late Match their reps both reached out to me to offer me deals to sign back up.  With pandemic they are even more motivated to give you a deal.

Ah right, I just need to find the price that they offered me before I deleted my old account yesterday. Can't remember it exactly.

[Lakter]

18 hours ago, d0nnivain said:

Email them & ask for it.   They want your business so have no reason to say no

Yeah, good idea, I'll do that.

[d0nnivain]

20 hours ago, Shortskirtslonglashes said:

I don’t think I would. If people can find love for free, why pay $29.99or whatever... 

But people aren't finding love for free so paying for some help has value.   Then again, when I did it I was much pickier since I was paying for it, then I was in real life. 

Two things:  I could find casual anywhere & this is important:  my DH was way outside of my specified parameters.  He was younger & with far less education then I required on line.  He was also on Match while I was in e-Harmony.  The systems had no chance of putting us together.  I was above his top age range too so relying solely on a platform to find love is not the best idea. 

[Weezy1973]

I met my wife through eHarmony so it worked for me. When the entry point is harder, it creates a self filtering for people who are more serious about a relationship. And eHarmony is expensive (relative to free), takes time to answer all the questions so their algorithms work, and takes getting through all the initial stages before actually getting to email someone. 
 

The downside is that far fewer people use it, which gives the impression of far fewer options. But the free sites falsely give the impression of endless options which wastes a ton of time. A  proxy for eHarmony for free was OKCupid back in the day - although I’ve heard it’s changed.  
 

As an exercise you can go onto OKCupid and answer about 100-200 of the questions. Then put in your preferences. Then sort by match percentage. Anything above 95% is a potentially good match. Now how many of those do you find attractive? You will see how few options there really are pretty quickly...

[mark clemson]

On 1/22/2021 at 5:16 AM, d0nnivain said:

Two things:  I could find casual anywhere & this is important:  my DH was way outside of my specified parameters.  He was younger & with far less education then I required on line.  He was also on Match while I was in e-Harmony.  The systems had no chance of putting us together.  I was above his top age range too so relying solely on a platform to find love is not the best idea. 

That's the issue with these match things. I believe they tend to work reasonably well (and no doubt the companies that do this could pull out some statistics if asked, and probably do in their marketing mtls). But there's always those who don't fit our preconceived notions of "what we want" but who turn out to be good partner anyhow. There are really plenty of "what are THEY doing together" married and/or committed couples out there. I think some of these things that also matter (and can sometimes matter a whole lot) like attachment styles and "love languages" that maybe aren't as easy to factor into a survey.

I also think some users try to game these systems. I've actually overheard women discussing doing exactly that, and no doubt there are men who do that too.

[QuietRiot]

13 hours ago, Weezy1973 said:

I met my wife through eHarmony so it worked for me. When the entry point is harder, it creates a self filtering for people who are more serious about a relationship. And eHarmony is expensive (relative to free), takes time to answer all the questions so their algorithms work, and takes getting through all the initial stages before actually getting to email someone. 
 

The downside is that far fewer people use it, which gives the impression of far fewer options. But the free sites falsely give the impression of endless options which wastes a ton of time. A  proxy for eHarmony for free was OKCupid back in the day - although I’ve heard it’s changed.  
 

As an exercise you can go onto OKCupid and answer about 100-200 of the questions. Then put in your preferences. Then sort by match percentage. Anything above 95% is a potentially good match. Now how many of those do you find attractive? You will see how few options there really are pretty quickly...

Right, also a lot of men have gotten screwed when OK Cupid changed their format to accommodate the women. Men who were getting responses and dates are now down to zilch. Apparently, the messaging system has changed where a guy cannot just send a woman a message, apparently there has to be some other requirement to even message a woman now.

[Fletch Lives]

It's a gimmick. The free sites work just as well

[Cookiesandough]

On 1/22/2021 at 8:16 AM, d0nnivain said:

But people aren't finding love for free.

Really? Because I never paid a dime… And neither has anyone I’ve ever known personally ... (friends, acquaintances, aunts, cousins, teachers, parents )

 

exactly what value do you mean? Because the paid sites have a few extra features(?) , but like you mentioned, that kind of specificity might actually work against you. Also, it’s not gonna make anyone attracted to you or fall for you that wouldn’t anyway ... There are also less people, so less chances of finding the right person. 

Edited January 25, 2021 by Shortskirtslonglashes

[Wiseman2]

It's more of a screening tool. For example needing a credit card, answering a few questions (so not a bot), etc.

It's not about "finding love for free", it's about cutting down on the wear and tear of OLD, by having built in screening tools, rather than swiping, wasting time texting useless entities and running around on mostly one and done coffee meets.

So. Like a business class ticket, yes you get to the same place at the same time, but with reduced hassle. And that is key in OLD burnout.

Do you really want to bother texting or meeting someone who doesn't have a credit card or is that broke/cheap?

[Cookiesandough]

I use it as a screening tool lol... if a person is on a paid dating site I know he wants to get cuffed up yesterday... and I ought to avoid him lol. 

, I am not saying that if you are in that camp it is a bad thing or that love can’t be found there. But I have never had trouble finding people on a free site... never felt my time was wasted. Never met anyone who didn’t have a credit card either haha. Just people enjoying the ride, not the destination.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but Donnovain has stated before she was on a paid app(eharmony’), and wasted a ton of time and then went offline and found her DHubz for free.  I don’t think it is that cut and dry

 

 

Edited January 25, 2021 by Shortskirtslonglashes

[Wiseman2]

9 minutes ago, Shortskirtslonglashes said:

. Just people enjoying the ride, not the destination.  

And that's exactly what makes it a waste of time. Not interested in amusing or babysitting bored lonely people.

[d0nnivain]

1 hour ago, Shortskirtslonglashes said:

 Correct me if I’m wrong, but Donnovain has stated before she was on a paid app(eharmony’), and wasted a ton of time and then went offline and found her DHubz for free.  I don’t think it is that cut and dry

It's not cut & dry.  But I didn't waste a "ton of time" .  I was only there for 90 days & hated it.

I think @Wiseman2hit the nail on the head:  sites like eHarmony do the pre-screening for you.  For me a minimum amount of education was a requirement.  The system screened out those who didn't make the cut.  Ironically, my own DH would not have made that cut at the time.  (He has since earned the degree.)  But I can't fault the algorithm -- it gave me a pool of men who fit my specified criteria.   On sites without that sceening function, you have to wade through people who come at you knowing there are not what you asked for.

For me the site I  was on was the right one for me.  I wanted marriage minded people.  I also didn't want something open & free.  One of my friends was on the big free site.  She also had a PT job tending bar on weekends.  Whenever I would visit her at work inevitably some guy would come in & say he saw her on that site.  That always unnerved me.  I never wanted to be so public about my search so I valued the closed system I was on.  Although dating is a numbers game, on line I preferred the smaller pool with more suitable fish.  As I said -- & did -- meeting men IRL was easy & I could better assess them quickly but I was tired of the bar / singles scene & meeting dozens of fun for now guys when I was ready to settle down.