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Yesterday’s New York Times had a great article about Internet dating, specifically sites that do the matching for you, like eHarmony and Chemistry.com What was REALLY juicy was the companion article and the comments attached. Wanted: Single or Married Adult with Online Matchmaking Story asks for stories from couples who met online, and WOW! Did folks write in or what? You know how I love love stories, so I’ll copy off a bunch here. And I’ll put up “Wanted: Single or Married Adult with Online Matchmaking Story” in another post as well.
Here’s the first article below:
January 29, 2008
Findings
By JOHN TIERNEY
PASADENA, Calif. — The two students in Southern California had just been introduced during an experiment to test their “interpersonal chemistry.” The man, a graduate student, dutifully asked the undergraduate woman what her major was.
“Spanish and sociology,” she said.
“Interesting,” he said. ‘‘I was a sociology major. What are you going to do with that?”
“You are just full of questions.”
“It’s true.”
“My passion has always been Spanish, the language, the culture. I love traveling and knowing new cultures and places.”
Bogart and Bacall it was not. But Gian Gonzaga, a social psychologist, could see possibilities for this couple as he watched their recorded chat on a television screen.
They were nodding and smiling in unison, and the woman stroked her hair and briefly licked her lips — positive signs of chemistry that would be duly recorded in this experiment at the new eHarmony Labs here. By comparing these results with the couple’s answers to hundreds of other questions, the researchers hoped to draw closer to a new and extremely lucrative grail — making the right match.
Once upon a time, finding a mate was considered too important to be entrusted to people under the influence of raging hormones. Their parents, sometimes assisted by astrologers and matchmakers, supervised courtship until customs changed in the West because of what was called the Romeo and Juliet revolution. Grown-ups, leave the kids alone.
But now some social scientists have rediscovered the appeal of adult supervision — provided the adults have doctorates and vast caches of psychometric data. Online matchmaking has become a boom industry as rival scientists test their algorithms for finding love.
The leading yenta is eHarmony, which pioneered the don’t-try-this-yourself approach eight years ago by refusing to let its online customers browse for their own dates. It requires them to answer a 258-question personality test and then picks potential partners. The company estimates, based on a national Harris survey it commissioned, that its matchmaking was responsible for about 2 percent of the marriages in America last year, nearly 120 weddings a day.
Another company, Perfectmatch.com, is using an algorithm designed by Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington at Seattle. Match.com, which became the largest online dating service by letting people find their own partners, set up a new matchmaking service, Chemistry.com, using an algorithm created by Helen E. Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers who has studied the neural chemistry of people in love.
As the matchmakers compete for customers — and denigrate each other’s methodology — the battle has intrigued academic researchers who study the mating game. On the one hand, they are skeptical, because the algorithms and the results have not been published for peer review. But they also realize that these online companies give scientists a remarkable opportunity to gather enormous amounts of data and test their theories in the field. EHarmony says more than 19 million people have filled out its questionnaire.
Its algorithm was developed a decade ago by Galen Buckwalter, a psychologist who had previously been a research professor at the University of Southern California. Drawing on previous evidence that personality similarities predict happiness in a relationship, he administered hundreds of personality questions to 5,000 married couples and correlated the answers with the couples’ marital happiness, as measured by an existing instrument called the dyadic adjustment scale.
The result was an algorithm that is supposed to match people on 29 “core traits,” like social style or emotional temperament, and “vital attributes” like relationship skills. (For details: nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
“We’re not looking for clones, but our models emphasize similarities in personality and in values,” Dr. Buckwalter said. “It’s fairly common that differences can initially be appealing, but they’re not so cute after two years. If you have someone who’s Type A and real hard charging, put them with someone else like that. It’s just much easier for people to relate if they don’t have to negotiate all these differences.”
Does this method actually work? In theory, thanks to its millions of customers and their fees (up to $60 a month), eHarmony has the data and resources to conduct cutting-edge research. It has an advisory board of prominent social scientists and a new laboratory with researchers lured from academia like Dr. Gonzaga, who previously worked at a marriage-research lab at U.C.L.A.
So far, except for a presentation at a psychologists’ conference, the company has not produced much scientific evidence that its system works. It has started a longitudinal study comparing eHarmony couples with a control group, and Dr. Buckwalter says it is committed to publishing peer-reviewed research, but not the details of its algorithm. That secrecy may be a smart business move, but it makes eHarmony a target for scientific critics, not to mention its rivals.
In the battle of the matchmakers, Chemistry.com has been running commercials faulting eHarmony for refusing to match gay couples (eHarmony says it can’t because its algorithm is based on data from heterosexuals), and eHarmony asked the Better Business Bureau to stop Chemistry.com from claiming its algorithm had been scientifically validated. The bureau concurred that there was not enough evidence, and Chemistry.com agreed to stop advertising that Dr. Fisher’s method was based on “the latest science of attraction.”
Dr. Fisher now says the ruling against her last year made sense because her algorithm at that time was still a work in progress as she correlated sociological and psychological measures, as well as indicators linked to chemical systems in the brain. But now, she said, she has the evidence from Chemistry.com users to validate the method, and she plans to publish it along with the details of the algorithm.
“I believe in transparency,” she said, taking a dig at eHarmony. “I want to share my data so that I will get peer review.”
Until outside scientists have a good look at the numbers, no one can know how effective any of these algorithms are, but one thing is already clear. People aren’t so good at picking their own mates online. Researchers who studied online dating found that the customers typically ended up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they studied, and that those dates often ended up being huge letdowns. The people make up impossible shopping lists for what they want in a partner, says Eli Finkel, a psychologist who studies dating at Northwestern University’s Relationships Lab.
“They think they know what they want,” Dr. Finkel said. “But meeting somebody who possesses the characteristics they claim are so important is much less inspiring than they would have predicted.”
The new matchmakers may or may not have the right formula. But their computers at least know better than to give you what you want.
I first heard of Pepper Schwartz years and years ago (well, it was published in 1985) when I read her book with Philip Blumstein “American Couples.” It was a heavy tome filled with eye-popping charts and graphs of their work with couples, gay and straight. I loved it and it heavily influenced my thinking about couples and how they relate.
Schwartz writes prolifically (just go to Amazon and type in her name), but she is most relevant to my work with helping singles find love in her incarnation as the expert behind the matching system at PerfectMatch.com. She just came out with a new book Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years which sounds right up my alley, right? I thought so too, and ordered and read it.
Eeeesh. I wish I could say I liked it, but I didn’t. Sprinkled in amongst her own pretty exhibitionistic stories about having lots of great sex with lots of great guys in lots of great places was some sound advice about online dating, but nothing extraordinary, frankly. That advice is just about all contained in the article below that appeared in the Seattle Times where she lives. I’ll underline it in the article so that you can see what I really did like about what she wrote. But frankly, you can skip the book, unless you want to torture yourself by reading some over-the-top sex pieces that strain credulity, or if they are true, are out of reach of 99.99% of women over 60. I found it pretty embarrassing, actually. I’d prefer the more academic Pepper Schwartz.
Relationship expert finds herself dating again
By Pepper Schwartz
Special to The Seattle Times
Pepper Schwartz
Schwartz is a sociology professor at the University of Washington and author of 15 books, including her latest, “Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years” (Collins, 2007; $24.95), a personal account of re-entering the dating world after divorce. Schwartz, a Ph.D., is also the relationship expert for Perfectmatch.com, where she co-developed the Duet personality profile matching system.
There is nothing quite as disconcerting as having to follow your own advice. After 30 years of answering people’s questions about their emotional, sexual and romantic lives, I found myself in the somewhat ironic situation of having to pose, and answer, some of these same questions for myself.
At first, like most people who have just gotten a divorce, I wanted to stay home, do some soul searching, figure out what went wrong and what part I had in it.
But soon there is that familiar itch: the desire for intimacy, connection, sex and, in my case, adventure. Love would be nice, too, but honestly, when you have just disconnected from a 23-year marriage, sex and companionship seem a lot less complicated than love and commitment do, and therefore a lot more imaginable.
As a relationship expert, finding that connection should have been a piece of cake, right?
Wrong. As every doctor knows, it’s different when you’re the patient. I had many of the qualms of re-entry that everyone does. So I had to embark on a fix-up campaign to get myself date-ready — and think about what I actually wanted and who I was looking for.
One thing I knew: I was starting over again at 55.
I started out by creating a new philosophy about sex and love. I decided that the only way I would figure out who and what I wanted was by meeting a wide range of men — cowboys, poets, fishermen, chefs, CEOs, or whoever else crossed my path. The “how” of it was pretty easy — I knew the online dating scene as the relationship expert for Perfectmatch.com — now I just had to go explore dating online myself.
That the dating expert would be looking for a date was a little embarrassing, so I didn’t put my picture on the site. Instead, I looked at men’s profiles, and if they were intriguing, I’d invite them to look at a description of me. If they liked that, I promised to send a picture.
Thus started a chain of “coffee dates” that online daters know only too well. These short encounters exist for a reason; a quick in, then out if the guy’s not OK. I learned this the hard way when a guy who said he had always admired me wanted to take me out to a really nice dinner. I relented when he suggested Canlis, one of my favorite places in Seattle.
Once we got there, however, I might as well have gone alone. He talked so fast and so much that all I could do was sit there and time him, thinking maybe I was witnessing some kind of world’s record for self-absorption. At 45 minutes, he looked up, a little dazed with his own chatter and said, “Am I talking too much?” I said, “Yes, actually you are.”
He looked abashed and then, I kid you not, talked on for another 20 minutes. I had time to listen, chew my food very carefully, and learn not to allow more than a half-hour for a first meeting.
There were other colorful characters, some so unusual that I learned to think of dating as anthropological fieldwork. I decided each person would have something to teach me, no matter how dreadful a match we might be for each other.
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My favorite oddity was a man who was handsome, smart, nice and accomplished. He seemed like a perfectly fine bet for a relationship. There was only one problem: he could not pass a beast without making that animal’s noises. We decided to go hiking in the Methow Valley and stay over at Sun Mountain Lodge. But the ride there killed the possibility of anything more physical than climbing up a few hills. If we saw a horse, he neighed, a dog, he produced a bark, a cat — well, you know. I was afraid to order a steak.
Of course not all of these dates produced a humorous or strange story. Some produced all kinds of satisfaction: intellectual, emotional and sexual.
Dating, though difficult and disappointing when love didn’t last, was clearly possible and often fabulous, no matter that my 20s and 30s were distant memories. I have come to believe that love is possible at any age, that romance and passion are no less intense at middle or old age than they were when we were barely out of our teens, and that all of this can be ours if we put ourselves out there, learn how to handle loss or rejection, and have the resilience to pick ourselves up and start the process all over again.
This is the very cycle that many women and men just can’t bear to face, but I have to say, the happy moments justify having to deal with the sad ones. Love is life-giving, passion helps sustain our youthfulness, and relationships help us to grow and develop heart and character. All of that is just too good to miss.
I met the man I am dating now online. Honestly I don’t remember why I picked him out except that he was attractive, wrote well and sounded like a sincere, bright, athletic, nice person. I contacted him and said I was interested. He replied that he thought he knew who I was, and he was a little put off about meeting another ambitious, busy, Type-A woman. He had gone that route before and wasn’t sure it was a good fit.
I wrote him back that yes, he had guessed who I was and what I was like. But I thought we should meet anyway. I mentioned the scene in “Notting Hill” where Julia Roberts has to convince Hugh Grant that her world isn’t all she is. She says something like, “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy… .”
He replied, “OK, you got me with that one.” We met for coffee. He was even more handsome in person than in his picture, and a genuinely nice and witty man. This was last autumn, and we have been dating ever since.
The Internet is your friend
The Internet is one of the most efficient and safe ways to find romance. I still hear women and men voicing fears of who’s on there, but believe me, it’s a godsend to older people who aren’t meeting loads of eligible partners.
You get a lot more information about someone you’ve met in cyberspace than you do in other kinds of one-time contact. There are bad dates everywhere, but the Internet has no more than other parts of the dating world do — and probably less.
Writing a profile
Put out your best stuff. Don’t lie, but you can omit your flaws. Everyone has them and they don’t need to be in your first sentence. Leave out anything but a brief mention of children — you are looking for a partner, not a father or mother. If they are partner material, then you can see if they will fit into your family or vice versa.
Use a good picture, but make sure it’s yours and wasn’t taken for your high school graduation. Avoid anyone who has a blurry picture, sunglasses or won’t show you a picture on request.
Talking on the phone
Don’t wait too long before making this relationship aural. If you like each other online, then relatively quickly transfer it to the phone. (Use a non-traceable number just in case you do meet Mr./Ms. Wrong and don’t want them to know your phone number.)
If you let the e-mail relationship go on too long, you may be caught in a fantasy perception of this person that gets you way too attached before you have a better sense of who she or he really is. Hearing their voice and talking is the first test of finding out who they really are.
Meeting someone
Likewise, once you’ve talked, arrange to meet fairly soon. I’ve known people who were just about saying “I love you” because of the intimacy and beauty of what they wrote to each other — until they met in person and one of them realized there was no chemistry.
Use the half-hour meeting rule (you can always extend it). If it’s really a great match, there will be a second date.
Remember to listen and ask questions — both of you are being interviewed — each of you should know more about the other than when you started. Do not complain even if your day was a horror and your kids robbed a bank.
Don’t dump on your ex even though you are sorely tempted. Everyone will always be thinking, “… and what would he/she be saying about me?” Try to see if there is any reason you two should know each other that is not readily apparent — i.e., explore hobbies, values, lifestyle, talents, passions.
Don’t give up
I don’t care if the first 15 dates are duds. There is someone out there for you.
I found this comment below on Mark Brooks’ Online Personals Watch. It’s from James Houran, Ph. D. who used to be associated with True.com and now is not. I don’t know the “why’s” of either. Regular readers of my blog know that I don’t think much of True.com. But Dr. Houran does sound like he knows what he is talking about, and if you are interesting in compatibility testing or have taken them (a la eHarmony, True.com, PerrfectMatch, etc) you should read his comments here and the article he sites at the end “The Truth About Compatibility Testing.”
Despite their potential power and value, all assessments have limitations. Both online dating sites and their customers need to have realistic expectations about what types of information assessments can and cannot deliver. The strengths and limitations of a given assessment are based on its technical and theoretical underpinnings.
Below are some important points to remember in this respect:
1). Assessment feedback is derived from mathematical extrapolations of behavioral data. As such, feedback reports describe statistical predictions of what attitudes and behaviors a given test taker will likely exhibit. Mathematical models are consistently more valid than subjective observations, but even the finest assessments are never 100% percent accurate 100% of the time.
2). The validity of a report is limited by the reliability of the test taker’s responses. Test-takers may answer assessments unreliably for a myriad of reasons: lack of motivation or interest due to less than ideal testing conditions or test taker’s mood, fatigue from answering a long set of questions, an attempt to answer questions in a socially-desirable way or difficulty understanding particular questions for linguistic reasons (e.g., when English is not the test taker’s first language).
3). All test scores are statistical estimates. Thus, each score is accompanied by its margin of error [also called a confidence interval or standard of error (SE)]. However, properly constructed employee assessments provide information on the statistical reliability of a particular test taker’s test scores, as well as measure the degree to which a test taker seems to be answering the assessment truthfully.
4). Finally, the quality of an assessment (and hence its feedback) is associated with its methodological and statistical principles:
Self-referential vs. normative instruments: Some assessments provide feedback based simply on how a test taker perceives him or herself. In other words, these instruments describe individuals only in a self-referential way, i.e., against themselves. Examples of self-referential instruments are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (the inspiration for PerfectMatch.com’s test) and the DISC assessment (offered by Thomas Technologies). By contrast, normative instruments are inter-individual because they describe test takers against a reference group. This approach is significantly more valid than the self-referential approach.
Classical test theory vs. modern test theory: Most assessments on the market today are constructed and validated using classical test theory, which essentially treats all assessment questions as equally weighted “points.” A great example is the assessment offered by eHarmony.com. Such assessments consequently provide a total score that is the sum of those points. This approach has been outdated since 1960. Today, test and measurements experts rely on modern test theory (Item Response Theory and Rasch scaling), which yields unbiased, scaled scores for test takers. Modern test theory is the same gold standard statistics used in such well-known assessments like the GRE, MCAT and LSAT. This approach can identify and remove response biases related to age, gender, cultural background and employment level of the test taker. Besides greater technical precision and the protection of meeting legal requirements, modern test theory also yields richer information that traditional approaches miss.
For detailed scientific information on the realities behind compatibility testing, see:
Houran, J., Lange, R., Rentfrow, P. J., & Bruckner, K. H. (2004). Do online matchmaking tests work? An assessment of preliminary evidence for a publicized ‘predictive model of marital success.’ North American Journal of Psychology, 6, 507-526.
For a lay-person’s guide to the subject, see:
http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/features/compatibilitytesting.html
Thanks,
James Houran, Ph.D.
Online Dating Magazine
Rich men will pay big money to get (pretty, young) women. And women look for men who don’t mind a definite financial element in the deal. So what’s new about that?
Well, nothing much, but there’s been a lot of attention to it lately on the wires. Must be a slow news season, huh? Not actually. Most of the stuff came out right around the election, and that was plenty newsy. But maybe the print media wanted to write about plain old heterosexual sex and money, rather that politics, pederasts, and male ministers willing to pay for sex with men.
Dr. Phil chimed in early (before the election on November 3) with a show on Sugar Daddies and Cougars (the female version of Sugar Daddies—older women with younger men, though money did not seem to be so much a part of that equation). Sanjay (40) and Jacqueline (18) met on SugarDaddie.com Creepy site, creepy couple. You can read some of the online postings that the show generated here.
The Seattle Times’ Meghan Barr wrote “Online dating sites where Mr. Right is Mr. Rich” which appeared on 11/15/2006. The article mentions SugarDaddie.com of the Sanjay and Jacqueline fame, and WealthyMen.com. A seeming big advantage for men is the gender ratio: Meghan Barr writes that the male/female ratio on sites like Match.com and AmericanSingles.com is 70/30. (I wonder about those stats—what I had heard was more like 55/45.) But even so, WealthyMen.com claims a male/female ratio of 1/5. Pretty good for the guys, wouldn’t you say? But not so good for the ladies. Maybe women think they have at least a 20% chance at the big $$$. Better odds than the lottery, for sure.
BTW, sites that women like (eHarmony, PerfectMatch) have ratios that favor men. EHarmony avoids stating the ratios, but PerfectMatch blatantly advertises to men their good numbers: female to male: 2 to 1. I suspect eHarmony is similar. And PerfectMatch seems to have really dropped in the ratings. Mark Brooks’ blog listings (top 15) don’t even include PerfectMatch.
Mark Brooks blogged about Meghan Barr’s article, and I commented. Here’s what I wrote:
There are a number of sites aiming to hook up (appropriate term?) women with wealthy men. As long as the guys recognize the bargain, I suppose there’s no problem. But I have run across wealthy folks, both male and female, who are in a quandary about how to find a mate who will love them for who they are and not for their money. How can they get to know someone while being open and honest and not have their wealth become the prime focus? One guy naively joined one of these sites and honestly answered all questions, including income. He was swamped with offers from women, clogged up his mail box, and had eight proposals of marriage in the first contacts. It’s not easy being rich.
Kathryn Lord
Your Romance Coach
PS Interestingly, one of my blog posts that has been getting attention lately is about Sugar Mama’s. .
PerfectMatch.com has added new bells and whistles. They’ve
developed what they are calling Duet(R) Analysis Profile.
Probably using more testing (Argh! Don’t we all LOVE those
looong personality tests?), PerfectMatch then coughs up more data
for those looking for a mate: In addition to the basic details
(location, age, occupation) the site also identifies the person’s
values and ideals, does a “Life and Lovestyle” descrition, and
analysizes personality factors (risk-taking, intensity and pace,
outlook on life, and variety). All look good. I’d love to have
that info if I were actively looking right now.
PerfectMatch gets mixed reviews, from me and others.
Particularly for women, because the gender ratio is so bad: At
least 2 women for every guy. Of course, that’s good for the men-
folk.
This also points to the importance of taking those questionnaires
VERY seriously. TAKE YOUR TIME if you sign up for a site that
uses them. Do not rush through the process! It’s your future.
It’s important. Go slow.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
eHarmony has a suit pending.
John Claasen is suing eHarmony because they refused to match him after he had spent two hours filling out the matching survey. eHarmony routinely refuses to match married folks, and Claasen is not yet divorced, just legally separated. Claasen asserts that eHarmony is discriminating against him because of his marital status, which may indeed be breaeaking California’s civil code, section 51.
PerfectMatch has unresolved complaints filed with the Washington state Attorney General’s office and the local Better Business Bureau gives PerfectMatch an unsatisfactory rating.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
Right after I finished yesterday’s posting about an earlier article in the Wall Street Journal, up pops yet another treatment of Internet dating in the New York Times.
The story leads with Elizabeth Brereton and Robert Smith who were part of one of the first (if not THE first) experiment in computer matching called Operation Match in 1965. Each received a list of ten possible dates after the data they provided was crunched by an impossibly big computer. They appeared on each other’s list, though never followed through in making contact.
Four years later, Smith went to a mixer for grad students at the University of Chicago, saw the proverbial “woman across a crowded room” and introduced himself. They both immediately knew that they had been paired earlier by Operation Match.
They were married four months later, and are still so.
The article goes on to discuss the comparatively new compatibility testing that dating sites are moving towards, a la eHarmony, PerfectMatch, and now Match.com’s Chemistry. Throwing in some interesting statistics on divorce (more of those in a later posting), the reporter David Leonhardt (and the compatibility matching dating sites) make a good case for matching like with like. Leonhardt quotes Pepper Schwartz, Perfectmatch’s pro behind their matching system: “What this does is try to narrow it down so you spend less time with people who are totally out of the question. We’re just upping your chances.”
If you’ve spent any time on Yahoo! Personals and Match.com sorting out who you’d like to meet from the millions listed, anything that saves you time would be welcome. I spoke to a new Romance Client this week who was lucky enough to get a charter membership to Chemistry. She said that she had met two very interesting guys through Chemistry who she would never have considered otherwise. Big advantage right there: You may be blinded by your own prejudices to very good candidates. See what another blog reader reported in about his experience with Chemistry.
I’m not a huge fan of the compatibility testing sites, but combining one of them with a listing on one of the big major sites (like Match.com or Yahoo! Personals) might serve you quite well.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
Since I am a Romance Coach specializing in helping singles find partners using Internet dating sites, I read with interest Vanessa Juarez’s article ”www.findlovehere.com” in the February 20th issue.
The first half of the article is essentially correct, but falters in the second half when Juarez starts talking about specific dating sites. First off, folks 50 and over, divorced or not, find the best and most choices on the largest Internet dating sites, Match.com (where I met my husband in 1998) and Yahoo! Personals. Smaller sites have correspondingly smaller numbers.
What Juarez did not mention is that sites like PerfectMatch and eHarmony (which have built-in a more passive role for singles—the web site does the matching—and therefore appeal to women) have very skewed gender ratios that do not favor women. PerfectMatch openly courts men, enticing them with 2:1 male to female ratios. That would include all age ranges, so likely the older women get (when they outnumber men anyway), the worse the ratios.
Most of my clients are women over 40, and I NEVER suggest either eHarmony or PerfectMatch for these because of those bad numbers. All have gone to either Match.com or Yahoo! Personals or both and been pleased and astounded at the large numbers of quality men just waiting to hear from them. Internet dating is in large part a numbers game, and a single is best served by going to the sites where the numbers are in his or her favor— large numbers of singles in gender ratios that favor the individual.
Best, Kathryn Lord
I got this very amusing link yesterday from a reader, evidently in response to my review of “Must Love Dogs” and PerfectMatch.com’s rather blatant product placement in that film. The reader is Dave, the author of the linked article. It chronicles amusingly his experience last February with being matched on “Dr. Phil” by the PerfectMatch folks. Or at least he thought he was going to be matched, because it seems from the article that he never was. Dr. Phil and the show come across pretty well (see Dave’s “Editor Note” that prefaces the article), but PerfectMatch gets raked over the coals.
I saw the “Dr. Phil” show that Dave was on, and indeed, the guys looked pretty much like deer in the head lights. The show as a whole was not one of Dr. Phil’s best, to say the least. But I did again recognize the coup of PerfectMatch and product placement. See my review of “Must Love Dogs.” Somebody at PerfectMatch is doing a pretty terrific job with product placement. Follow through does not seem to be the strong point of PerfectMatch, however, at least according to Dave. Far from Perfect.
Dave is no longer on PerfectMatch, but he’s still looking for Los Angeles women on Match.com. You can find him there under DavidLA68 . I just checked. He’s cute!
Dave’s article also reinforces what I have said before: PerfectMatch and eHarmony are not the best sites for women. The odds are very poor—at least PerfectMatch is honest about it, advertising to men that the female to male ratio is 2:1. And likely, the older the women get, the more out of whack the odds. I think it is similar at eHarmony, though it’s hard to find that stated anywhere.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
Why are the three top sites that potentially have so much to offer so flawed? All three say that they are “relationship sites”—places for serious singles to meet serious partners. Serious means wanting a long-term, committed relationship or marriage. eHarmony has led the way in differentiating “dating sites” from “relationship sites”—Match.com would be a traditional dating site, where you can meet for friendship or casual dating as well as more serious, long term relationships. All three use some kind of “compatibility testing” for matching singles—long sets of questions that each poster fills out, and then the sites’ computers match one with another, using some sort of formula. All sounds good, right? No wonder so many are flocking to join up.
But I’ve got reservations about eHarmony, and I am not alone. Jennifer Hahn writes extensively about eHarmony’s founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren’s evangelist Christian roots in her article “Love Machines” for LA City Beat. I, like Hahn, think there are lots of problems in the site and how they match singles. eHarmony’s largest black mark is that the site will not work with Gays and Lesbians. And it doesn’t take much of a Google search to come up with more fodder. The site also TURNS DOWN one in five applicants: Can you imagine getting this message after you screwed up your courage to sign on in the first place, and then spent several hours filling out the questionnaire?
“Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching system is not suitable for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply would not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand that we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time. ”
I’ve written plenty lately about True.com and their questionable practices. Here’s the message you get on their home page:
“Married people will be prosecuted. Because we care, we screen members against public records to check marital status.”
Isn’t that cheery? And for some odd reason, True.com seems only to charge the guys, not women, for posting. That is really strange, since these “relationship sites” tend to attract far more women than men.
That’s PerfectMatch‘s problem (eHarmony’s too) and does PerfectMatch ever have it bad! PerfectMatch is now offering men two months for free, just to get more to sign up!
PerfectMatch’s ratios are now two women for every guy. Well, at least they say so. Getting gender ratios for other dating sites is nearly impossible. I must say, that other than the poor numbers for women, I have no other complaints about PerfectMatch. Pepper Schwartz is their resident expert and designed their compatibility profiling. I’ve known of Pepper Schwartz for years and respected her work, so I am assuming she is doing a good job here, too. But if the guys would only sign up there… Hey, guys, it’s free, for heaven’s sake! And the numbers are great, for you, anyway. Git on over!
Dating and matchmaking sites are having to compete harder and harder for your dollars. More than 850 different sites now crowd the wires, and the fast pace of visitor traffic has slowed from the red hot growth of the past five years. One of the ways some of the larger sites are trying to differentiate themselves from the pack is to define themselves as “Relationship sites” as opposed to “Dating sites.” Serious daters are 20% more likely to become paying subscribers than more casual singles. eHarmony, PerfectMatch.com, and True.com are the top three calling themselves “Relationship sites.” YahooPersonals is trying to straddle the fence with it’s new “Premier” designation (see my blog entry). Match.com, the industry biggie, is moving in that direction as well.
eHarmony, PerfectMatch, and True all use what they call “scientific” means to pair folks with the best matches. That means questionnaires for subscribers to fill out and some sort of matching procedure that takes place behind the scene (read: the computer somehow “reads” the questionnaires and then pulls out “matches” based on some kind of formula). These sites tend to appeal to women, because of the purported seriousness (a relationships-only orientation), the safety (True’s background checks and attempts to keep married people out), and the highly structured, more active role of the dating site in doing the actual matching and communicating (eHarmony). Men tend to find the sites irritating: They don’t like the long questionnaires, they don’t like being matched by the computer, and they don’t like not being able to cruise through the profiles and pick for themselves. Guys particularly don’t like not being able to see photos (eHarmony).
This trend plays out in the gender ratios. Dating sites have tended to mirror the gender ratios of the Internet in general --around 60/40, male to female.
However, in these “Relationship sites,” the ratios tend to be just the opposite, or even more skewed: More like 60/40 female to male, or worse at PerfectMatch. A reader (male) just sent me this from PerfectMatch: “Thanks in part to our new relationship with the Lifetime television; women now outnumber men on PerfectMatch.com two to one! Men, for a limited time, you can receive 3 months for only $59.95 on PerfectMatch.com. That’s right, a full three months, all access premium subscription, for only $59.95, a savings of over $100!” (PerfectMatch got partnered with Dr. Phil. He did a show about online dating around Valentine’s. PerfectMatch gave away 1,000,000 free memberships before 2/28, and 90% of those who signed up are women. )
These gender ratios are probably even worse for older single women. The male to female ratios even out around 40 and 50, then tip towards women outnumbering men as the ages go up. And of course, we have the issue of men looking for younger women, which tilts the tables even more against older women.
So guys: The numbers favor you at those “Relationship sites.” Particularly if you are older. If you are tired of no or low response, you might want to try one of them out. Ladies: Even though “Relationship sites” may feel more appealing, the numbers are not great for you. Particularly if you are older. If you must, use one of these “Relationship sites,” but hedge you bets and also sign up on a big site where the odds favor you more. My current favorite is YahooPersonals. Sign up for the Premier version and get the best of both worlds.
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