eHarmony, Again
Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 10 Aug 2006 04:51:33 GMT
Jarrod said about 13 hours later:
That’s a really accurate description. It assumes you pass the personality test. I took it a few years ago and they said that I was in the 20% of the population they couldn’t let become members because we had unusual personalities. I took it again a few months ago and they let me become a member. I don’t know if they or I changed enough to become a member.
Everytime you take a personality test, you get slightly different results. I would be surprised if you tested that differently though. I bet they just turned enough people away that they started seeing it in dollar signs.
Now, I’m weird, but I’m not that weird.
My pet theory is this: money. Every other personals service on the internet makes it free to post and pay to respond. That system strongly prefers women, who are a lot more likely to fire ‘n forget and who have less disposable income. Men respond to (i.e. get obsessed over) pictures to a greater extent than women do, and with more income and a predilection for looking at pictures of women online (cough), the money flies out of our wallets.
Now, eHarmony is a lot more gender-agnostic. Both players have to pay to communicate, because the system aggressively matches you against other people. It’s not relying on the users to do the work. Unfortunately, due to real genetic differences and annoying cultural gender inequalities, it’s less satisfying in the short-term to men than ordinary relationship sites.
There should be a way on eHarmony for men to pay a small fee for their matches to respond to them, or something.
