She Met the Right Man Through eHarmony

I'm not an employee or stockholder or affiliate of eHarmony, but I'm intrigued by their "personality profile" approach to matchmaking. My friend, Dating Coach Ronnie Ann Ryan, maintains that no man in his right mind is going to submit himself to answering the numerous questions the company requires. A lot of her clients back her up on this.

At a party over the weekend, though, I spoke with the well-traveled and successful owner of a Manhattan company who met her fiance through eHarmony. Obviously, she felt differently about the service. She said she'd used other online services, too, but the matches she got through them wanted casual fun instead of serious fun (in fairness to eHarmony's competitors, I do know a couple of people who met through them and eventually married). She believes that men who want relationships will invest time in answering questions that improve their odds of meeting the right woman.

I asked her if eHarmony supplied her with an adequate supply of eligible bachelors. I wanted to know if she considered them quality matches, as opposed to a bunch of losers. She said that the company had indeed supplied a number of good matches, all of whom she spent considerable time on the phone with before making coffee dates. The one exception was a high school principal in upstate New York she said she really wanted to meet. Ultimately, she decided against it; she figured a high school principal would be pretty invested in his town, and she has no intention of leaving Manhattan.

She concedes that not everybody she knows has been as succesful as she with eHarmony, though. A relative of hers ended up disappointed. I'll be back with that part of the story tomorrow.