Internet Dating & Hidden Agendas

By Norman Mickey

Feeling rejected? E-harmony has admitted to rejecting more than a million applicants since its inception in 2000, up to 1 out of 5 applicants. Up till now their policies have been shrouded in secrecy. According to a June 4, 2007 article in HeraldNet, e-harmony is finally revealing criteria for rejection, after rejecting people without explanation for so long. E-harmony's stated reasons for rejection:

A. Married
B. Age under 21
C. Age under 60 with more than 4 marriages
D. Inconsistent answers
E. Severe depression

And an additional reason cited by critics:

F. Gay

Let's look at the legitimacy of this criteria:

A. Married. Most single persons do not want to encounter married persons on a singles dating site for obvious reasons. However dating sites are full of married persons.

Estimates range from 13 to 18% of actual users on most internet dating sites are married. Married visitors to dating sites are even higher. Several sites allow married persons to use their site. For example, in a 4/5/02 Wall Street Journal Article "Bored of the Rings," Yahoo! personals explained that they allow married persons to use their program if they identify themselves as "married but looking."

In contrast, E-harmony is to be applauded for excluding married persons from their dating program.

B. Age under 21. It's hard to understand this one as long as the person is of legal age.

C. Age under 60 and married more than four times. This is certainly a red flag for a relationship. However it seems that as long as the marriage history is openly disclosed, it allows the prospective suitor to beware.

D. Inconsistent answers. Inconsistent answers can suggest deception, dishonesty or indifference to the testing process. However they can also be the result of misunderstood questions, accidental insertion of a check mark in the wrong box, or interpretation of a question that has many possible meanings, depending on the complex variety of word and question interpretations unique to each person taking the test.

E. Severely depressed. Who can properly determine that a person is severely depressed? A personalized individual assessment should be made by a licensed professional to make this diagnosis correctly. Shame on e-harmony for their cursory, flawed assessments!

By their standards, many good people are ineligible for their program. Most persons experience depression at some point in their lives. Many wonderful individuals who enrich other persons' lives, have bouts of depression. (Newsman Mike Wallace, for instance, who has publicly discussed dealing with depression, would be eliminated.) Would e-harmony consider these persons to be unsuitable for a relationship?

More importantly, If e-harmony is truly in the business of helping singles (who already have a higher incidence of suicide than marrieds), shouldn't they find a better way to communicate with vulnerable, sensitive people who are simply trying to reach out? Just telling people that they're unsuitable for a relationship is a kick in the stomach.

F. Gay. Discrimation against sexual orientation is basically wrong. Practically speaking, however, gay dating services can do a better job for their constituency than an organization which is intolerant or insensitive to gay issues.

Nevertheless, it rankles when an organization declares itself to be the ideal or ultimate standard. E-harmony might have avoided the charge of discrimination if it had declared itself a religious organization (based on the values of its founder) or simply made its policies transparent from the beginning.

Are there other criteria for rejection that e-harmony isn't telling us about? I took their test out of curiousity a while back. Without falling into any of the above rejection categories, I, too, joined the ranks of e-harmony's million plus rejects. And I am a singles expert with an extensive background in social work, and together with Bay Area Psychologist Dr. Michael Mayer, created the first Partner Compatibility Test for singles back in 1992 (which really does do a good job of measuring compatibility), many years before e-harmony's advertising hype about their patented system (now considered by many to be flawed). Thank goodness I had sufficient self esteem and knew I wasn't really a relationship reject.

Feeling rejected? Don't be. You've got choices!