recent experiences with EHarmony

July 4, 2020 7:41 AM

How has your recent experience with EHarmony been? I'm trying to figure out if it's worth joining.

Recently I have found free dating sites to be lacking and I'm considering EHarmony.

I know the common wisdom on here is "Ok Cupid", and while I think OKC used to be good and fine, I feel that it's really changed in the last 3 years or so and it seems that the quality of profiles and thoughtfulness has really gone down. I use Bumble now, which I feel is a bit better, but I thought it may be helpful to join a site with even more intention behind it.

I kind of like how EHarmony asks a lot of questions and tries to match via compatibility that way (yes, I know OKc does that, but it seems not as good now- I'm very familiar with it).

So, as someone who is leftist, a bit unconventional, "artsy", a woman looking for relationships with men, and 41 years old-- my question is , if you have you used EHamony recently, did you like it and is it worth joining? (paid).

I'd prefer people who have been more recent users chime in. (I have searched on the site and don't see many recent questions about Eharmony)

Also, please know that I am quite familiar with most of the free sites.

Also, I tried Match before and didn't like it.

Thanks!

posted by bearette to Human Relations (5 answers total)

I'm a man, seek/sought women...

I had an eHarmony membership that worked well for me in Atlanta years ago. I didn't find a relationship through it, but I met a lot of neat people and it got me out of my head and it was a positive experience. This would have been around 8-9 years ago.

I moved to San Francisco 3 years ago and tried spinning it up again, since I had such a good experience.

Well, eHarmony did not recognize that I changed locations. I repeatedly changed my location, and it continued to try to hook me up with people from Atlanta. I looked for a support contact of any kind; guess what? There was none. There were only help documents.

My impression was that eHarmony was just running on inertia, with no active investment from anyone.

The current action is all in the dating apps; if I jump back in, that is what I will use.
posted by billjings at 10:58 AM on July 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I haven't tried eHarmony in the last 10 years, but in my area/age (mid-30s) it seems like a lot of the people who had been using OkCupid have moved into Hinge (or have profiles on both). There aren't as many questions on Hinge, but there are way more than Bumble and I can easily find interesting people to talk to based on their profile, and it seems to pick up on that and keeps matching me with interesting people. In my area Bumble is full of people who don't seem to like anything other than sports and dogs, it feels very generic. So I'd give Hinge a shot if you haven't already.
posted by JZig at 11:21 AM on July 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

Hi, I used eharmony a couple years ago as a 30-something liberal woman, I had a free trial where you took the survey and could see matches. The survey made it pretty clear it was a bad fit for me (questions mostly about religion, whether I want to get married, have to pick male or female matches (not both), and non-binary people don’t exist). I finished it anyhow and found no men I wanted to contact. My memory is that my matches all wore khaki pants, lived in really bland apartments with no distinctive furnishings in the pictures, and had decided it was time to get married and have kids now. Some of the older guys seemed to me to be basically looking for a mom, for themselves and/or for their kids. Not for me and it sounds like not for you either.
posted by momus_window at 1:11 PM on July 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I briefly looked at eharmony and match a few years ago, but decided against both because it seemed like their user numbers had dropped off too much to be worth it. A friend of mine recently got back onto both after a two-year relationship ended and she abandoned both sites because there wasn’t anyone on. (We’re both late-30s, in urban centers on opposite sides of the country.) She’s using Hinge, and my two other friends who used to use okcupid have also abandoned that site and are using Hinge exclusively.
posted by umwhat at 2:27 PM on July 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

Here's more info for you: 1, 2
posted by foxjacket at 11:56 AM on July 7, 2020