EHarmony

eHarmony.com

Company type	Private
Founded	2000, Pasadena, California
Headquarters	Pasadena, California
Website	eharmony.com

Date ME!!!! Supasmitty!!!

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History

eHarmony was founded by Neil Clark Warren, a psychologist and author of successful relationship advice books and Greg Forgatch. Warren and Forgatch launched the site on Aug. 22, 2000. In the late 1990s, after more than 35 years of work as a clinical psychologist and marriage counselor, Warren decided to test his evolving theory that certain characteristics can predict compatibility, and lead to more satisfying relationships. After three years of research, working in collaboration with Dr. Galen Buckwalter, Warren developed a model of compatibility that is now the basis of the company’s matching system.

The service was financed with a $3.0 million investment from Fayez Sarofim & Co. and individual investors. In 2004 eHarmony received the fourth largest venture capital infusion of that year from Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures.

eHarmony launched its matching service for singles in 2000. Since then, the company has had about 20 million members. As of 2008, about 15,000 people take the eHarmony questionnaire each day. After finding a match on eHarmony, Harris Interactive reports that an average of 236 eHarmony members marry every day.

Despite a common misconception, eHarmony is a single word and not two separate words.

Methodology

eHarmony advertises that compatibility is the core tenet at eHarmony, as indicated by most people who have used the site. As CEO Greg Waldorf explained, “It's not about matching people who like certain hobbies ... it's about compatibility. You go on to the site and tell us about you, rather than about what you want."

eHarmony seeks to differentiate its matching service by what it calls a scientific approach to a deeply personal and emotional process . Prospective eHarmony members complete a proprietary questionnaire that purports to determine characteristics, beliefs, values, emotional health and skills. Matching algorithms – the basis of the matching system Warren and Buckwalter developed, which the company believes matches people's core traits and values to replicate the traits of happy couples – use these answers to match members with compatible users.

eHarmony's research methods and its models for compatibility matching have not been submitted to any peer-reviewed journals for evaluation and publication. However, in 2004, eHarmony's research director, Dr. Steve Carter presented a paper at the 16th Annual American Psychological Society (APS) meeting. In the paper presented, Carter compared eHarmony couples married for more than five years with a control group, using the Dyadic Adjustment Scale(DAS), a measure of couple satisfaction. His results showed that "over 90% of eHarmony couples had marriage quality scores which were above average when compared to couples who had begun their relationships elsewhere. eHarmony couples were more than twice as likely to be in highly successful marriages than non-eHarmony couples... Not only are eHarmony couples 35% more likely than other married couples to report that they enjoy spending time together, but we found they are nearly twice as likely to report that their marriages are "extremely happy" or better versus other recently married couples." It should be noted that the study provided no data on the eHarmony failure rate for comparison. No independent studies of eHarmony's methods or success rates have been published.

Current board of directors

• Neil Clark Warren, Founder of eHarmony
• Greg Forgatch, Founder of eHarmony
• Sameer Gandhi, Partner at Accel Partners
• Pete Hart, Chairman of the Board of SVB Financial Corp. and Silicon Valley Bank
• Jay Hoag, General Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures
• Jaynie Studenmund, Director of Orbitz Worldwide
• Greg Waldorf, Founding Investor

Current executives

• Greg Waldorf, Founding Investor and CEO
• Greg Steiner, President and COO

Criticism

Some complain that the procedure to unsubscribe from the service is unfair or misleading. There have been many reports of credit cards continuing to be charged following subscription expiry. Concerns about the auto-subscription process are now being raised in the UK where a number of users are reporting re-instatement of previously cancelled auto subscription on eharmony account settings.

New promotions such as "Free Communication Weekend" do not permit either photos as viewable nor free-form messages. Therefore only multiple choice style communication is possible. This results in a user requiring to subscribe in order to exchange any contact details.

Various problems relating to the matching mechanism have been expressed, including the inability to filter matches by user-defined criteria, the fact that the matches are entirely generated by eHarmony, and not by browsing and choosing on the part of the user, and the inability to discern if a given match is an active, paying user.

Steve Carter, PhD. also published an article in the APS Observer (The newsletter of the APS), which was criticised by APS readers as an advertisement for the service, without any scientific merit. Other readers pointed out that eHarmony has never published data on how many of their matches do not result in satisfactory marriages, which makes it difficult to evaluate the service's relative value.

Another criticism is that the site does not adequately inform potential customers that they may not be eligible for the service. After answering a 258 question profile, which takes around one hour to complete, some would-be customers are rejected without explanation. The site states that one in five people are not suitable for the service. However, this is not stated until after they have completed the questionnaire. Known reasons for rejection are because the user is already married, is younger than 60 and has been married more than four times, is under the minimum age of 21, provides inconsistent answers in the profile or fails its "dysthymia scale."

Reports in media as well as blogs and newsgroups dealing with dating and relationships have steadily accumulated since at least early 2007 about some female users having been matched with users who turned out to be married men, ostensibly using the service in a means inconsistent with its stated objective and presumably submitting false and/or misleading information, some of which could apparently be easily fact-checked by eHarmony staff. The presence of married women using the service under false pretenses for unintended purposes—what is often referred to on other sites and media as "discreet relationships" with or betwixt married individuals—can be assumed, but relative and absolute numbers are difficult to discern.

Anecdotal reports of users on the service using falsified information aside from marital status has been noted in some cases.

This is a perennial problem with personals and dating sites, second to automated high-volume posting of ads which are in fact advertisements for pornography in terms of making a site unusable to its intended audience over time. It has led some services and sites to take countermeasures of varying extent and sophistication.

The irony of these problems with the service has been noted by media in many of their reports.

Some commentators have jocularly referred to the service as "e-Cookiecutter.com" and "e-another-me.com" with "69 levels of sameness"

eHarmony has also been criticized for not publishing their customer support phone number on their website.

On November 18, 2009, in response to eight complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority requested that a UK television ad for eHarmony be amended for two reasons. Firstly, the ad used a statistic generated from results of an online survey of 7,000 people, carried out in 2007, which seemed to show that 2% of Americans who married in that year met on eHarmony. The ASA acknowledged that the evidence appeared to back up that statistic, but they ruled that the ad implied a definitive figure of marriages between people who met via eHarmony in the past year, rather than an estimate based on an online survey in 2007. Secondly, the ASA ruled that the ad did not make clear that in 20% of cases it was unable to find a match for people who registered. Therefore, the ASA asked eHarmony to clarify these two points in their advertising.

In response to the ruling, Sean Cornwell, VP International Markets at eHarmony, said: "We believe the TV ads accurately portrayed the eHarmony service, but we respect the ASA’s request for more detail. We are amending the ads to indicate that eHarmony does have some eligibility requirements for users and to clarify that the claim that an average of 236 eHarmony users married each day in America is based on a study conducted by Harris Interactive for eHarmony in 2007. The ASA did not disagree with the results of the research."

Same-sex couples

eHarmony does not provide same-sex matches, which has led to criticism. Warren explained that he had done extensive research on heterosexual marriage but does not know enough about homosexual relationships to do same-sex match-making which "calls for some very careful thinking. Very careful research." He also noted that eHarmony promotes heterosexual marriage, adding that same-sex marriage is illegal in most states, "We don't really want to participate in something that's illegal." In a discussion regarding eHarmony's lack of services to gay individuals, Warren, a practicing evangelical Christian, is reported as having said, "Where Focus on the Family and a lot of these other places come from is that there are six places in the Bible that say homosexuality is wrong." But then he continued: "On the other hand, in the Old Testament if you work on the Sabbath day and you're guilty then you should be shot." eHarmony's lack of same-sex matching options has prompted lawsuits claiming that eHarmony has violated laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. A California case was dismissed, but as part of the settlement of a New Jersey case, eHarmony launched a partner website called Compatible Partners providing same-sex match-making "for serious couples" Theodore B. Olson, an attorney for eHarmony, said that even though the company believed the complaint was "an unfair characterization of our business," it chose to settle because of the unpredictable nature of litigation.

See also

• List of online dating websites

External links

• The official eHarmony Homepage
• eHarmony Labs Homepage
• eHarmony United Kingdom
• eHarmony Patent: U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,568
• eHarmony's Marriage Counseling Services
• Love in Tough Economic Times Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo. Video file.
• eHarmony CEO Talks Marriage CNN's The Boardroom. Video file.
• The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Interview: The Matchmaker Wall Street Journal.
• David Kirkpatrick Fast Forward: eHarmony Does What Tech Ought to Do Fortune Magazine.
• Ditching a Successful Ad Campaign Wall Street Journal.
• Online Dating Prospers in the Recession The Economist.
• eHarmony Launches in the U.K. BBC News.
• Brits Value Sex and In-Laws Reuters.
• Matchmaking Through Science. The Times.