02-05-10

Your Match with Steve Could be the Start of Something Great.

Oh eHarmony. You lost me at hello. A while ago, when things caved in on my current life and it was time to start looking for new things: new job, new apartment, new nanny, I also started doing a little research on my new dating options (just to look, at this point replacing the nanny is more important than replacing the boy.) I started talking with my mom about things and she suggested eHarmony.

Mom: You know your Uncle Eric met his wife on eHarmony.

So I went. And I filled out their HUGE personality test (p.s. they repeat questions in one form or another) and found the most boring profiles of my life. It felt like I was pouring through ten thousand profiles of the same person: “i love my family, My favorite book is:  i don’t read books (which is obvious by their atrocious profiles. Capital letters!!!! My love, don’t let your Freudian aversion to big and intellectual scare you. Capital A’s are sexy) and my idea of a romantic date is: dinner.” Yawn.

At least with PlentyofFish and Craigslist, you can sit down with a bowl of popcorn and entertain yourself with some of the tragedies you find. eHarmony is just…harmonious. A big bowl of blah. And then the emails came: it was ridiculous waking up in the morning to dozens of emails with pretty similar subject lines: “Meet Philip and see if you spark” or “your match with Steve could be the start of something great”. My email box wreaked of eHarmony commercials! The subjects easily could have been “We don’t care about your future, just give us $50 a month to bug you with our branding!”

It’s hard enough not mailing out invoices for my time to these advertisers already, I’ll be damned if I’ll be paying anyone for my time in the near future. Thanks mom, but I’m not looking for wife, or a husband, or even a date right now.

Really what it boiled down to was research. Like shoe shopping, which is futile online, before I dragged my butt away from the computer and actually walked into Dillards, I wanted to know what styles were on the market right now. What I found: a lot of blue collar with spelling errors and big trucks, a few older gents with relatively established careers (and a nagging suspicion that something was terribly wrong with them) and a few ladies who’s boyfriends probably posted the ad for them. Shoe shopping online is tragic, you have to be able to physically run your hands over the product to know what you are really getting and if it will even fit you. The worse thing you could do is fall in love with a great pair of shoes and find out they are two sizes too small.