An Open Letter to eHarmony

I understand that you probably receive many emails to this effect, but I nevertheless feel I must submit this complaint about your rejection practices, which I feel, with some justification, are both flawed and offensive.

They are flawed because one particular reason for rejection, if I understand correctly, is if a prospective eHarmony member provides contradictory answers to your personality profile. I think I'm right to question what counts as "contradictory." If I encounter two variations of the question, "I think of myself as a leader," and then have to answer them both on a ten-point "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" scale, would a 5 and a 6 count as contradictory answers? Must I remember my answer to the earlier question to avoid coming across as "contradictory"? The flaw here is an absurdly obvious one, that you are asking people to measure the most immeasurable aspects of their personality -- and to do so on a standardized scale!

The biggest problem here is that the questionairre in which Dr. Warren takes such pride doesn't take context into account. To stick with the "I think of myself as a leader" example (which may be purely hypothetical; I can't remember if that's actually one of the questions, but it will do to serve my point), a person can be a bona-fide, natural-born leader under certain circumstances, and invariably a follower in others. The same guy who actively leads a social group might desperately look for a savior in a crisis. The same person who's an aggressive go-getter at the office might be a laid-back, 'I'll do anything you guys want" fellow with his friends. The possibilities even for this one "I think of myself as a leader" question are endless -- and that's just one of many, many such ambiguous questions in your profile.

Now I know that one possible response to the above complaint is, "well, if he's a leader sometimes and a follower other times, then he should just click on the mid-range between "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree." This makes sense only ostensibly. Such a solution robs that person of an opportunity to advocate his genuine leadership skills to the personality profile. More to the point, the lack of context forces that person to make a ridiculous decision. "Am I a leader? Sometimes. So I should click in the mid-range. Except. . . when I am a leader, I'm a powerful leader. So maybe I agree. But wait, I am kinda laid back too, so maybe I don't agree. I guess I strongly agree, strongly disagree, and only sort of agree. Now what?"

I must emphasize that such thoughts aren't a sign of a wishy-washy individual, but rather a natural and in fact unavoidable consequence of the nature of asking applicants to measure the immeasurable, to provide answers with no frame of reference despite a desperate need for context.

I should also point out that your rejection statistics are probably flawed too. Granted, you're in a better position to understand your own statistics than I am, but consider: When I was first rejected by eHarmony, I complained about it to anyone who would listen (and probably a few who didn't). Out of sheer curiosity, several of my friends and family members then tried to sign up with eHarmony -- and every single one of them was rejected too. If I understand correctly, you claim that the statistics are an average of one rejection out of every five applications. With me, my friends, and our relatives, we found the statistic to be five rejections out of every five applicants. Admittedly, we were hardly a random sampling, but I fail to see how we're not a representative sampling. Even if there's something about this particular group that somehow makes us different than the rest of the world, I'd think we still represent some sort of microcosm of society -- and yet there's a huge statistical difference between "one out of every five" and "five out of every five." Not that I'm making the ludicrous claim that you don't accept anybody at all, all I'm saying is, there seems to be a bit of a discrepency here.

Yet even if you disagreed with all of the above -- although I think you'd have a difficult argument to make if you did -- I am sure that your rejectees would nearly unanimously agree that your rejection practices are offensive. The rejection message that you give to your applicants is two-fold: 1) that eHarmony has certain (albeit mysterious) standards that the rejectee has failed to meet; and 2) that eHarmony is so sure that this person is difficult, if not impossible, to match -- in other words, so sure that none of its thousands of members would want this particular person -- that you can't even take their money. Yes, I am, of course, paraphrasing, as eHarmony makes an extremely half-hearted attempt to use diplomatic diction, but those two messages are impossible to ignore. It's not a matter of interpretation or "reading between the lines" -- eHarmony is telling its rejectees, in so many words, one thing, and one thing only: You're not good enough. Harsh.