4 ms·

eHarmony is disgusting. Or they were, the one time I tried to use their service ten years ago. My wife and I had been separated for a while and in the divorce

eHarmony is disgusting. Or they were, the one time I tried to use their service ten years ago. My wife and I had been separated for a while and in the divorce process. (We were and remain on friendly terms, but it was definitely over.) I thought I would check out some dating services, and eHarmony sounded like one that wasn't sleazy or weird. So I filled out their lengthy multipage onboarding form, with all kinds of personal questions where they ask you to write heartfelt essays about various things. At the beginning they asked my marital status and went on from there through the whole questionnaire. After I entered all of my information and wrote my personal essays, they got to the last page and said: "Sorry! We don't serve your kind. You are separated! Come back when your divorce is final." Those weren't the exact words, but that was the message. Now if a dating site wants to serve only a certain market, and if they don't want to serve people who are separated but not yet fully divorced, I totally respect that! But they need to say it up front after asking your marital status. Instead, they led me through the entire questionnaire, asking all sorts of personal questions, without even a hint that the very first question about my marital status was going to disqualify me. And then they offered no way for me to recover any of the information I had just entered into their site: all the essays, personal questions and answers, all gone. No online service of any type, dating or whatever, should ever do this to anyone. Luckily, I'd had the sense to copy and paste all my little essays into a text file and not trust them to give them back to me. That just seemed like common sense. But in the case of eHarmony, it was necessary!

Xelbair 7y ago
>And then they offered no way for me to recover all of the information I had just entered into their site - all the essays, personal questions and answers, all gone. What's worse is that they probably saved it and profited from that data.
vertex-four 7y ago
In my market, eHarmony pretty blatantly advertises itself as the morality police type of Christian platform - so this sort of thing is implied.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  Yes indeed, and I have no problem with their choice to serve only those who fit with their mission. If they had only been honest and up front about it, and as soon as I said I was "separated" they said "sorry, we're not the dating service for you", it would have been fine! I would have respected that and moved on. But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    The "separated" issue makes sense because on Planet Dating "separated" can mean anything from "The divorce papers have arrived and I haven't updated my status yet" to "I'm still living in the same house as my spouse and we have sex in between rows, but I'm not sure where this is going" to "I didn't mention I was married? Oh. Well. Sorry." But I suspect incompetence rather than malice. They simply didn't care enough - or weren't self-aware enough - to do a basic sanity check on status before onboarding. Or perhaps decided to add the check later and didn't have the spare braincells required to rearrange the onboarding sequence.
    - Stratoscope 7y ago
      You are right, and I ran into a few of those variations including "we still live together and sleep together, but we don't feel any emotional connection any more." And point well taken about suspecting incompetence rather than malice. Or not even incompetence. I can easily imagine some poor overworked web developer (maybe someone like me!) trying to meet their deadlines and business requirements and not even realizing that the "funnel" should have had a filter at the very top instead of waiting until the end to note the error. This is why I try to put myself in the shoes of whoever is using my app and hopefully look at it from their perspective. I try not to just to ask myself if the interaction I'm building meets the technical requirements, but how will the person feel who is using my app?
  - lordgrenville 7y ago
    It may have been incompetence instead of malice (eg they only implemented the marital status filter a while after designing the onboarding form). Either way that sounds really annoying, though.
DrScump 7y ago
I met someone out of area on EH in 2012, and we communicated for a couple of years. We both quit EH. Many months later, I found them still using her (quite attractive) photo in their advertising.

Xelbair 7y ago

>And then they offered no way for me to recover all of the information I had just entered into their site - all the essays, personal questions and answers, all gone. What's worse is that they probably saved it and profited from that data.

vertex-four 7y ago

In my market, eHarmony pretty blatantly advertises itself as the morality police type of Christian platform - so this sort of thing is implied.

Stratoscope 7y ago
Yes indeed, and I have no problem with their choice to serve only those who fit with their mission. If they had only been honest and up front about it, and as soon as I said I was "separated" they said "sorry, we're not the dating service for you", it would have been fine! I would have respected that and moved on. But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  The "separated" issue makes sense because on Planet Dating "separated" can mean anything from "The divorce papers have arrived and I haven't updated my status yet" to "I'm still living in the same house as my spouse and we have sex in between rows, but I'm not sure where this is going" to "I didn't mention I was married? Oh. Well. Sorry." But I suspect incompetence rather than malice. They simply didn't care enough - or weren't self-aware enough - to do a basic sanity check on status before onboarding. Or perhaps decided to add the check later and didn't have the spare braincells required to rearrange the onboarding sequence.
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    You are right, and I ran into a few of those variations including "we still live together and sleep together, but we don't feel any emotional connection any more." And point well taken about suspecting incompetence rather than malice. Or not even incompetence. I can easily imagine some poor overworked web developer (maybe someone like me!) trying to meet their deadlines and business requirements and not even realizing that the "funnel" should have had a filter at the very top instead of waiting until the end to note the error. This is why I try to put myself in the shoes of whoever is using my app and hopefully look at it from their perspective. I try not to just to ask myself if the interaction I'm building meets the technical requirements, but how will the person feel who is using my app?
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  It may have been incompetence instead of malice (eg they only implemented the marital status filter a while after designing the onboarding form). Either way that sounds really annoying, though.

DrScump 7y ago

I met someone out of area on EH in 2012, and we communicated for a couple of years. We both quit EH. Many months later, I found them still using her (quite attractive) photo in their advertising.