Eharmony: it’s me against the machine

I decided to give eharmony 48 hours to impress me before I cough up for its extortionate £35 a month subscription. It boasts that with its personality match system, you don’t have to wade knee-high through profiles, the way you would with other sites.  Instead, they email you a handful of ‘highly compatible matches’ each day. So I’ve been waking up each morning to the bleep of my Blackberry as a half-dozen potential boyfriends drop into my inbox.

Having made all these claims, eharmony’s oh-so-unique psychometric software had put itself under quite a bit of pressure. So when it didn’t perform well on the first day, I did wonder if it was just a bit nervous. Uxbridge? Reigate? Woking?? Was this computer serious? If it can’t discern from my answers to the personality test that I don’t eat outside the city, let alone date there, it’s got a serious problem with its algorithms.

I was also a little surprised that the first six guys it picked for me were all Chinese. But then, that’s the beauty of the personality test: it can give you useful insight, like the fact that you’d be hot stuff in Nanjing. Either that, or I confused it by overplaying my love of pork balls. (It probably wasn’t an answer they were expecting under “name the five things you couldn’t live without”.)

The first night, I went to bed disappointed. With no pictures on the profiles – you don’t get to see those til you pay up – I could only go on the meagre scraps of information that an eharmony profile provides. These include “the three things I’m most thankful for”, “how I typically spend my leisure time”, and  “my best three life skills”, all of which sounds about as moodkilling as a kipper tie. The three life skills, by the way, are from a list – there’s no place for creativity here – so people are genuinely forced to sell themselves on the basis that they are good at “maintaining an organised life”, “achieving personal goals” or my personal favourite: “using humour to make friends laugh”. Oh! So that’s what funny looks like!

Today was day two. Crunch day for Mr Computer. If he didn’t pull something out of the bag, he’d lost me. I snuck a look while still under the duvet. It wasn’t promising. Martin from Knebworth was 10 years older than me. He had last read a book called “How to be a better father”. I was pretty sure that I had told Mr Computer that I wasn’t remotely interested in the prospect of being a stepmother. Mr Computer told me that this was a “flexible match”. I didn’t understand this term. Mr Computer directed me to his “help” page.

“If no matches can be found for you, we will employ flexible matching.”

Two days in, and even the computer’s given up on me.

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