This has not been the best weekend. After what will be known in the history books as the Great Hairdressing Catastrophe, I am at a low ebb, and my hair, instead of dazzling blonde, is the colour of weak coffee. My confidence – sky high right up to the moment I walked into the salon and mistakenly used the words “sure, whatever you think” – is now in a critical condition, while my vanity is sitting fidgeting by its bedside, desperate to switch off the life-support.
All in all, not a good time to join a dating site that requires you to fill in a psychological questionnaire. But those eharmony adverts exert a powerfully mystic pull. It starts with the promise of a “lasting relationship” with someone who’s been specially selected to complement your character, intellect and values. Then, just when they’ve got your attention, comes the clincher: they’ll give you a free personality profile!
It’s a brilliant marketing plan, because nothing better appeals to people’s egos than the personality test. We love to believe in the multiple-choice oracle that will mount and frame our best features, and effortlessly turn our weaknesses into hidden strengths. I used to envy high-flying friends of mine who applied for City firms, not on the basis of their salary or prestige but because they were going to find out, officially, if they were a leader, a follower or a psychopath. Even now, when people return from a draining three-hour Myers Briggs test, clutching the little piece of paper calling them an introverted extravert/extraverted introvert/extra-pert introvertible Turk, I have to fight the urge to rip it from their hand and scream: “But what about me? WHAT AM I?!”
As we know, my approach to online profiles is generally to the copy-and-paste one, an essential ploy if you want any spare time to actually go on dates. (It’s not a failsafe plan, as you can read here). With its lengthy psychometric test, eharmony, gave me nowhere to hide: there aren’t any “About you” sections where you can unpack your usual spiel, and you must answer every question, no passes allowed. Once you have inputted your data and your personality has been determined by their computer system, you will be matched to a complementary human within a 30-mile radius. And they say romance is dead.
Still, who am I to be sniffy? I’m reliably informed (by eharmony themselves) that 2% of all newly-weds in the US meet each other on this website. It’s probably no better or worse a system than matching people who have an 80% crossover in their DVD collection, which is how it’s worked on most of my previous sites.
I had a dead hour on the weekend, so I spent it telling eharmony whether I would strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, or neither agree nor disagree with a welter of statements, including such gems as:
“I must have a partner who maintains high standards of personal hygiene, orderliness, and other personal habits”
“I must have someone who is mature and experienced as a potential sexual partner and is able to express himself/herself freely”
“I can’t stand someone who believes that any particular ethnic group to which they belong is superior to the rest of humanity”
(Strongly agree on all counts, natch.)
Unfortunately, that dead hour was also the one I spent with strong quantities of peroxide slathered on my scalp, and by the time my hairdresser had remembered about me my hair had quite literally gone white. His attempts to redress it turned the blonde to a murky brown so rodenty that I fully expect it to crawl away of its own accord during the night…
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