Goober and the art of love

There's nothing like negative publicity to pique curiosity. On Thursday I read another blog in which a guy tried taking eHarmony's free personality profile, only to discover at the end that he didn't have any matches. "No matches! Are you kidding?" I thought. And then: "I wonder if I'd have any matches." A few mouse clicks later I'm filling out a personality profile. I tried to be as honest as possible, but I did use an assumed name. How embarrassing would it be to run into someone you know on a site like that! A little over an hour later, I finish the survey. When I send my final results, a bar moves dramatically along the bottom of the screen while images of happy couples embracing and an explanation of why eHarmony is superior to other matching sites flash above.

Aaaaand... I have two matches. One is from Meridian, and the other is from Jackson. What are the odds that out of all 8 million eHarmony users, my only matches live within an hour and a half of me? This seems pretty fishy to me. Over the weekend, I seem to have become more compatible, because when I checked it this morning, I had seven more matches, about half of which were from the northeast. A couple of them sound like okay guys, but some of the language makes me laugh:

Below are some of the important interests that you and Sean share:
Walking

Oh, yeah, walking is a great way to begin a relationship! I bet he breathes and eats too!

One important thing to know about eHarmony in case you're at all interested in it—I try these things out so you don't have to—is that they make no differentiation between subscribers and those on the 7-day free trial. I have no intention of subscribing, but my matches don’t know that, and I can’t communicate with them until I fork over the money. In other words, a new user could be used as “bait” to get some guy to subscribe, only to find that he still can’t communicate with her because she was only on the free trial. I tried to remedy this situation by putting “I am not a subscriber” in my profile.

So no matter how appealing Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan make an online romance look in You’ve Got Mail, I’m not going to be jumping into the world of online dating any time soon. "Goober, you were on a date—you weren't taking medicine."