Throwback Thursday: How to Outsmart eHarmony
I wrote this three years ago. Three years ago and people are still commenting on the original post. (Seriously, I woke up at 6:00am to the sound of WordPress app pinging away on my cell phone). I get it, I was pretty snarky back then, and I still have hangups about height, but really this wasn’t even supposed to be about height (or size or shallowness or anything else). It was supposed to be about gaming the system… which I managed to do. For about a week and a half.
My God. I’d forgotten how much work goes into online dating. And I haven’t even reached the dating phase yet! I’m still stuck in the interminable quagmire that comprises eHarmony’s “Guided Communication Process” but I will say this: I’ve received some interesting prospects this week.
My eHarmony subscription is paid up through June. As I mentioned last month, the matches they’d been sending me went from bad (5’6”) to worse (5’4”). And yes, I know I shouldn’t be so hung up on the height thing but I can’t help it. It’s one of my non-negotiables, and a girl’s allowed at least a few less-than-rational demands, isn’t she? I mean its not as if I’m asking all of my Potential Soul Mates to take up baroque dance or eighteenth-century costuming.
Anyway, I figured that the folks over at eHarmony figured that they’d never be able to send me six or seven good candidates every day for the final four months of my subscription (and that I’d call to complain as evidently so many of their clients do). According to my eHarmony Conspiracy Theory, they therefore began padding my daily matches with the sort of men who, to be frank, made me think that spinsterhood might not be such a bad idea after all.
First it was one or two duds every day. Then three or four. Then, last month, nothing but duds, and even then the deluge of vertically challenged, linguistically challenged, entirely-not-for-me men eventually slowed to a sad, steady trickle. At last count, I was receiving only two or three matches per day.
So I decided to outsmart eHarmony.
I turned off the “Send me matches” feature and took a few days off (by which I mean, I reactived my Match.com account and got started on Plenty of Fish). My thought was that once the folks over at eHarmony realized they wouldn’t need to send me six to seven matches every day from now until the end of June, they’d stop holding out on me. And once I reactivated the “Send me matches” feature, the rationing of actual Potential Soul Mates would cease and I’d be swamped with good looking men.
Genius right?
And it was genius, because it worked. I’ve even gone so far as to give one of my potential PSMs my phone number.
Kat Echevarría Richter 
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