Adventures in Online Dating - Part One

I was first lured into the prospect of online dating by personality tests. I love studying personality, so a free assessment of my own personality as well as the person with whom I'd be a great match appealed to me. So I signed up for eHarmony.

With a free membership on eHarmony, you don't get to view photos of your matches, and you can only communicate with them on free communication weekends, which are held around several holidays during the year. I wasn't really looking to meet a guy right that minute, so I stayed with a free membership for years, connecting with a few guys but rarely making it through open communication.

I set up an anonymous email account to access eHarmony and share with the people I met on the site. If you are looking to pursue love online, an anonymous email account is a great first step. It provides a necessary buffer as you get to know potential matches, especially for women. The more a guy knows about you, the easier he can find you offline, and while sites like eHarmony have some level of screening (including their long personality test), you do not want all of your matches to know where you live, or even your last name. There's plenty of time after you've gotten to know someone better to share personal details.

After a good friend told me he'd signed up for eHarmony, I thought that there might be some guys worth checking out there, so I paid for a subscription. If you want to do the same, look for promo codes! I was able to get a total of seven months for one quarter the price my friend had paid for six. Saving $150 was definitely an economical choice.

I loved being able to see photos of my matches! A picture is truly worth a thousand words. What photos a person chooses to post says so much about them. While I still based my decision on whether to contact a person on their profile information, their photos did influence my decision.

I tend to be pretty picky about who I contact online, but eHarmony's matching service did weed out the majority of the bad apples. I soon grew to realize that 95% (if not more) of my matches only had free memberships, which meant they had no idea what I looked like and no way to contact me except during free communication weekends. So in an effort to reach the tiny minority of guys who could contact me back, I started communication with many of my matches every day. As long as their profile didn't raise any red flags and their picture didn't repulse me, I sent them an initial message.

But after 7 months of contacting about 20 guys a week and getting to talk with maybe 10 of them total (half of which ended up being duds, a few got into relationships shortly after we started talking, and a few let the conversation fade away), I had had enough. I was spending too much effort and money on a dating site that was essentially a ghost town. I ended my subscription. It was time to try something new.

That something new was OkCupid. But I will share that story in part two!