They like me! They really like me!

This is actually nothing new, but as of late, it's put me in a bit of an ethical quandary.

I keep getting these emails from eHarmony asking me to join or come back or some other such nonsense.

I'm tempted to identify them as "spam" so that Yahoo! will keep them out of my inbox, but are they really "spam?" I mean, sure they're irritating and I never actually open them (ah, the joys of delete from the inbox list!), but it's not like they're trying to sell me porn or prescription drugs or even get my bank account information so that they can move their ancestral fortune from Kenya to the United States, offering to make me a small fortune in the process.

No, they just want me to sign up for online dating based on 29 personality points of compatibility! (feel that feigned excitement with me!)

Uh-huh.

Anyone out there ever done this? (Now would be the appropriate time for audience participation if there is in fact an audience....)

I actually tried eHarmony a few years back when it first came out. I admit, I was intrigued. I took their grueling, way too long, personality test. Slowly, potential matches trickled in. The more I learned about these men, the more I decided that I really didn't like myself. You see, I believe in science, and if science says this is who I'm compatible with, based on the results of this test, that I believe the science.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I changed my name and retook the test. Obviously I had been in some strange mood when I took the test in order to have the highlight of my potential soul mates be a moderately employed, barely articulate man in his late 30s who still lived with his mother. (Are you feeling the not liking myself very much now?)

I admit, eHarmony allows for a certain degree of fun, if you're predisposed to analyze others (or perhaps judging others) by the smallest detail or move they make, like some psychological chess match. Your first interaction is a selection from a list of multiple choice questions ~ I liked to think of them as my screeners. My personal favorite asked how many books you had read in the last year. Anyone who didn't respond "d" which was either "10 or more" or "12 or more" was just wasting my time. But that was my screener. More interesting were the questions I was asked to answer. One guy selected a question about the importance of sex in a relationship. The responses ranged from the Puritanical marriage bed type answer to the West Village exploration of all fantasies response. I have no idea what he was looking for ~ not that I actually cared.

My second run at the personality test proved as fruitless as the first. Nobody witty, articulate, interesting or intriguing enough to let my cat date, forget me.

In the years since, I read an article in Atlantic Monthly about online dating. The author of the article did the personality test (235 questions, by the way) for eHarmony and actually spent time with the PhD who runs that show.

“Let me tell you why you’re such a difficult match,” Warren said, facing me on one of his bright floral sofas. He started running down the backbone of eHarmony’s predictive model of broad-based compatibility, the so-called twenty-nine dimensions (things like curiosity, humor, passion, intellect), and explaining why I and my prospective match were such outliers.

“I could take the nine million people on our site and show you dimension by dimension how we’d lose people for you,” he began. “Just on IQ alone—people with an IQ lower than 120, say. Okay, we’ve eliminated people who are not intellectually adequate. We could do the same for people who aren’t creative enough, or don’t have your brilliant sense of humor. See, when you get on the tails of these dimensions, it’s really hard to match you. You’re too bright. You’re too thoughtful. The biggest thing you’ve got to do when you’re gifted like you are is to be patient.”

So, apparently, if you don't flash your press badge, they just send you the other losers they can't match with anyone else?? Or is that just something to keep you occupied until that other one in 9 million with a Y chromosome shows up? Perhaps that's why they're bugging both of me to come back.

At the very least, I hope I've completely skewed their data by pretending to be two different people.

I'm still saying that the greatest lesson I learned from eHarmony and their 29 dimensions of personality/compatibility is that, apparently, I really don't like myself all that much.

Oddly, someone there does....