e harmony

[femw/i]

Has anyone sign onto e-harmony and decided to mention that they were crossdresses? If yes, how did you post your profile? I try an alternative site but, has no luck.

[Amy Hepker]

I tried E-Harmony and posted it as I am a male looking for a female who wears female clothing and had my Amy picture and the denied me.

[femw/i]

So no luck? Lol

[serinalynn]

I Think these dating sites want you to be completely honest with them. The sites ( i Believe) have ways to tell if you are already married or are streaching the truth. I think that the dating sites have not wanted to deal with crossdressers and that may be something that you would have to talk to your date(s) about in private. There are some women out there that would approve of you crossdressing, but that would be up to your date.

[Tasha T]

I signed up for it as a crossdresser and had my account deleted within 24 hours.

[Katrina]

Why would you want to sign up for a site that completely disagrees with your lifestyle because of their "moral" code? If you aren't a vanilla Christian, they don't want you in their system...it is as simple as that.

* and for the non-Christians out there, I'm sorry, but I got the distinct impression from their ads and what I read about them on other sites and their own that they are basically filtering out all non-Christians one way or the other. In case you haven't figured out, I like them about as much as I like Dr. Phil. (Not at all)

[MsJanessa]

e-harmony is not interested in having Us as their customers.

[tonya2]

I read somewhere that e-harmony only accepts about 1 in 10 who try to sign up. They filter for many reasons and want people who only match what
is in there system to try to keep the percentages of matches up.
Not a place to go.

Tonya

[Amy Lynn3]

I tried to sign up with them and they rejected me, because I said I was seperated and not single. I told the truth about my married status and it looks like they would respect my honesty. I say....take their site on the Jerry Springer Show, because both are a joke.

[Niya W]

they want hetro, single almost puritan people there. Any hint being any thing else bam you are gone.

[docrobbysherry]

For me, anyway. I'm speaking as a past client. Listed as straight man, looking for a straight woman. There r so many steps in their process before u can contact someone. It is WAY TOO difficult to communicate with someone your interested in. By the time u do, both parties have lost interest!

I have tried to join a number of dating sites as a CD. It all goes fine until I try to post one of Sherry's pics. Once they get a load of a pic, I'M OUT O THERE!

[femw/i]

Thanks for the comments, I guess that I will not be totally honest or bothering wasting me time?

[KathrynTX]

I met my SO through E-Harmony. I did not mention that I was a crossdresser at all. IMO mentioning one's femme side is something that's probably best reserved for after communication has started and you've met your match a few times.

I'm not as religious as I used to be, and am broadminded with regard to sexuality. I indicated as much through their questionnaires and was accepted. Speaking for myself, the process works, but it can take time. I was a member for eleven months before I met my SO. But she is without a doubt the love of my life, my best friend, and I can't see myself being with anyone else.

I think saying you're a CD'er right out of the gate and submitting a photo of yourself dressed is probably not the best approach. Amy and Jungle Woman, I greatly admire your wishes to be up front about who you are. I just think when it comes to online dating, this is something that needs to be brought up gradually.

I had plenty of E-Harmony matches that sounded like they might be open to being in a relationship with a crossdresser, but you've got to communicate with someone to find out to be sure.

[KimberlyG]

Not unlike Kathryn TX. I myself have met a wonderful woman on eharmony. Speaking only for myself, I'd much rather date someone about 5 to seven dates before sounding out the person about how open minded they might be on the subject of being a CD. That way she gets to know me for me. We are all a total package and being a CD is only one part of the complex person we all are.

It did take awhile - but it was worth every month.

Met a fabulous GG.

[Alicia_lynn419]

They are a scam... I consider myself to be a Christian, but more spiritual than religious and stated that on my profile. I also said i was interested in meeting women with 100 miles of me.... I ONLY got matched with "bible-thumpers" and most of them lived several states away. I would not recommend that site to anyone. I have had much better luck on match.com... they allow YOU to search and have a better interface and customer service.

[mykhelee]

You should know what e-harmony is all about before you go. Happy "normal" people seeking same. I am glad it has worked out for some. They would not accept me because I do not ift in as "safe and normal" even without my proclivity for dressing.

[femw/i]

I realize that there are many down sides to life. Mostly I enjoyed reading Kathryn and Kimberlys' success. With that being said if it happen to you it can happen to me.
Maybe there is something to be said about holding off on certain issues. You don't wait your date running out the door on your first date.
It's not like you are going to marry on the first day!

[KathrynTX]

You should know what e-harmony is all about before you go. Happy "normal" people seeking same. I am glad it has worked out for some. They would not accept me because I do not ift in as "safe and normal" even without my proclivity for dressing.

I'm not sure I'd describe myself or my SO as normal, lol!

I regularly play tabletop RPG's (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons) and we both enjoy playing an MMO called Guild Wars. In fact she's a Guild and Alliance leader in the game.

I'm a serious sci-fi geek (Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5 mainly) and she's a serious anime geek.

Yet neither of us had our profiles rejected and we found each other.

I think the operative phrase for this situation is "Your results may vary."

[Sam44]

Without denying the direct experiences of those that posted above about eHarmony I have to say that my experience with them was only positive and I was honest and upfront about things both in communication with matches there as well as in private email to the eHarmony staff. I never experienced or heard of censoring in talking to my potential matches even when things came up that were more outside of "normal" than those mentioned in posts above.

I'll not make this into an anti anti eHarmony post, but I'm pretty sure I understand the roots of many of people's bad experiences at eHarmony and that they are more benign than the explanations often given.

My matches spanned the gamut, but were all fairly compatible with me except for an initial bias towards people with too little education. I realized that that might be because I reported that tho I went to college I didn't graduate. I sent mail to the staff asking if there were a way that I could indicate that I preferred more educated matches without lying. They said that it was fine if I changed my stated level of education and since this wasn't an item that was explicitly revealed to potential matches I didn't feel like I was lying to anyone so said I had a degree and then most of my matches seemed right on target.

Back to crossdressing: tho I was upfront about myself (including having my pictures set for open viewing instead of revealing them later) I thought that crossdressing was something better discussed in the later levels of communication. Similarly some of the people I dated only mentioned things like having MS after a date or two... I agreed with their choices in these matters and don't have any reason to believe that anyone felt bad about my choice to wait a little to talk about crossdressing.

I'm still in irregular communication with a few women that I met at eHarmony. We were pleased that a couple of them came to our wedding and my wife and I have gone for walks with one of them since.

[TSchapes]

I met my SO through E-Harmony. I did not mention that I was a crossdresser at all. IMO mentioning one's femme side is something that's probably best reserved for after communication has started and you've met your match a few times.

I'm not as religious as I used to be, and am broadminded with regard to sexuality. I indicated as much through their questionnaires and was accepted. Speaking for myself, the process works, but it can take time. I was a member for eleven months before I met my SO. But she is without a doubt the love of my life, my best friend, and I can't see myself being with anyone else.

I think saying you're a CD'er right out of the gate and submitting a photo of yourself dressed is probably not the best approach. Amy and Jungle Woman, I greatly admire your wishes to be up front about who you are. I just think when it comes to online dating, this is something that needs to be brought up gradually.

I had plenty of E-Harmony matches that sounded like they might be open to being in a relationship with a crossdresser, but you've got to communicate with someone to find out to be sure.

I'm glad your experience helped you find a wonderful partner. However, who is e-Harmony to dictate how we should discover the love of our lives? Their behavior is just another way to keep us in the "Weirdo Transvestite" column and not in the "Executive Transvestite" column (Thanks Eddie Izzard). How can we be genuine when companies like this pull this kind of junk?

-Tracy

[docrobbysherry]

I'm glad your experience helped you find a wonderful partner. However, who is e-Harmony to dictate how we should discover the love of our lives? Their behavior is just another way to keep us in the "Weirdo Transvestite" column and not in the "Executive Transvestite" column (Thanks Eddie Izzard). How can we be genuine when companies like this pull this kind of junk?
-Tracy

It isn't just Eharmony. Whenever I try to post a pic of Sherry on a internet dating site, they r immediately removed! Except for the ones that r titled, " Perverts R Us!", or something similar!

When ANY regular dating site starts accepting CD photos in their "members" section, I think THAT will be the day that CDs have become accepted members of the community!

[Sam44]

OK maybe I will try to more explicitly state my views on eHarmony. The reason isn't that I want to be an eHarmony apologist. Instead I believe there is a bigger point here.

My argument can be summarized by the aphorism "Never ascribe to malevolence that which can be explained by incompetence."

I think that many people take things personally when there is no reason to waste the psychic energy (or bile as the case may be.) If you bear with me I'll climb up on my soap box and try to explain:

First I'll use a not entirely contrived example: one which doesn't talk about the lives of people, their beliefs or their relationships with society.

Let's talk about a company which has designed a tool to help people organize their email folders; it doesn't matter so much whether this product is targeted to Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo email or whatever. The product scans the user's existing folders and inbox and suggests rules to help sort out the email that is in the inbox and to move future messages to the correct folder. (For example it might notice that messages with certain words in the subject sent on Tuesdays are from a specific email list and should go in folder xxx.) The company wants people to see what the product can do so it lets people try it out, but it doesn't allow them to install the rules into their email program unless they pay. The company also wants to keep a good reputation for working well so it has incorporated into the program some tests to see if the heuristics used to discover each specific user's organizational scheme are effective.

Now the company knows that the product isn't perfect: for example it doesn't understand languages which use a single character/word, or languages which are written from right to left instead of from left to right and (perhaps because of time to market or market size, etc.) the first release doesn't handle languages like German which have compound nouns (a sequence of nouns, etc. without word breaks) well.

We understand when the first release of computer programs like word processors don't handle such languages. The company has to decide based on its resources (money, staffing, experience, etc.) whether or when to build a more general product.

I don't think that most of us would consider it a moral or ethical lapse for the company to not support all languages in the first release or for that matter in any release.

But there are more subtle ways for the company's product to not work for some potential customers:

For example a potential client whose email storage organization is too far from any that program is designed to handle. The company has two obvious choices: 1) take a chance that the results for this customer will be at least good enough that the customer will be happy or at worst ask for his money back or 2) notify the customer that the program isn't designed for their specific needs and to not charge the customer or let the rules run amok. One can make a good business case for either choice.

I don't think my example is too far off of the mark but to be explicit let me recast and expand it now in terms of eHarmony.

eHarmony has done a reasonable amount of work to build a module of human traits as they relate to a long term "good" marriage. In any model there will be any number of sources of error: too small of a sample, too limited a set of parameters to be fit, parameters that aren't easy to measure, unknown parameter interactions, and on and on. On the other hand when you have a big enough pool of data you can solve most of these problems to a degree that allows the resultant model to be useful for many if not most inputs encountered. But not all…

In eHarmony's case there are explicit sets of customers not handled, for argument's sake: gay and lesbian matches.

There are probably also customers whose profile is so selective that eHarmony just doesn't have any matches. (As a customer I could see batches of matches that were very tightly matched and then later I could see more matches which were obviously a little less specific. One can easily imagine customers whose matches only come along every year or so.)

There are also certain potential customers whose personality tests just don't make sense to eHarmony's personality profile interpreter: Perhaps some people who are just winging it and end up with inconsistent answers or on the other end of the spectrum perhaps people with personality disorders. But even ignoring these problems, there will always be people whose scores on the personality profile test are sufficiently far from the people who were used to generate the personality profile that eHarmony (or more accurately their model) doesn't know with any certainty whats going on.

Unlike the case of the email organizer above, here there well may be people's futures at stake or at the very least the reputation of eHarmony's ability to generate good matches.

Personally I believe that it's moral and ethical for them to not take a potential client's money when they know that they don't have enough information to reliably deliver their advertised service. Note that the threshold of when to "give up" on a potential client is a judgment call: while I was presented with hundreds of potential matches in a few months (even when restricting my potential matches to my home city) one of the women matched with me told me that even with her potential matches set for anywhere in the whole US she got matched three times in a six month period. I'm pretty sure she would have rather had eHarmony just put her in the "can't help you" bucket at the outset.

For those of you who are still reading I'd like to make a few more observations:

I meant my original statement: I believe that most of the perceived faults of eHarmony stem from their "incompetence" in handling certain people and or classes of people. By that I mean that their matching program is incompetent for those people (i.e. it doesn't do a good job for them) and hence the company is just being responsible in not taking them on as clients.

Tho I believe that eHarmony as a company has made an explicit choice to not attempt to extend their models to handle, say, gays and lesbians there are other plausible alternatives: perhaps their current models break down when they do try extend it to handle them. Perhaps the extended model generates too few matches to be useful (or perhaps too many.) Or perhaps they need a few more personality traits to achieve their current level of "goodness" when some of these other parameters are added, but they haven't yet redone their research with these new traits added to the mix…

I also think that people tend to attribute actions of a company based on their own personal hot buttons instead of seeing that perhaps other things happened; perhaps some other unrelated rule was violated or even that mistakes might have happened. (For example my wife's account was disabled because of a billing error (with no notification) but an email asking what had happened cleared things up.)

In any case I don't agree with some of the posts here that there is anything personal in eHarmony not handling all individuals or classes of people.

Note that I'm not claiming that all experiences related here (and elsewhere) are misreported, but I can say that I have helped many of the people I met thru eHarmony understand simpler explanations of similar "malevolencies."

OK, I'll get down off of my soap box. Thanks for reading this if you lasted this long For the curious here's a reference to their patent: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6735568

[Jean Marie]

I signed up as a male, listing crossdressing and womens fashions as prt of my interests, my photos was my boy side. my ad is lsited but I never get any responses.

[TSchapes]

I understand what you are getting at. And if that's what e-harmony wants to do they certainly have the right to do it. But just like retail businesses have discovered that Tracy's money spends the same as my drab money, dating services that wish to expand their business will become more inclusive. Us male tom-boys are a market untapped. I and my sisters have disposable income just waiting to be taken. Any company that wants to operate on some arbitrary ideals does so at their own peril.

-Tracy

[Sam44]

I hope my rant didn't come across as condescending but in my first post I was reacting to people spreading rumors without checking them out rather than reporting experience: e.g. claiming that they try to match people based on the company's religious beliefs, or people who claim that they were rejected for various specific reasons.

Nothing personal, it's just that this thread pressed two of my hot buttons: rumor mongering and the perception of prejudice or discrimination where it doesn't exist. There is enough real prejudice in the world deserving righteous indignation that we shouldn't waste energy when there is really something more benign going on.

Not to beat a dead horse but quotes like "Their behavior is just another way to keep us in the 'Weirdo Transvestite' column and not in the 'Executive Transvestite' column (Thanks Eddie Izzard). How can we be genuine when companies like this pull this kind of junk?" caused me to try to explain why I think that people who say such things haven't taken the time to figure things out or aren't trying to think things thru. The company isn't pulling anything, I was trying to point out that it's not malevolence, it's actually likely a real problem for them.

The point of my long post (which I don't blame people for not wading all the way thru) is that for eHarmony (unlike most of their competitors) broadening their client base is extremely unlikely to be as easy as flipping a switch, removing an arbitrary restriction, etc. There's a basic problem with augmenting models with data that are a standard deviation or two away from the "norm". It, of necessity, require orders of magnitude more data or at the least very careful selection of data which has it's own risks. But in this case there is a more fundamental problem: For eHarmony to get as accurate of matching for, say, gays and lesbians, as they do for the general population they'd need as many multi year gay and lesbian marriages to analyze as the "conventional" marriages that they analyzed to build their current models... This data might not even exist at any cost. yet...

I'm not denying or ignoring the elephant in the room: The number of customers that they may be afraid they might loose if they courted some of the more obvious missing groups. (If I were them I'd say the heck with it, let's put x% of our R/D dollars into being more universal, but who knows who holds the purse strings there.) But this isn't the real problem.