EHarmony Discriminates Against Gays and Lesbians

Practically everyone has heard of eHarmony.com, the personal matchmaking website started by Dr. Neil Clark Warren. The bespectacled man appears against a white backdrop in the website's television advertisements, talking about their special methodology for marriage matching and how everyone deserves companionship. You get the impression they're trying to sell you on eHarmony's "scientific" approach, but there's an eerie clinical tone to the commercials that raises some suspicion. Still, if you're like me, you're intrigued enough to check out the site and at least get your free compatibility profile.

So, one afternoon, while staring at the steady drizzle outside my window, I figured it would be a good time to fill out their super-detailed questionnaire. I went to eHarmony.com and was done in about 10 seconds. Why so fast, you ask?

Because I'm gay. And eHarmony discriminates against gays and lesbians.

If you're not heterosexual, you can't even get past the first page. The website has only two choices: "I'm a man seeking a woman" and "I'm a woman seeking a man." For the millions of single non-heterosexual people out there, eHarmony declines service…but they're passive-aggressive about it. Nowhere on the site are potential users explicitly informed that eHarmony discriminates against gays and lesbians. Their terms of service make no mention of sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians only find out when they begin the sign-up process, like I did. When they see the site doesn't welcome them, they can't find an explanation - even in the "Help" section. It's as if same-sex matching had never even occurred to Dr. Warren.

But of course it had. As I began to research the issue, I found plenty of blog posts from frustrated users who were griping about various aspects of the site, including the denial of service to gays and lesbians. In 2005, Terri Gross from NPR's Fresh Air interviewed Dr. Warren about eHarmony.com and posed the gay question. (The archived 20-minute interview from August 17, 2005, is available with streaming audio on the www.npr.org website.)

Gross leads into the same-sex marriage topic by first asking the eHarmony founder about religious matching. After all, the site began with strong Christian overtones, as it was even branded by an early partnership with the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. Dr. Warren, it turns out, also holds a divinity degree and considers himself an evangelical Christian. But eHarmony.com now welcomes users from many religious backgrounds.

Warren said, "I want to try to reach all people with this website. We have hundreds and thousands of Buddhists and Hindus and Atheists and Agnostics and Jews and Christians and Wiccans." Further elucidating, he added, "I'm okay with anybody who basically says 'I deeply want to build a stronger link to the person I'm involved with. I want to have it survive over time, and I want to marry somebody else who's a lot like I am.'"

So he claims he wants to reach "all people," but gays and lesbians apparently don't count. When Gross specifically asks Warren why the site does not match gays or lesbians, he gives a direct response:

"Let me tell you why we don't. I look back at my 38 year career and I've seen thousands of people in therapy. I've never had a same-sex couple in therapy. I don't know how…I don't know exactly what the dynamics are there. We've done a deep amount of research on about 5000 married people but never on people who are same-sex, so we don't know how to do that. We think the principles probably are different, so we've never chosen to do it, and that's the position we take."

In other words, Warren is saying he doesn't know enough about gay and lesbian relationships to include them in eHarmony. But the reality is that we're still talking about single people who are looking for a mate. Love, affection, conflict, commitment, intimacy, care, support, and unity are the same relationship concepts regardless of sexual orientation. While gay people face special issues in society that can affect their relationships, so do blacks, Jews, Asians, Muslims, and people in wheelchairs. But eHarmony doesn't automatically discriminate against those groups.

Dr. Warren just doesn't *want* to include gays and lesbians at eHarmony. The site spends millions of dollars on its ad campaigns and employs plenty of researchers who could, without taxing themselves too much, find research on gay relationships and build that into their site. Although he claims ignorance about gay and lesbian matchmaking, you get the impression that he is just using it as an excuse - a way to avoid discussing his real bias.

It's true that eHarmony's aim is to match people for marriage, and technically Warren can argue that gay marriage isn't legal in many jurisdictions. But it is in Massachusetts. And Spain. And the Netherlands. And Belgium. The point is that there are plenty of places where eHarmony services are available and gay marriage is also legal. And even if same-sex couples cannot marry for legal benefit in most jurisdictions (yet), should that bar the matchmaking?

eHarmony does deny service to some heterosexual users, though it does not do so off the bat. The site allows users to fill out the questionnaire and then, on the basis of their answers, it may advise them that they aren't matchable. By looking for certain personality traits and consistency in answers, the site does edit a certain population out of the eHarmony pool - people it believes are not good prospects for marriage. While some users take offense to this, at least the decision is based on a well-rounded assessment of the person's profile and not just a litmus test on sexual orientation.

I would encourage people of all sexual orientations to consider boycotting eHarmony until the website changes its discriminatory practices. Also, if you have a personal experience in using eHarmony (be it positive or negative), please add a comment to this article.