Match.com vs. eHarmony.com

Turn on your television. Pick any channel, as long as it has commercials (PBS won't work for this example). Chances are, in one hour's worth of programming, you will see at least one advertisement for Match.com and one for eHarmony.com. Both promise eternal bliss with your perfect mate. But how do they determine who is the perfect mate for each person. This writer decided to go on an internet-dating, fact-finding mission, to see just exactly how Match.com and eHarmony.com help you to find your perfect match.

Both sites are subscription based. Sign up and view your matches for free but if you want to contact one of them, you have to pay. eHarmony.com subscriptions are as high as $59.95 per month, Match.com's highest rate is only $34.99 but that figure is buried deep within the site. You have to be a registered member and be signed into your account to view the subscription costs. They aren't even listed in the site's Terms of Service. On eHarmony.com, they are found just a few links off the first page.

But even with eHarmony.com, the subscription prices are buried at the end of the tour. From the first page, click on Tour at the very bottom of the page then click through the six pages of the site tour and at the bottom of the last page is a link to Membership Plans. Both sites lure people in with their "view your matches free" commercials but don't make it easy to find out how to connect with your matches later on.

Customer service at either company will tell you it is on the commercial in the fine print but who can read that? It's usually 250 words of white print on a white background and you get two seconds to read it.

The subscription costs are, naturally, not the only differences between the two companies. Match.com allows users to show themselves in every question they answer about themselves. From listing your favorite things to describing your favorite activities to expounding on your religious and political beliefs, Match.com users are given a series of essay-style questions, sprinkled with some general click-the-radio-button or select-from-the-pull-down-menu questions such as ideal height, ethnicity, religion.

On eHarmony.com, you are matched on "29 dimensions of compatibility." However, after spending nearly 45 minutes clicking radio buttons indicating the importance of each of their 29 dimensions of compatibility, I didn't have a chance to use a single word from my own vocabulary. The questions on the eHarmony.com compatibility assessment are more akin to the Myers-Briggs typography testing than to anything that could be construed as courtship. Each question is answered using the "very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, very unlikely, not applicable" scale.

Sexual preference is also a considerable difference in using Match.com verses eHarmony.com. On Match.com you are given a pull-down menu labeled "I am a..." and a pull-down menu labeled "looking for a..." You are given the opportunity, if applicable, to select I am a Woman looking for a Woman. On eHarmony.com, there is one pull-down menu labeled "I am a..." and the only choices in the menu are "Man seeking a Woman" and "Woman seeking a Man." "Woman seeking a Woman" or vice versa is not an option (This pull-down menu was and still is a big factor in a civil lawsuit against the owners of the website).

Out of curiosity, I put in "I am a Woman seeking Women" on Match.com, and clicked search - just to see if their programming would allow it. It allowed it but the returned results were decidedly male.