Harmony

I’m still sticking with my plan of doing something new every week. This week I decided to get back online. That’s right, folks.

I’ll admit, I’m pretty lonely. I spend at least an hour a day sorting through puppy pictures, checking out the photo galleries on the SPCA sites, and searching the ads on Sacbee.com for ‘pug,’ ‘puggle,’ or ‘cavalier king charles.’ I debate in my head whether my dog will sleep with me in my bed or not. But I’m off to Burning Man in about a month for ten days and I can’t get a dog before then.

So to ameloriate the lonelines, I got back online to find a dog. Not a puppy, but a real dog of a man looking for his bitch. Yes, that would be me–a bitch. I swear, if I have to read one more profile about some guy looking for a girl with a heart of gold, I am going to puke. I’ve done the Craigslist thing. I’ve done Match, twice actually. Going online can’t be that bad if I met my ex-boyfriend while cruising the wonderful world of the web.

But it’s all about doing something new so eHarmony it is.

Now, I know eHarmony has gotten into some GLBT trouble lately (i.e., eHarmony = eHomophobia). I do have plenty of gay friends. I love me my gay friends. Maybe you think I should stand up for gay rights and boycott eHarmony. But I say…Fuck that! The rainbow-toting movement has taken plenty of educated, charming, sensitive, attractive men out of my dating pool and I say FUCK YOU!

So back to our regularly-scheduled programming of online dating with eHarmony.

Let’s see, where should I begin.
1. What kind of 90-year-old crinkly geezer allows himself to promote an online dating company that caters to young people?! I don’t care if you patented the 29 compatibility point system. Why are you front and center in these advertisements? You are ugly! I think of myself as pretty cute, but I swear in ten years I’m not going to want my picture taken anymore.
2. Who is running the daily operations of this company authorizing these advertisements? Your marketing team needs to go!
3. Ultimately the joke must be on me because I still paid!!!

eHarmony is pricey. Anything’s pricey compared to cheapie Craigslist, but even pricier than Match–which is definitely a much more popular site. The difference with eHarmony is that they do the matching for you. It’s not a free for all where you can email anyone at will. You have to wait for matches to come through in your inbox. No searching which can get kind of addicting which is good because I really don’t have time to search or do any homework with this thing. Just send them my way so I can get my fancy dinners!

Now I felt a little bit of buyer’s remorse at first because I had no matches. What the fuck? I really felt like this was confirmation that no one in the world was right for me. But the matches slowly start to show up. It’s been about 90 minutes and I have thirty matches now. Overall, it’s a different population of men on eHarmony. They’re older, more educated, more career-oriented. It’s not a complete surprise because a friend compared/contrasted the different sites for me this past weekend and gave me that observation…which I agree with.

I’m not expecting a lot out of doing this, but I have to say, I was laughing out loud with some of these matches and their profiles. “Love is a verb.” The money spent was worth the comedic value. I’ve been giggling all night.