Really? I know he’s responsible for Santorum and Saddlebacking, but I wasn’t aware that he named that one too.
I listen to his podcast all the time, and he uses that term fairly officially, and without a hint of that self-congratulatory facetiousness you hear when he says santorum.
Cubit
3722
Savage Love is one of my favorite podcasts to listen to.
I’m not a fan of E-Harmony, from what I’ve heard about it, but they’ve brought back a commercial from a couple of years ago that is really funny. It’s the one with the nice, normal-looking guy suffering through a series of dates with truly insufferable women:
“Okay, first impression - would you marry me?”
“There are so many things about myself I DO. NOT. LIKE.”
“Let’s talk about something fun. How about magic?!”
And the woman talking about all the nuts she likes.
I’m single now, and I’m looking forward to meeting women the old fashioned way. Out there in the world. Aiee!
Yep! He gave “pegging” the win despite how it made him feel about his Aunt Peg.
I listen to his podcast every week and love it.
Zylon
3726
I’ve never heard this guy speak, but really, when slapping a mock-Latin label on something as nasty as that, is there any other way to say it?
Why? Just because they’d refuse to serve you? Pfft. Narrow minded homophobephobe!
I had a friend who was going through a really rough patch in his life and at one point he decided to sign up for eHarmony. See if he couldn’t get something moving in the romantic part of his life. I’ve never seen a guy look so put down as the way Steve did when he checked his email and saw that eHarmony had filed him as unmatchable.
Good ol’ eHarmony.
Kael
3728
This is how I imagine the rejection letter:
eHarmony’s goal is to provide mature, attractive companions for its members. We attempt to safeguard our clients from the least desireable people in the dating world so they can have a pleasent dating experience. By “least desireable” we mean you.
Although 80% of the desperate, websurfing, shutin community may be good enough for our standards you don’t even meet that level of decency. You are the worst of the worst, if the dating world is a garden and those that participate in online dating are the mealy cancerous slugs that inhabit that garden you are the foul fungus ridden slough that hangs from the excrement holes of those slugs.
Really, go to walmart and look at the 400 lb losers that are waddling along with their spouse and 3-5 children. They didn’t need an online service to find their mate and they are doing better than you. Search through the rest and find the most desperate and loney, the 40 year old stock boy that eats lunch by himself, the toothless woman with the nice beard, the nerd waiting in line for the release of the next star trek season on dvd. Those are our clients, and 80% of them are more datable than you are.
Thank you for choosing eHarmony
What criteria would eHarmony use to declare someone unmatchable? I ask because I’m assuming the profile form is just a bunch of things you check off and I’m trying to imagine what you could check that puts you in the “no go” territory. Or is there a big freeform section where you can talk about being a serial killer or something?
ElGuapo
3730
I’d imagine if you are severely, painfully shy, or very aggressive, or say that you are really just looking for sex, or something like that.
eHarmony is for vanilla people to meet other vanilla people.
eHarmony has always given me a Stepford Wives vibe. Not that I’m exactly their target market to start with.
eHarmony works by essentially running you through a personality test - like Myers-Briggs, but even less scientific than that load of crap. It then shoves you into one of seventeen or twenty or something categories. Some of those categories are considered matched for other categories. You see the ones you’re matched with. It’s roughly as sophisticated as the search filtering options on OkCupid, but except you don’t control them and you have to pay thirty dollars a month to see them and like half of the women you talk to will be inexplicably stranded in random African countries and need you to send them some money to buy a ticket home.
As a person who was very depressed at the time and had that experience, you pretty much got it - it’s precisely as much fun as you think it is. My memory for that whole segment of my life is lost to the foggy mists, but I have a vague impression that I may have written a tearful, passive-aggressive letter to them complaining about how mean they were to give up on me without even trying. Then I proceeded to create burner email accounts and poke the test in the eye until it let me into the site. That’s right - I was so pissed off at being rejected by a program on the internet that I invested like twenty hours in forcing them to offer me the privilege of giving them way too much of my money.
Jesus - can you believe I was a worse person BEFORE the pills? Damn.
On the plus side, Chemistry does basically the same thing and won’t pull that “we can’t match you” bullshit on you. Still a pay site, which I don’t particularly love, but if you’re looking for that kind of effect, you’ll get it there without having to worry about a bunch of php script thinking that you’re ass looks fat in those jeans and nobody could love you.
Cubit
3734
Yeah, isn’t it run by an evangelical Christian? That would explain a lot.
ElGuapo
3735
And this is not an endorsement for their filters how? Come on, you have to admit, you probably needed to get some stuff straightened out yourself, first.
Yeah, I’d consider a rejection from EHarmony sort of an endorsement.
And nice one, Kael. :)
eHarmony used to send rejection letters to everyone who answered that they weren’t spiritual. I believe they stopped the practice after the story started picking up steam online.
Not really. I still don’t match, nor, I’m going to go out on a limb and wager, would quite a few people around these parts. At its heart, eHarmony is a cynical combination of a personality test and a bad interface designed primarily to perform Wallet Extraction Procedures. I could go take the personality test now (I’m better now) and would get the same result because they have one hell of a hard time with anybody who…well, has thoughts, or is in any way self-reflective, or has a tendency to game any multiple choice test. I would be willing to at least entertain the idea that it might be helpful if somebody else were proctoring the test, but when the users are responsible for providing their own answers, the results tend to be a little bit skewed anyway.
I will openly admit that I hate the website with a passion that probably renders objectivity utterly useless (I mean, come on - they DID hurt my feelings), but just consider this. Their matching functions operates just like I’ve said you - you are categorized by the Invisible Pigeonholing Committee and then matched against people in compatable types with no regard to your own input. Ten at a time. At their pace. Once a day. You can’t even look at all of your matches. Tell me that that’s not a practice designed to keep you strung along looking for the next perfect match.
Seriously - if you want to try that sort of matching, there are better options. Chemistry is more clever by half and not nearly as discriminatory, though I have yet to pay for the service to test it out and see if the matching is any better. PerfectMatch, where I created a profile at some point in the distant past when it was a completely different design, does mostly the same thing, except that for the longest time they were honest enough to match me with almost nobody (I think I had two in five years after paying a one time fee - lately, I’ve been getting more notices of matching, which I believe may be them trying to entice me to come back and participate in their new service plan, but I am a hopeless cynic).
JM1
3739
Uh, you’re aware of the backstory, right?
Maybe he just spruced it up a bit. You have to admit a little faux-latin would make the story seem a lot classier.
