Love Reject

Two, maybe three years ago, a friend told me that I should check out eHarmony. I looked at her with my infamous furrowed brow expression, and blinked fifteen times to really send the "um... what?" message home. "No, not for that," she smiled at me shaking her head. “They have a great personality test. You should take it; it's free and it's a lot of fun." Well, who am I to pass up the opportunity to have a little fun (especially when it's free)?

So, on one not so special day, completely out of boredom, I went to eharmony.com to take their personality test. Let me say, I don't know what my friend was thinking - there was nothing fun about this test. It took me almost an hour to answer all of the questions, some of which, by the way, were asked multiple times (just slightly re-worded). When I was finally finished, I sat back and waited for the payoff. "Come on eHarmony; give me some insight to my inner workings." I wanted to be dazzled by their accuracy. "Man, they’re good. They hit the nail on the head! That is sooooo me!"



What came up instead, was a bunch of vague statements: You enjoy being around loved ones. "No expletive Sherlock! I told you that!" You prefer honesty. "Um... what the...?" You are kind and enjoy taking care of others. “Well… not really. I don't want to have to take care of anyone. Now you're just twisting my words damn it!"

Okay, so as you can imagine, I was a little annoyed at this point. I wasted an hour on this thing! Geez, I got more insight from the fake psychic lady who stopped me on the street and told me that I'm a kind person, but not completely happy. And she didn’t even have access to a ridiculously long survey where I answered personal questions about my life! Any who, so after a series of these vague statements, a new message came up:

Yadda, yadda, yadda, “unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand, and we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time.”

The strangest feeling came over me then - my face got extremely hot, my hands started shaking, and then I exploded at my computer, "What the hell do you mean you can't match me? Why not?" I sat back and tried to calm myself. "Maybe I should have put down that I want more kids. Who doesn't love kids? I should love them MORE. Maybe my goals were in the wrong order. Maybe I should go back and change some of my answers. Maybe I should go back and change all of my answers - then they'll be able find me a match..."

I had forgotten all about this incident until chemistry.com started airing those commercials where people said that they were rejected by eHarmony. At first, I felt a kind of camaraderie with the actors. I was not alone; other people had been rejected. Thank god! That was at first. After a little while, every time one of those “rejected commercials” would come on, my top lip would twitch and I would start mumbling under my breath, "I was rejected by eHarmony... the bastards! And I wasn't even looking for love or whatever! I just wanted to take their stupid personality test."



Unbelievable isn’t it? I mean... really… who wouldn't want to date me ;)