So you have decided to become an eHarmony user. What happens now? How does the eHarmony system work? It is quite different than what you may think of, when envisioning the average online dating website. It works a little differently.

First off, you are only matched with people the eHarmony system finds you to be compatible with. You don’t get to see everyone in the system like at a say Match.com. My experience was about 3 to 5 new matches a week. These are the people that you communicate with and see if something develops.

You do have some control over you matches. Such as from how big and area do you want to draw from. Like just your city or your state or whatever you choose. You can also get matches by ethnicity, religion, smoking and drinking habits and whether or not they have children. So if you are looking for someone of a certain ethnicity, who is spiritual, doesn’t smoke, drinks occasionally and has no children but is highly compatible with you nonetheless then you can. Or, if none of these things matter to you except compatibility then that is fine too.

As an eHarmony user when you login you are taken to your list of matches. From there you can view their individual profiles. These are the basic stats of each match. On this page you will find your matches:

• Picture
• Name
• Occupation
• Area they live
• Height
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Date the match was created
• When the last communication was
• What the next step in the communication process is
• And a page of introductory information

The introductory info consists a few tidbits pulled from your personality profile questionnaire like:

• Following are 3 Relationship Strengths from So-in-so’s Personality Profile:
• Three of So-in-so’s best life-skills are:
• Below are some of the important interests that you and So-in-so share:

You will also find answers to a few questions they have answered like:

• The one thing So-in-so is most passionate about:
• The most important thing So-in-so is looking for in a person is:
• So-in-so typically spends his/her leisure time:

There are 15 of these in total. They are the beginning of how you get to know your matches. They can be quite informative or in some cases quite bland. Bad profile pages can really hurt you in this process but that is a topic for another day.

Now you decide if you are going to enter in to communication with any or all of them. I would recommend all. You can’t really tell by just a few things on a page if you have any chemistry or not with these people. You can only find that out by communicating with them.

Next: The eHarmony Guided Communication Method. For a continuing look into the eHarmony online dating service.