The eHarmony dating service this month has celebrated five years of matching singles. This month is also my one-year anniversary of dating online using eHarmony to find a match. So far this has not happened. This is one of the reasons I created this site. In writing about dating online, I could learn more about it and how to use it best all while helping others improve their prospects also.

A free cruise for a lucky couple is how eHarmony celebrated their fifth birthday. No matches for me to celebrate yet. I want to emphasize yet. I think it will happen, possibly with the help of the eHarmony dating service. Or, maybe some other online dating site as I am thinking about trying out more of them. The idea behind eHarmony makes the most sense to me at this time. But, if I am going to be writing about dating online, I should probably spend some time on a few different sites in the online dating realm.

Before I do that I thought I would talk a little about my eHarmony experience. In the one-year I have been on the service they have provided me with about 315 matches. Since eHarmony shows matches with anyone that has filled out the Personality Profile. Not all of these matches end up signing up to the service. My educated guess is that as many as a third of these matches are of this type. This is based on the number of matches with introductory pages with incomplete info. Also, the numbers of matches that never answer a communication request and never close off communication. If they are active on the service and don’t want to communicate they usually seem to close things off.

This puts me in at around 210 real matches. I, as eHarmony suggests, have attempted to communicate with every match. Not everyone does this for whatever reason but that is a topic for another post. These are matches from my area (Seattle, WA). I chose to only receive matches within 120 miles of me. You can go smaller (just your city) or wider (just your world). So I could have many more matches in the system if I were to go wider in my search.

Of these matches I have ventured down the guided communication path with maybe half of them. Not always making it that far. I reached the open communication stage with 18 of these matches. Communicating outside of eHarmony with 5 of them. Leading to the meeting of two of them in person. The ultimate point of dating online is to meet offline.

One of these I went out with a few times but nothing came of it. With the other there was just no chemistry on a romantic level. You may say only a handful or so of dates after a year of dating online, what is up with that? It may not seem like a lot to you. I refer to it as the hot streak!