Is eHarmony Serious about their Mission?

I was reading an article at the Noblesville Daily Times about recommended online dating sites and I came upon a statistic regarding eHarmony's goal of reducing the U.S. divorce rate by 1 percent per year. I was surprised at this and I didn't remember hearing about it before. After a little more digging I came up with this eHarmony feature article called Religion, Marriage and eHarmony by the founder of eHarmony Dr. Neil Clark Warren which talks a bit about eHarmony's mission to lower the divorce rate by 1 percent (but not in a year as the other article suggests). I have a feeling the article is a few years old but there is no date so I can't be sure. They do have a success story listed with the article that is dated August, 2004.

Currently the divorce rate in America is around 50% and if eHarmony could effectively reduce this by 1% this would mean 500,000 couples would not have divorced because of eHarmony's matching them. When will they be successful? Let's see, currently according to eHarmony's "Why eHarmony" web page, 90 members get married every day. Lets assume these members met each other because of eHarmony, so in reality it is 45 couples who got married. If this rate was static, it would take over 30 years for eHarmony to reach this goal and this is if every single couple did not divorce and was still alive (to meet the 1% of divorce reduction). eHarmony got its start in 2000 so they are in their 8th year or over a quarter of the way to 30 years. I wonder what the current statistic is for eHarmony on how many people who met on eHarmony, got married, and still are?

I doubt eHarmony would ever release this type of information since I am sure some of their couples have gotten divorced and the news would be spinned to eHarmony's disadvantage. I do think eHarmony matching system does work better than most matching systems, so this statistic would probably be much less than the current 50% divorce rate for all of the United States. In the end eHarmony should of really come up with a more realistic achievable goal. Maybe it should of been based on the number of eHarmony married couples every day. I just would have made one that would have been accomplished within a few years.

For more information about eHarmony, try reading our review.