eHarmony

CBS new late-night dating show called "Excused" started last week on Monday September 12th at 11pm. The thing that differentiates this show from other dating shows like "The Dating Game" or "Blind Date" (same creators) is that at the shows core there is an online dating site. The dating site is Jazzed.com. This year old service was launched by eHarmony (see Story) to help them compete against the more general oriented dating sites which typically younger singles use.

So how does the show Excused make use of the dating site? Every contestant on the show will have an online dating profile on Jazzed.com. This profile and references to the information on the profile will be used throughout the show to help match up the contestants. The twist here which Jazzed.com and TV executives hope brings in a large audience is that viewers will be able to go online and view the contestants profiles as well. Just like any other profile, viewers (who become members) will then be able to send emails or instant messages to the contestant if they choose and even potentially date if the attraction is reciprocated.

For more on the story you can read Ad Age and for more details on one of the online dating sites mentioned, please check out our review of eHarmony.

It has been about 3 months since eHarmony has had a free communication event. Well the wait is over! In the United States and Canada eHarmony will be having a free communication event from September 2nd to the end if day on September 5th. September 5 also happens to be Labor day in the US making it the last long weekend of summer (FYI Canada also celebrates Labour Day at the same time).

So what is a free communication event? As the name suggests all members of eHarmony will be able to communicate for free during the promotion. New and existing free members will be able to create a dating profile, receive matches, and use the guided communication process to communicate with those matches at no cost. The only thing not include is viewing of members profile pictures and Secure Call communication.

This will be eHarmony's 35th free communication event with the last one occurring last spring in May (see Story).

To find out more about this matchmaking service you can take a look at our review of eHarmony.

Late last month eHarmony announced a new feature for their dating service. Members can now tell when their matches were last on the site by checking out the "Active Within" enhancement that is visible (or will be soon) next to the matches name. The activity is broken down into 5 increments with "Today" being the shortest and "Over three weeks ago" being the longest.

This feature has been requested for a long time as it helps members to prioritize which of their matches they should contact first. You have a better chance of contacting someone who was just on the site as opposed to over 3 weeks ago.

For more on this story you can read the eHarmony blog and to find out more about this dating site, please read our review of eHarmony.

eHarmony in the United States is having a free communication event this weekend from May 27 to May 30, which falls close to Memorial Day. During this eHarmony event, new and existing members will be able to use the guided communication process for free which allows you to interact with other members by asking and answering questions.

Along with guided communication, members will also be able to create a profile and receive matches at no cost and with no credit card required. Viewing of members profile pictures and Secure Call communication are not included in this promotion.

This will be eHarmony's 34th (I believe) free communication event with the last one occurring for the entire month of February (see Story).

To find out more details on this popular online dating site that matches you based on personality, please check out our eHarmony.com review.

When Dr. Gian Gonzaga and the research team at eHarmony decided to conduct a study on the relationship between divorce and the way couples meet, they found themselves confronted with a couple of hurdles to clear:

• Online dating is a relatively new phenomenon - it's been around for a little over a decade, and only been popular for the last 7 or 8 years. That's not a significant amount of time for a large number of couples to meet, marry, and then separate, and the sample size would likely have been too small to create an accurate study.
• One method of running the study would be to simply sample the American population at random, hoping that a significant number of people who had gotten divorced met their former spouses on an online dating site. The research team would have to hope that, through sheer luck, they would find a large enough number of people who had A) Married in the last decade, B) Met their partner on a particular online dating site, and C) Gotten divorced from that person. But surveying the entire population of the United States is far from practical, and leaves too much to chance.

Instead, the eHarmony team, aided by Opinion Research Corp., "identified an online panel of 4,000 people who had been married to AND divorced from that person in the last 15 years," with a focus on marriages that began between 2005 and 2009. Though their final sample size was small - only 506 people - their findings are still interesting. In most cases, "the expected number of divorces was very close to the actual number of divorces...observed in the sample," which means that "it didn't really matter how you met your spouse, you were just as likely to get divorced." The most notable results from the study showed that:

• People who met on eHarmony were 66.6% less likely to get divorced.
• People who met through school were 41.1% less likely to get divorced.
• People who met at a bar were 24% more likely to get divorced.
• People who met through unspecified other means were 16% more likely to get divorced.

Their findings are food for thought, but the eHarmony team acknowledges that they are far from definitive: "We realize the numbers of eHarmony divorces is pretty small and this is only one sample of divorces. We don't know if these results will replicate in another sample or generalize to all marriages. Those are important limitations to this study that need to be acknowledged. We're already working on replicating these findings to address these limitations."

It is also important to remember, as Dr. Gonzaga notes, that studies like these show only WHAT happened, not WHY it happened. "How you met your spouse is only one of many reasons for why a couple eventually ends up unhappy or divorced," he writes. "Many relationships that start off shaky end up lasting a lifetime. Others that have a great foundation still end up in trouble. How you meet is only the starting point. You, and your spouse, control where you end up."

Read the original post here and for more details on the matchmaking service which conducted this survey please read our review of eHarmony.

Does where you meet your spouse make a difference in how happy the marriage is and if the relationship lasts?

According to a marriage study conducted for eHarmony in December of 2010, online dating is currently the 3rd most popular way for newlyweds to meet (following work/school and friends/family), and eHarmony is now responsible for nearly 100,000 marriages per year in the United States. Bringing couples together is an admirable occupation - but it doesn't mean much if the relationship isn't built on a strong foundation that can stand the test of time. In the words of eHarmony's Dr. Gian Gonzaga: "my colleagues and I aren't doing our jobs correctly if all we do is bring people together.... It's not about creating a lot of relationships; it's about creating a lot of good relationships."

With that idea in mind, Gonazaga and his team asked themselves the question posed at the start of this post. Does where you meet your partner have an effect on how happy you are in your relationship, and whether or not the relationship lasts? After failing to find any studies that investigated the matter, Gonzaga and his researchers decided to take matters into their own hands, in conjunction with Opinion Research Corp.

RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION

The first study, an online survey of 7,386 adults who married within the last 5 years, examined relationship satisfaction. Participants were asked how they met their spouse, and were then directed to use the Couples Satisfaction Index, a well-known test developed at the University of Rochester, to measure their relationship satisfaction. eHarmony users scored well: couples who had met on the site were more satisfied with their marriages than couples who had met on Match.com, via friends or family, or at a bar or other social gathering. Couples who had met on eHarmony also reported higher relationship satisfaction than those who had met through their jobs or at school, but the difference was much less significant.

KEEPING THE SPARK ALIVE

Participants in the study were also asked if their relationship had "lost the spark," as a loss of chemistry between partners is often a precursor to relationship dissatisfaction. Once again, people who met on eHarmony fared well: couples from the site were least likely to feel that the magic was gone from their relationship.

But what about the major issue of divorce? Does how a person meets their spouse have any relation to the likelihood that they will get divorced? eHarmony researchers asked people whether they or their spouse had ever seriously suggested separating or divorcing, and it turns out that the "proportion of couples who discuss divorce doesn't differ widely across the various ways couples met." eHarmony couples were the least likely to discuss divorce, but the numbers were not statistically different from couples who met at church/place of worship, work/school, and through family/friends. There were, however, "statistically significant differences between the eHarmony couples and those who met at bars/social events and those who met on Match.com."

Talking about divorce is, of course, only an indicator of divorce - it is not a divorce itself. To get a clearer picture of the link between divorce and the location where couples met, eHarmony conducted a second study. Read on to hear more about what they found.

For more information on the dating site which conducted this survey please read our eHarmony.com review.