Divorce

Our local talk radio station had a Love Expert on one of their shows a few days ago. She (I forget her name) talked a fair bit about men and woman getting back into the dating game after 10 years or more. Her target audience was single people after a divorce. She discussed online dating as a solution and went into a bit of detail, good for beginners but nothing really new that you wouldn't find here. One thing she did mention, which I hadn't thought about before was, for the most part when woman are matched, they are a lot more forgiving about a man's weight than his height. The opposite is true for men. Men are more critical about a woman's weight than how tall she is.

We have had a few articles recently (see Story) about how online dating sites have seen a spike in memberships as the economy slips. The opposite trend seems to be true for divorces, when compared to the economy. Couples who are struggling with their relationships tend to stay together more and longer when the economy is down. Worries about money and finding someone to pay half the rent or mortgage are the primary reasons.

A economics professor at San Diego State University had an interesting point of view regarding marriage. Shoshana Grossbard noted that probably a greater percentage of online daters now, are not looking for marriage. For the most part, most people do not want the expense of getting married in times when money is tight. As example, In the first few years of the Great Depression, the number of marriages dropped 20 percent from 1929 to 1932.

Read Sign On San Diego for more of the story.

The Consumerist has a post regarding eHarmony and their divorced policy. In it they talk about a woman who was separated from her husband for 7 years when she signed up to eHarmony. She took her time and filled out the hour long profile. At the end she was informed that she would not be able to join since she was not actually divorced. After a year and when the woman got her divorced finalized her daughter wrote to eHarmony for her to see if she could reopen her profile so she didn't have to spend another hour to fill it in again. eHarmony's response was:

Since you are divorced, please reply with the county and state of your divorce proceedings, the name of the judge, and the date your divorce was finalized. We hope you understand that this information is very important in order to protect the integrity of our matching process. Once this information is received, we will be very happy to reset your Relationship Questionnaire for you. You will need to retake the questionnaire so that we can accurately assess your relationship needs and provide matches who are deeply compatible with you.

First off I must say is I do applaud eHarmony for sticking to their guidelines and allowing only people who are not married or separated. Other dating services could learn from this and it is what makes eHarmony one of the top spots to go if you are looking for a serious long term relationship.

In my opinion eHarmony does need to make a few changes to make things flow more smoothly. First off all, one of the first questions they ask is if you are single, separated or divorced. If this is a deal breaker profile question for eHarmony, then it should stop the user from entering further information at this point. They should really have all the profile deal breakers up front so people don't waste their time filling out a profile that eHarmony will ultimately deny. This just makes potential members angry.

The other thing I didn't like from the eHarmony customer service response was that the woman had to provide proof of the divorce. Why can't they rely on her word? On everything else she wrote in her profile they trust her about. Plus if a new member says they are divorced, you don't have to go out and prove this. I'm all for verification of profile information but I think they should allow her to change her status and maybe for these type of issues have a verification logo or something for the profile. Just like how some sites are doing for photos. If she needs to prove she is divorced then all divorced members should have too.

After checking out eHarmony profile creation again I notice that eHarmony Canada still allows you to continue the profile creation if you select you are separated. eHarmony.com has improved on this and now has your current relationship status on the home registration page. If you select separated or married, the browser changes and asks you if you want to learn more about eHarmony Marriage, a service from eHarmony that helps married couples with advice on how to improve a struggling marriage. This is a much better way to go about it than telling you after you spent the time to fill out the profile.

Read our eHarmony review for more information about this online dating service.