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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.

The Chicago Tribune has a story about some of the research going on to find out how attraction works between people, both gay and straight. The author takes a look at 4 aspects of this. These aspects are DNA matching with the online dating site ScientificMatch.com (see our other story on them), how physical attraction and evolution works, if there is a love hormone and finally, how your brain effects love.

More and more dating sites are pushing how they have the science and research behind their match system. eHarmony, Chemistry and Perfectmatch are the big 3 who promote their matching system and the science along with their relationship experts. All of these sites post a summary review of how their matching systems work as quoted by the experts. None as of yet (that I am aware of) have actually gone in great details on how their system works and made the research public to back it up. We also need peer reviews of these matching systems from an independent source to begin to fully trust these matching systems. We talked about this in a story we previously did where Chemistry may be one of the first sites to start actually doing this.

After the article “Navigating the One Night Stand” was published about a week and a half ago on eHarmony and through their newsletter angry members started to voice their opinions on blogs and/or cancel their memberships. The article described what to do if "you're a swinging single and you've had a one-night stand" and what the etiquette was after the fling. This article was a far departure from eHarmony and their Advice Blog which normally promotes long term relationships and Christian values.

On April 21, 2008, Stan Holt, Vice President of eHarmony published an apology on eHarmony Advice for the “Navigating the One Night Stand” article. In it Stan Holt states:

The advice contained in this column was completely inconsistent with our editorial guidelines and the relationship service that we offer to our members. The day after sending the e-mail newsletter, I was made aware of the column and it was immediately removed from our site.

It's not often you get an apology from a company and it shows eHarmony realized the mistake and they value their members enough to put an apology in writing. Most other companies making a similar mistake may have removed the article but I am sure most wouldn't have put up an apology.

You can find more information about the retraction and the complete text for the article “Navigating the One Night Stand” at the unofficial eHarmony Blog. For more general information about eHarmony, please read our review.

eHarmony has added free Icebreakers to their dating service. This allows non-paying and paying members to pick from 11 predetermined short messages and send it to their matches. Icebreakers include simple messages like, "Great pic…love to see more photos!". This type of feature has been used for a long time on other dating services so it is in no way a revolutionary thing but, I do think eHarmony needed to add them.

What Icebreakers do (and this has always been a major complaint with eHarmony members) is it gives free members the ability to see if their matches are currently using eHarmony and are not just potentially old profiles of members who don't log in anymore. If the new members has a match they really like, by sending an Icebreaker and getting a reply back they know it's an active profile and it will be most likely worth signing up to the service to pursue the communication. The only problem here is that eHarmony choices for Icebreakers are rather limited. Replying to an Icebreaker with any of eHarmony's current list of Icebreakers doesn't make sense. Most of the Icebreakers either ask a question or want you to do something like talk or request a picture, so there is no real way to say yes or no to a Icebreaker question.

Icebreakers will also give eHarmony more paying members in the long run for the same reason stated above. This is the second major feature eHarmony has added in the last few months. They obviously are feeling the competition from other serious matching sites like Chemistry and PerfectMatch.com. I wonder what else they have up there sleeve?

Related Story: eHarmony Members can now see "Who Has Viewed Me"

I've decided to do a little more research of my own on the Better Business Bureau in regards to dating sites. This was after seeing an article about rising complaints (see Increased Complaints Registered Against Dating Services).

First a bit more on how the BBB works. To do a BBB search on a company visit their home page. The best way I found to find dating sites was to type in the domain name without the www prefix. Just a note here, most free or small dating sites are not found on the BBB. Once you have initiated a search, a list of companies may then come up. Some have nothing to do with what you are looking for while others may deal with separate branches or offices of the company. As an example, do a search on "yahoo.com" and you will get 22 results. Another thing to remember (which I didn't realize at first) is a company doesn't have to be a member to have a report on them. Actual BBB members are denoted with an icon and usually contain a lot more information than companies that are not members. When you click on the name of the company it will bring you to the report page of the company on the local Better Business Bureau website. These local BBB websites are not all the same and some have a lot more information available than others. All the information I am giving below seems to be how most of the BBB websites display their information. Some BBB sites like the one serving Los Angeles displays the information differently. They grade the company and actually shows some or all of the customers complaints. This seems to be an update to the service and may be how other BBB sites will soon follow.

This month, eHarmony announced their 50 top couple's success stories for the year 2007. Each couple represents one of the 50 states. For entry into this contest the couple had to submit their success story of how their experience was on eHarmony. For this contest there where more than 25,000 entries. The grand prize winner for 2007 is, John and Mindy Pease, of Kailua, Hawaii. They received "a travel package including flight and five nights stay at a luxury resort in Orlando, Florida courtesy of Southwest Airlines Vacations and the Orlando Visitors Bureau."

On a related note, Lavalife is currently looking for it's top singles: Lavalife is Searching for Canada's 10 Top Singles