My eHarmony Procedure
Yes, I use eHarmony. I have my match distance set to something like 200km so I get about 5-8 matches a day. I try to sift through them pretty quickly to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here’s my current procedure:
- First pass is to eliminate people who are definitely not an option. Starting with the most recent match, I command-click (middle click) to open in a new window and then I look at the small photo:
- If they closed me, I close them, don't bother looking at photo or description.
- If there's no small photo, I close. It's not worth the hassle to request photos. A picture is worth 1000 words.
- If it looks like I wouldn't like them, I close without reading anything.
- If they look potentially interesting, I don't do anything (so they stay in the queue).
- If I closed in the above action, I switch back to the original tab, because eHarmony is too slow in closing, and also it doesn't return you to the right place in your list if you go back. Once I'm done going through everyone, I close all the tabs, reload the main page, and get ready for the 2nd pass.
- Now I'm on the second pass. All of the women left have passed the first sight test. Now I look at the photo details. I find it's very important for me that there's both a closeup face shot and a shot from father back so you can see what they look at. I include these in my profile. Without both, I close. If I don't like what I see (and this can be facial expressions, the context, as well as more normal attractiveness levels) I close without reading anything.
- OK, finally, after doing the above step for everyone, the people who are left are worth reading about. In fact, at this point I only really feel the need to skim what they wrote because as I said, your character is written all over your face and the context of the photos. So I usually contact anyone who's made it this far.
So there you are. I do this in phases, because it’s annoying to be really interested in someone, and then the next 5 people are horrible. So, I save myself the pain by going in passes and only increasing how much I care after I’ve eliminated the uninteresting people already. After all I need to manage my own sense of involvement or I’ll just get tired of it.
I actually at one point wrote a pretty nifty greasemonkey script for firefox to add various close buttons at the top of the page to make it easier to close people. But it made me nervous. A couple of times I clicked the close button when I meant to click something else. Also, I just don’t like Firefox – prefer Camino. So, no more of that.