Gabriel89706 is offline Gabriel89706 Post #1  May 3,2009, 11:30pm
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Hi, Scott!





I have to give you some serious high-fives on "taking a chance" and being courageous. Some guys don't even know where to start with eHarmony, let alone communicating and actually dating someone!!



You gave some great tips and I can't help but feel it will definitely help plenty of other guys find their special someone.


I heard you on the whole "lack of communication" and "keeping you waiting" for some kind of response with some of your matches. But you did the right thing on moving on and closing some matches. As it turns out, I also met someone where I had closed an account only to have it re-open and hit it off!


I appreciated your thoroughness and wanted to comment on your scam account incident. One of the main reasons I left other dating sites and chose eHarmony over others was because of the high prevalence of fake accounts. Although I never encountered a fake/scam account on eHarmony, I hear you big time on the major annoyance it causes when you're just trying to connect and meet someone. I think eHarmony does an excellent job of weeding-out fake/scam accounts since I never experienced one. On other sites, I encountered at least 9 fake/scam accounts in a six month period and it severely made me want to try something else!


It takes some serious effort to find someone and eHarmony helped me out!!


Glad you hung in there and made it work,



Gabriel
 
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ScottGainesville is offline ScottGainesville Post #2  May 4,2009, 5:23pm
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Gabriel89706,604512 wrote :

Hi, Scott!





I have to give you some serious high-fives on "taking a chance" and being courageous. Some guys don't even know where to start with eHarmony, let alone communicating and actually dating someone!!



You gave some great tips and I can't help but feel it will definitely help plenty of other guys find their special someone.


I heard you on the whole "lack of communication" and "keeping you waiting" for some kind of response with some of your matches. But you did the right thing on moving on and closing some matches. As it turns out, I also met someone where I had closed an account only to have it re-open and hit it off!


I appreciated your thoroughness and wanted to comment on your scam account incident. One of the main reasons I left other dating sites and chose eHarmony over others was because of the high prevalence of fake accounts. Although I never encountered a fake/scam account on eHarmony, I hear you big time on the major annoyance it causes when you're just trying to connect and meet someone. I think eHarmony does an excellent job of weeding-out fake/scam accounts since I never experienced one. On other sites, I encountered at least 9 fake/scam accounts in a six month period and it severely made me want to try something else!


It takes some serious effort to find someone and eHarmony helped me out!!


Glad you hung in there and made it work,



Gabriel

Gabriel,


It's one of those things where we think about how we could of never of met if she didn't send me back the request to reopen. It's one of the features that I think eharmony did a great job on. It's a red flag that the person is interested in you.


I could only imagine having a ton of scammers on here. They do a great job though in taking care of them. Must be a job on itself.


Thanks for the response





Best Regards,





Scott
 
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ScottGainesville is offline ScottGainesville Post #3  May 5,2009, 9:16pm
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Well to start off I'd just like to say that I’m grateful for the whole eHarmony experience. I had my doubts about finding someone I’d really be interested in online just like everyone else. The commercials really did it for me I think, pondering what it would be like to actually finding that special someone and just thinking after I’d seen a commercial. “I want what they have”. Even though I’m no longer a member to eHarmony I still receive e-mails from eHarmony showing new forum topics or tips for dating. Now that I found that special someone, I just want to talk about the whole experience and how I’ve managed and dealt with my experience as a whole.


So it started off like everyone else, filling out long personality profiles and just basically truthfully answering everything. But most importantly for me was putting in qualities I felt would be the perfect match for me. Well I figured since this site was going to find exactly what I was looking for, why settle? Oh well that sure became a eye opener when I realized I only received one match and this person didn’t have any photos. I spent a good amount of time uploading my photos and making my profile acceptable, and the first match I get doesn’t have any photos and their profile lacked any information. So I canceled that match, but then I realized that this site doesn’t let you get another one until they feel like enough time has gone by. Well to be honest with you I was a bit bummed, I clicked receive more matches and it would always say there are no new matches. After waiting a few days I received no more then 3-4 matches. It seemed like eHarmony wasn’t matching me up with the types of women I was interested in, I’d had asked for athletic I got non athletic several times. So I realized something, perhaps it was just giving me what ever was closest to me and I had set my search area too small. I then decided to broaden my search radius to 300 miles. I live in North Florida and 300 miles is the distance south to my mothers in Palm Beach. Figured ok well maybe it will match me up with someone down there and yadda yadda. Well it did, and as far as Miami to say the least. I was receiving 6 matches a day, and realized it wasn’t using my criteria for matches at all. I began doing my own sifting and just deleting matches without photos or ones that I felt wouldn’t have anything in common with. I judged most of the photos by looks and where they were in a certain photo. If they had booze in their hands and most of the photos were at bars I immediately closed them. Then I was constantly trying to open conversation with certain matches only to have them close on me or never answer at all.


Then finally it happened, someone responded and actually started chatting with me. We did the back and forth with the generic questions, but we weren’t in open communication. This seemed to me like a huge waste of time. It had been a week and the only thing I’m finding out is that this girl would rather go to a sporting event on Sundays rather then watch a movie at home. So I asked for open chat, and I was really just trying to do this how the website requested, you know following the guides that they gave me. Well long story short, she asked for my e-mail and it turns out she has an accent apparently and doesn’t spell very well. Well I thought perhaps this could turn out to be an experience. Well I asked her to send me another photo because the one she had up I couldn’t see very well. I received two more from them and then I noticed something. The two people in the photographs were girls yes, but they looked perhaps like two different people. What is going on I thought. I searched the internet for scam photos for dating sites. Sure enough one of the photos was in the list of scam photos. OH MY GOD.. A scammer on eHarmony. I contacted eHarmony and they apologized and said they handled the account. Back to square one I guess.


So I decided that since I spent so much time sending these pointless questions back and forth, if I saw someone I was interested in I was just going to send an open chat request. If they didn’t answer after 2 days, I’d delete the match. My first month was running out I had about 2 weeks left to find someone before I called it quits because it wasn’t looking so good. Then I was matched up with someone I had a lot in common with and she lived 30 minutes from me. Great! Well we opened communication and my opening question was “what’s your favorite ice cream?” That’s all I asked. We ended up hitting it off and writing very long messages to each other back and forth for about a weeks time. I decided we’d been doing this long enough and I wanted to chat on the phone with her, she seemed distant when asking to meet up for lunch one day. She gave me her number and I called her one night. How did the conversation go you want to know? FAIL!! The conversation was horrible and I didn’t have anything to really talk about because well she obviously wasn’t interested in me. I felt like I was the one interested and asking questions and just trying to get anything from her and it always just ended with quite noise. I got the vibe that she wish she didn’t give me her number and perhaps she was just trying to be nice?? So I tried a little experiment and didn’t send a message for awhile and yup she never sent me another one either. Match Delete. I thought to myself how and why did we talk to for so long and how did it end up like this? Geez I felt like crap after that one. Back to square one again.


Ok so after that I got another match, this profile was amazing they were interested in everything I was. It was almost too good to be true. Women playing video games? Wha.. I looked at her pictures and my mouth just dropped. She was beautiful and there is no way in hell she’d be interested in me. So I sent her an open chat request anyways. My first question was... “If you had a super power what would it be and why? Also when you sneeze how many times do you sneeze in a row? Sorry about the silly questions these are my favorite” she answered me back and wrote a pretty long response, it was very positive and seemed like she liked my profile and the things I was into. Well I sent a second message then she sent one back, I sent one more... then nothing. What is going on? Was it something I said? So I waited almost a week, with no response to my message, I even sent another message asking if she was dead. Waited a couple more days then, I was heat broken that I had to close the match with her. I sent her a final message saying how much I enjoyed meeting her and if she ever wanted to talk I gave her my e-mail address and phone number. Then I closed the match. About this time I had enough of eHarmony and I guess I was expecting something different. I hadn’t checked my matches in a couple days and was just working, then one night I got home and logged on. Said I had a request to reconsider reopening a match that I had recently closed. It was the same person I last talked to that I really liked. So I reopened it to a big apology about the delayed response and about how busy she was. I told her I wouldn’t be continuing to use eHarmony much longer, so she gave me her AIM name and we hit it off right away on there. Ended talking for hours upon hours on AIM. Day after day we talked on AIM; it was something I looked forward to coming home to. There was only one concern I had, when I set my distance of 300 miles, I was envisioning it to close to my mom’s house down south. Well the person that I seem to be a special match to is not 300 south but 300 miles north, in Alabama to be exact. In my mind I was thinking about asking her to meet up, but who’s going to drive into another state for possible failure and let alone 320+ miles.


After about a month, I realized that I never canceled my eHarmony and that it had charged me another month. It was around thanksgiving 2008 and I’d been telling my guy friends about this girl I met on eHarmony and being guys they were all giving me a hard time. “What if she’s really a guy?” “What if she’s crazy?” “What if... what if... what if.” So Thanksgiving Day I asked her “if she was really a 400lb dude” and I’m being taken for some kind of joy ride. Right before dinner I received a photo of her pointing to the date on a newspaper. She was no guy, but besides that she was beautiful just like her photos.


Then the question came up about meeting, and to my surprise she said she had been thinking about it for a bit and wanted to come to my house first. So basically she was telling me she was going to drive over 300 miles to meet someone she just met. I took this as a huge step and didn’t expect her to be coming here. After all I’m a gentlemen and I should be going to her place. NOW what?!?! I've got to make sure her trip here is going to be excellent. What are we going to do, what am I going to show her? I sat down one night just planning the weekend like a vacation. So we set a date and we were both excited. The plan was this, make dinner the first night she came in and we were going to go to a concert for a band we both liked that night. Following morning go to a nice breakfast joint in town and take her on an outdoors walking trail that led to a giant sink hole. Then to the museum of art and a natural history museum. Finishing it off with a nice sushi dinner with a few drinks. Sunday morning head to a botanical gardens and have a picnic before she left to go back home. Well that was the plan, so I went to the grocery store to buy dinner supplies for the first night. Got everything together, and then I received a call that she wanted to just meet me at the entrance to the concert. Well that totally threw off the nice dinner I was going to make for her. Now I had salmon and everything else I had purchased for this dinner sitting in the fridge, and my whole plan was now changing. I asked myself why she would want to meet at the concert. Hmmm her friends probably said to meet at a public place first to make sure I wasn’t some kind of weirdo. Made sense to me, but I still felt like if we had dinner at my place first it would be easier for us to open up with each other on our first meet. So I called her back and told her my plans to have dinner at my place first before we go to the concert. She said she had directions to the concert and thought it would just have been easier, but I stated that my place was right off the interstate and was a lot closer. So she agreed then to meet at my place. Phew!! Glad I was able to convince her. So then I started to get things ready and I was really running behind, I had been cleaning my place for hours and hours to make sure it was very clean. Nothing worse then a bad first impression. Living alone can sometimes just get a bit too comfortable and you don’t notice little things about your living quarters. Anyhow I was running behind and she was getting closer and closer, and I wanted the dinner to be ready and on the table when she arrived. *knock knock knock* My heart dropped, the mashed potatoes weren’t done the asparagus wasn’t ready… ha. So I opened the door and there she was even more beautiful then her eHarmony pictures. Boy was I nervous, I didn’t know what to do when I saw her there except tell her to come in and we gave each other a big hug. She seemed relieved that I was the person in my profile pictures. Because she said something like, oh you are cute I was a having a hard time seeing your face in your pictures. Then she saw the kitchen and laughed because it looked like a bomb had went off, I was a bit embarrassed about the mess and how I wasn’t ready. She quickly tried to help me finish the cooking and we ended up having a nice meal and chatting a little about going to the concert.


I had a friend who works with the local radio station as a DJ get us VIP tickets to the concert. There was a huge line out front that wrapped around this building, and we ended up being able to walk right in front of the door and we were on the VIP guest list and got to walk right in. *Thank you NICK!* walked in and we met up with a few of my friends that had just arrived, we had a few drinks and I introduced everyone to her. After a few songs I felt it was necessary to make a move, so I just stood behind her and put my arms around her waist and we moved to the music. It really broke the ice and that was the hardest part for me. Now I knew she was truly interested in me and didn’t think I was the weirdo her friends told her I might be. Ended up going back to my place and watched a movie. I went in for a kiss and it was just a normal kiss not a make out session we watched the whole movie and went up stairs for sleep. I offered her my bed and I’d sleep on the couch but she declined that idea and we just slept in the same bed. Of course I was thinking dirty thoughts but I didn’t want to rush anything. The next morning we did the rest of my plan, we went had breakfast, went to the park, went to the museums and had an excellent sushi dinner. We had a great time. Then Sunday we went to the botanical gardens and had a picnic we held hands throughout the gardens and ate our homemade sandwiches in the bamboo forest. Was a very magical moment and we headed home for the dreaded departure. That was the first meet we ever had. I took plenty of photos and some video of our time together.


We talked online and about us being a couple and trying to make this long distance relationship work, because we really liked each other. We both had a lot of questions and how we were going to make it work, such as travel, expenses, keeping communication between us. So we decided we would switch every two weeks to visit each other. Well she was in between moves and wasn’t comfortable with me going up there just yet, so we planned again for her to come down. This time it was going to be a 5 day affair and she was going to take a day off from work. So we planned for new years and it was about 4 weeks away from our first visit. It seemed like a lifetime. I ended up planning the whole time again like a vacation, and got a nice bread and breakfast by the water in St Augustine, watched fireworks on the water and just had a great time. Now it’s May and we’ve been seeing each other every two weeks sometimes we see each other in a weeks time depending on what we have going on in our lives and we are in love. Good news is, she’s moving with me on the 23rd of this month. So we are getting a bit excited since its only 20 days away now.


Moral of this long and boring story, if you and your partner give something 110% you are more then likely to succeed or at least know you are both trying your best in the relationship. I told the story in more detail for the people asking for advice onhow or whatto do in situations leading up to some feared challenge. Most of all just don’t push things to fast and talk to your match or partner with the same courtesy and respect you would want from them. Nothing is worse then not feeling like an equal. We are proof that a long distance relationship can work and that with proper communication on what we wanted in our lives we worked together to achieve those goals.


Hope everyone enjoyed this and yes... I finally ended my subscription after 3 months of forgetting J


Best Wishes,


Scott
 
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tommyboy047 is offline tommyboy047 Post #4  May 20,2009, 7:28pm
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I was matched on 12/25/09 with a girl named Wendy and being new to e-harmony went to fast track right away by mistake. On 01/04/09 we exchanged emails and continued chatting which progressed to phone calls, we talked every day. We set up our first date for Feb 1st. We are going on 4 months now since our first date and we see a lot of each other. I am still waiting for the honeymoon stage to calm down a bit but my feelings for her seem to get stronger the more time I spend with her. The truth is, she is everything I have wanted in a women and I have said to myself if I ever meet a women like her I will never let her go, way before I even knew she existed. I was married for 18 years to my high school sweet heart whom I met when she was 14 and I was 16 and thought that she was my sould mate, my dream girl, my everything. I have been divorced for 10 years and dated a lot since my divorce, got engaged to one women and almost married her. I thought I loved someone enough to marry again but I did know from the start that something was missing but I figured every relationship is different and I would never find that inspirational loving relationship again, not twice in a life time at least. I have also learned that my marriage was missing very important parts in a stong relationship that, I know now, we never had and never would have had, things that I did have from other relationships since my divorce. I learned a lot by dating and every women brought something positive in my life. Some things I really needed to learn in order to be the person I can be in a relationship. I would have never learned all I have if I never divorced, sad but true.

I have learned respect in a relationship, friendship and admiration. I have learned that you can find respect in just about anyone you meet and having that in a loving relationship is a big plus. Also a big thing I bring into my relationship with Wendy, since she seems to give me everything else, is not to make the same mistakes I made in previous relationships. I want to keep her in my life and I will remember this when ever we reach a bump in our relationship.
 
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