Newbie here! Do women on eHarmony actually reply?


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WinjaWaffle is offline WinjaWaffle Post #1  October 12,2009, 1:20pm
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I've spent some time on OKCupid and it's incredibly frustrating because the girls never ever reply to any of my opening messages and they never seem to make first contact. Basically I feel that:

1. The ratio of guys to girls is extremely skewed - the girls whom are even remotely physically attractive get hammered with tens of messages a day. All they have to do is sit back and filter through the profiles and cherry pick the ones they like the best.

2. The girls are still playing by some old fashioned "rules" of always letting the guys come to them first. They will never make first contact.

Is eHarmony the same way? I'm mostly asking for input from the guys here because if you're a reasonably attractive woman I'm going to guess that you get all sorts of attention and have no problem communicating with potential matches all the time.

EDIT:

I'm in Silicon Valley, close to San Jose and San Francisco.
Last edited by WinjaWaffle; October 12,2009 at 2:23pm.
 
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Dafearon is offline Dafearon Post #2  October 12,2009, 1:50pm
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This is such a generic loaded and biased question you're asking here. It depends on so many factors that you can't just give a general yes or no answer.

It depends on what EH has gleaned from your profile they would consider your "primary" matches that they will send you.

It depends on where you are. Which metropolitan center are you closest too.

It depends on what you're looking for. Is your target population looking for you in general.

For myself, I've only had ONE match start communication with me. That's one out of about a thousand matches total for me. Unfortunately, I never met up with her because I had too many on my plate and we never got around to meeting. When i say too much on my plate, it means that I did get responses from my communications which culminated into multiple dates.

My limited knowledge of the female side is only what my girlfriend has told me. She would get a decent amount of communications starting out, but they would usually close her for one reason or another before getting to OC. I find that very different from my point of view as a guy because if a woman DID answer my questions, usually, they would end up in Open Communications
 
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WinjaWaffle is offline WinjaWaffle Post #3  October 12,2009, 2:27pm
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Dafearon wrote :
This is such a generic loaded and biased question you're asking here. It depends on so many factors that you can't just give a general yes or no answer.

It depends on what EH has gleaned from your profile they would consider your "primary" matches that they will send you.

It depends on where you are. Which metropolitan center are you closest too.

It depends on what you're looking for. Is your target population looking for you in general.

For myself, I've only had ONE match start communication with me. That's one out of about a thousand matches total for me. Unfortunately, I never met up with her because I had too many on my plate and we never got around to meeting. When i say too much on my plate, it means that I did get responses from my communications which culminated into multiple dates.

My limited knowledge of the female side is only what my girlfriend has told me. She would get a decent amount of communications starting out, but they would usually close her for one reason or another before getting to OC. I find that very different from my point of view as a guy because if a woman DID answer my questions, usually, they would end up in Open Communications
I don't see how this is a biased question, because it certainly isn't one on places like OKCupid. It really is a well known problem on those sites - women just don't respond unless you're more or less Casanova. Like I said, due to the skewed numbers they can simply cherry pick among hundreds of high quality guys. I haven't gotten any matches yet on EH, but I've heard that the system limits the number of matches that you can get at a time? I bet that this was implemented to try and combat this exact scenario.
 
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scarlet13 is offline scarlet13 Post #4  October 12,2009, 3:37pm

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lather, rinse, repeat.
 
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Deb55 is offline Deb55 Post #5  October 12,2009, 4:03pm
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I'd say I'm about average as far as looks, but I find that I have to initiate about 80% of the time, and I still have about a 50% Close-out rate from the guys. I think everyone has trouble get responses, not just one gender.
 
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DDjr is offline DDjr Post #6  October 12,2009, 6:35pm
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The key is patience. Get your matches. The ones that you can't stand, close. For just about all the rest send Short Questions.

You may send to 10 matches without a reply. It may be 100. But you're not looking for quantity, you're looking for quality. All you need is that one girl who reads something in your profile that attracts her.
 
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WinjaWaffle is offline WinjaWaffle Post #7  October 12,2009, 7:37pm
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DDjr wrote :
The key is patience. Get your matches. The ones that you can't stand, close. For just about all the rest send Short Questions.

You may send to 10 matches without a reply. It may be 100. But you're not looking for quantity, you're looking for quality. All you need is that one girl who reads something in your profile that attracts her.
The problem with this is that EH is a paid service. You can have the patience to send all these messages and wait for these replies, but it's going to cost you. I'm not going to pay hundreds a year and work on hundreds of intelligent, witty first messages just to have the same response rate as a free site like OKC. And that's just a reply, not even a guarantee for a face to face.
 
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nightling is offline nightling Post #8  October 12,2009, 7:54pm
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how fortunate for you then that there is a guided communicaiton track. No need to think of anything witty. They've prewritten the questions.

I generally don't make first contact. Maybe it's a generational thing, but I figure if the guy's interested in getting to know me, he will initiate and if he is not, then that's fine too. I figure the fact I didn't close the match ought to be clue enough that I wouldn't mind hearing from them.
 
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cardguy is offline cardguy Post #9  October 12,2009, 10:06pm
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Well, here are a few thoughts of mine in no particular order. First of all, no matter what dating arena you're in, people who are very physically attractive (especially women) are going to have a lot of interest directed towards them. In that sense, I doubt you'll find eharmony different from anywhere else: if you're only communicating with people who are just plain hot, expect to be one of many guys trying to hit it off with her. eharmony does only give you a certain number of matches (0-8) per day, but I don't think that will ultimately have as much impact on that issue as you might expect.

More generally, however, odds are actually in your favor as a guy on eharmony. Unlike more casual dating sites that tend to be heavy on men, or a 50/50 split at best, eharmony has many more women (the women:men ratio was about 1.4:1 from the last numbers I saw). In short, as average guy the chances are that you've got more communication going on than those you are talking with just based on raw numbers.

Now that said, the biggest thing you'll run into as far as lack of communication of the site is dead profiles. The response rate I get from women who are actively using the site is actually quite good: of those that have some kind of response to a request for communication, I'd say over 50% chose to communicate back rather than just close me. However, there are a lot of inactive accounts you'll get matched with that you'll never hear anything from at all.

As for initiation, I'd say guys still do the significant majority of it here, but I've definitely had a few women initiate communication with me. Like nightling said, the first step of guided communication is sending out a few pre-made multiple choice questions, so there's a very low barrier to initiating contact with someone.
Last edited by cardguy; October 12,2009 at 10:14pm.
 
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Sassafras54 is offline Sassafras54 — Advice Official Moderator Post #10  October 13,2009, 9:48am
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No, Winja, not one girl has ever replied to anyone on eH. It's a mystery why men oops I mean boys keep trying.
 
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