Odd matching issues

I have a rather tricky problem. As near as I can tell, eHarmony's matching system seems to interpret an indication of a particular religious denominational preference or preferences as indicative of a strongly religious character. There are religions and denominations that for philosophical and other reasons I do not want to date, but I do not consider myself to be a strongly devout Christian, and am not looking for that type of woman. And yet that is what I keep getting: women whose lives are built almost entirely (or entirely) around their churches.

Anybody have any thoughts on workarounds on this, or having similar problems with other aspects? I have tried mailing Customer Care on this, but so far have heard nothing.

For what it's worth -

My profile currently does (and has in the past, on and off) mentioned that I am Catholic in various ways. Never more than once in the entire profile, and I do not use any other religious words or phrases. I have my religion preferences set to moderately important, and I have many denominations checked.

I have never noticed any change in the number of Catholic matches I get (almost none). I do not get many "very religious" matches, and in fact I get a lot of "spiritual but not religious" which I'd rather not be seeing.

Hi all,

This is a good thread to give a little nugget I got from EH support awhile ago.

I, like the OP, also list a specific Religion that I consider myself, but am not particularly Religious, and am not looking for a Match that is.

My raw Profile, for whatever reason, tends to get matched with very religious Matches.

For awhile, I thought it would be a good idea for me to have a little section in my "More Info I would like my Match to know", that would explain my position:

"I consider myself Baptist, but am very wide open to all Religions, or lack of Religion"

so that the very religious matches would understand that I would probably NOT be a good Match for them.

However, this was a HUGE mistake, because the explanation had the text "religion" a couple times.

The nugget I got from EH support, was that EH matches DOES do some parsing of the text in your Profile to do Matching!!!

This is something that surprised me, as my belief was always that ONLY the Questionnaire (ie, 29 dimensions), and our Preferences were the only things that were considered when EH searched for Matches.

Thus, if you mention religion a number of times in your Profile, EH's matching system will move your into a more Religious "bucket".

So EH support's recommendation to me was:
1) Remove that extra explaination from my Profile.
2) They would change some internal settings (ie, things we can't change), so that I would get Matched with less religious Matches.

This has worked for me.

So to the OP, I recommend the same thing. Call EH support, get them to change your internal settings, and then make SURE you do not have extraneous mentions of God, Religion, Bible, etc, etc.

For everyone else, this nugget is an interesting thing.

Do they only scan our Profile text for "Religion" type Matching?
Or can we tailor it for other things we might find valuable in a Match?

Like for Vegans, if they were to say Vegan all the time in their Profile, would they get more Vegan matches that they otherwise might?

Would it work for Weight, Height, or other things that everyone complains about all the time?

Gr8Guyn2008...the one thing that has kept me from calling is that I do not (or at least, not yet) want them to have my number. (For those unaware, calling 800 (877, etc.) numbers allows them to get your number...even if you have number block.) I may try e-mailing them, though....