A Couple Of Must-Haves For eHarmony

3) Better filtering system - I haven't been able to find a way to filter based on who has a photo and who doesn't. This is another feature I noticed earlier users discussed but wasn't changed.

Maybe this is all wishful thinking, but I'd like to hear from all of you. Are these features things you'd like to see? Are they poor features? Will things such as this ever be noticed by eHarmony developers and staff?

Please let me know. Questions? Comments?

First of all, the "Must-Haves" in the title of this thread is a play on words about one of the features of eHarmony. I say this because people will sometimes expect something out of a thread by the title and I don't want to confuse anyone.

Now that that's out of the way, I've been thinking for a long time about my eHarmony profile and I've noticed some problems. It's going to take a lot of work to fix them and I'd much rather reset the entire thing. I've been looking through the settings but I don't think there's a way to be able to not only reset my entire profile but also retake the personality quiz.

I've looked up some help threads and it turns out that I'd need to call eHarmony Help to be able to retake my personality quiz. I've also utilized the beautiful "Search" function on these forums and found that other people wanted this ability much earlier than I did. But I have a couple of other things to add:


1) Resetting my profile - I've already talked about this above. Basically, this would allow me to erase all of my data, pictures and quiz results so that I could redo everything to match who I am today.

This feature would also allow me to save a copy of all of my data (on my hard drive) beforehand in case my quiz results banned me from eHarmony's match abilities or I wanted to restore certain pictures or text from the "About Me" page. That way, I could restore certain sections or the entire thing in case I changed my mind.

2) Must Haves, Can't Stands... Unsure - I may post something about this in the Dating Advice forum, but I've noticed recently that some girls will include Must Haves like "Want to start a family" and Can't Stands like "Don't want anyone who doesn't want to start a family."

This makes me uncomfortable as I feel pressured to move toward a certain goal if we start dating. It'd be nice to have another field called "Unsure" or "Not Sure" that would allow me to tag things I haven't nailed down yet. Perhaps this field would also allow the other person to ask me open-ended questions regarding my "Not Sure" choices.

3) Better filtering system - I haven't been able to find a way to filter based on who has a photo and who doesn't. This is another feature I noticed earlier users discussed but wasn't changed.

It'd be nice to search for people who have a certain number of characters per each field in their "About Me" area so that I could narrow my search to people who had actually put effort into their profile.

As well, I want to search for those who have set up a subscription to eHarmony instead of those who just got the free trial and will never respond to me in time.


Maybe this is all wishful thinking, but I'd like to hear from all of you. Are these features things you'd like to see? Are they poor features? Will things such as this ever be noticed by eHarmony developers and staff?

Please let me know. Questions? Comments?

Honestly, I don't see a need for eHarmony to be changing anything to accommodate these needs.

#1: You can do this right now. Grated eHarmony doesn't make it easy for you, but I think that's a good thing... Still, if you truly wanted to do it, you could. So the real question then becomes: "Why should eHarmony be encouraging people to reset their profiles?" I don't really think it's a good thing to do. You're supposed to put some thought into the questions and answer them honestly, and only want to retake the quiz if you felt you didn't answer as honestly as you could.

As for the rest of your profile, you can edit whatever you wanna edit at any given time. I see no issue here.

#2: I don't see how this make sense at all. Must have and Can't stands are just another piece of information that your matches are sharing with you. Take from that what you want. You're not RESPONDING to their must have/can't stands in any way, saying "I have this, I don't have that". It's just information being shared.

In your particular case, the match is clearly telling you "I would like to have kids in the future... if you don't plan on doing so, you're wasting your time"... what's so unsure about this? If you feel like you need to ask the person "In that case, would you date someone who might CONSIDER kids, but does not know for sure yet?" you can do that at stage 3 (and actually, I think that's a GREAT thing to ask at stage 3). But still, before even starting to date this person... keep it in your mind that he/she is looking to have kids in the future.

Again, I see no problem here. Information being shared!

#3: It would be nice to filter better, yes. But it's not particularly necessary. You can organize your account in such a way that you have some of these functions implemented. Here's what I do:

Profiles without pictures, or with very little info... I leave them in the "New" section (as in I don't send communication, nor do I archive or close).... Other profiles I'm interested in, I send questions (therefore they move to the communicating tab) and profiles I'm not interested in, I archive and close (therefore they move to the closed folder).

Very organized!

With that said... Yes, it would be IMMENSELY helpful if we could tell which profiles are active and which are not... but according to the people who've been on these boards for a long time, it's been a request for quite some time now and eHarmony apparently won't be providing it anytime soon.

Some of the things you talk about filtering for are OK..
but a few of the others are getting into such fine detail about humans that you're straying into "Stepford Wife" category...which is not the true purpose of a dating site, really.

Characters in their profile?? really?
I mean, not everyone is a wordsmith..

Don't take this the wrong way, but a lot of the problem with online dating...is people who have, like you...decided to eliminate people right off the bat over trivial stuff, such as this.
Ask yourself this question: if you were to meet these people IRL, would you so carelessly dismiss them?

When you attempt to put people through such a fine mesh screen, I think you'll find you are eliminating many good potential matches...who may just need help a little with their profile.

The other thing is you still can choose not to communicate with anyone you don't want to...or simply close them.
Those are still logical choices.