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Few online matches in queer dating pool

• Published April 11, 2009

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Until recently, I thought the folks at eHarmony hated me. Nothing personal; they just didn't care to match queer couples.

The site wouldn’t allow it — until a court ruled last November that eHarmony could not discriminate against the queers and had to create a similar site that caters to same-sex couples.

March 31, that order came to fruition with the launch of Compatible Partners. Now I know it wasn’t all in my head. EHarmony does, in fact, hate me; I was rejected by the matching system. “Unable to match at this time,” reads the page I just printed from my browser. Not one to take rejection well, I called eHarmony to find out why they don’t like me.

“The biggest reasons why we don’t offer services are if you are under 18, if you are in a legally recognized relationship,” eHarmony spokesman Paul Breton told me.

I politely explained I don’t apply to either case. (Especially after being included in the “seasoned lesbian” category last week.) “There are a handful of reasons why that could happen,” he told me in his best media spokesman voice. Really, I wanted specifics. Why reject me?

Breton said I might be “answering questions that are making it difficult to match.”

What does that mean?

It appears that the matching technology is easily confused.

If a user signifies in some questions he/she is an introvert and in other questions that he/ she is an extrovert, the computer gets confused.

“Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs in about 20 percent of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service,” my rejection page read on the computer.

One in 5! Really!

It seems quite odd that a company flat-out rejects 20 percent of its business right off the bat.

I shared with Breton my suspicion of why I was rejected: Not many people have signed up to use the service.

Compatible Partners’ opening offer a free six-month subscription to the service for the first 10,000 people who sign up to use it.