Might cleanliness in this context merely be about how the person keeps house? Do you want to date an Oscar or a Felix? Sloppiness has broken up many a roommate arrangement; might it not also break up lovers? I don't really care how often my sweetheart showers, if he would just not leave his clothes wherever he drops them on the way there. (Where I drop his clothes is another matter entirely.)

eHarmony is not scientific, it is Snake Oil.

You can't even search on eHarmony, only look at what they search for you. For all I know they just throw me every profile in the area and let the other steps like the can't stands/must haves, and other crap be the weed out factor.

Where is the data and research behind the construct he is using? I can make the same thing, it is most likely nothing more than a multiple discriminant analysis with 29 variables. If you believe that eHarmony has a valid and reliable construct to match couples, I have a bridge in MN you might be interested in.

I tried eHarmony and got a book in the mail from that creepy old guy. It is all anecdotes.

...the vast majority of bisexual/lesbian ladies on craigslist (at least in my city) want "clean" women too...LW, I actually posted a simliar, albeit shorter, question of the same sort on CL not too long ago, and the answers I got fell into two basic groups: hygiene and disease. Given the propensity for casual sex on CL, the disease thing makes more sense.

I think it's just one of the easier responses. A lot of the other options are really specific and intense: "I can't STAND rude people!" It comes across like you have issues, like you are OBSESSED with hating rude people. I'm guessing the guys are just trying to keep it light by choosing the hygiene box (no pun intended).

That said, I also think lots of men (esp. the eHarmony types) have a fantasy of the perfectly groomed lady who smells like flowers. They want one of those, not one of those slightly sweaty ones who lets her hair get greasy from time to time.

Anyone see the movie "Next Stop Wonderland"? One guy, clearly a neurotic, phones in this personal ad: "I am looking for a woman who is tall, yet clean."

I don't think he's hinting about oral sex ... I'm sure the mere idea would give him a heart attack :)

Man: "I'd like a clean woman."

Woman: Oh my god, he won't give me oral sex!!! (Closes the match.)

Man: Was it my picture?

~

No wonder eHarmony never works. Men say what they want. And women follow that from point A to point B to arrive at a point roughly adjacent to the star cluster Alpha Centauri.

If only space ships could travel so fast.

The ironic ending, of course, is that LW will meet a guy who doesn't require cleanliness, and as she navigates past the rotting garbage, dirty dishes, stinking laundry, and moldy shower curtain, she will suddenly say to herself, "I must have a clean man."

Better yet, what if you waited until the relationship was quite far along, and when you took your dress off it turned out that your panties were full of leaves and twigs? That would be really odd, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it remind us, too, of our connection to the soil, to the earth -- a troubled connection these days?

...That was the creepiest response I've ever seen.

Clean? Isn't clean a given? I am so old school I just thought... well, it is online so you never know. Man, there are some freaky people out there. I think I'll just stay in tonight.

First, it's already been verified that "clean = hygienic" according to eHarmony so enough with the helpful "clean = tidy" peanut gallery.

In my experience, however, reading comprehension among online dating participants isn't terribly strong, so may all these guys were just skimming. I'll also back up the idea that men might give less thought to those check boxes than women do.

I'll defend the LW's leap to oral sex. I've heard many men mention women whose vaginas were "rank", "disgusting", etc. Now, hygiene that bad is possible, but it seems unlikely among the people I and these men hang out with. So who were these women, and were they really "disgusting"? It does seem as though some men do expect us to smell like flowers at all times, when, in actual fact, we smell like humans. It doesn't take too many fish taco jokes before you become self-conscious.

I once read an advice column letter where a woman was complaining her husband refused oral because he didn't like her smell or taste. The advice was to shower less, or at least not right before sex. The idea was that all of our bathing and perfuming have changed what "natural" is perceived as. He smells all this pretty shampoo and perfume, and then it's a shock when he encounters the natural scent of arousal.

I think this is a case of a contrived category being interpreted as a real phenomenon and hence generating unnecessary anxiety. This letter is less indicative of any real trend in gender relationships (plenty of you have already pointed out the string of assumptions underlying that interpretation) than it is of a specifically postmodern tendency to overly identify ourselves with abstract classifications rather than concrete experiences and life circumstances that could never be summed up in simple soundbites. It's the same mindset that gives us special pleasure when we take a Cosmo quiz or determine our Ayurvedic type. It's the reason why things like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator still have public cache: Somehow, without a label and a sorting out into categories, we seem to feel less real to one another. Besides, "Oh no! This guy is one of those oral-sex-haters!" seems a remarkably reductive conclusion to make based on the evidence, and a serious underestimation of the degree to which a person's sexual repertoire changes based on his or her current partner.

There is something very strange about choosing a romantic prospect based on which boxes he or she has checked. How much could you possibly tell about a person based on something like that, as if personalities were nothing more than choices from an a la carte menu? There is a tendency for dating nowadays to seem more like shopping for a very particular kind of wardrobe than any kind of relationship building. We search for the best example of what we believe we want from the outset, rather than approaching other people with a desire to be open and willing to change and be changed for the sake of human connection. No wonder so many relationships fail!

The very concept of a "can't stand" category seems the ultimate example of this problem, completely obviating any possibility of a relationship worth having by weeding out precisely those people who will challenge and thrill us. The real relationship fireworks, in my experience at least, happen when that guy or gal you chose based on some visceral, unanalyzed attraction manifests a trait you would otherwise have considered a deal-breaker, and you are forced to totally re-evaluate everything you thought about them and you and whatever abstract category you previously thought you had figured out. In this case, the pro-hygiene fellas might miss the potential turn-on of the down-and-dirty human scent of a person to whom they are truly attracted, and the "oh no it's an oral-sex-hater" lady might miss the opportunity to date someone who is disinterested enough in box-checking to choose something as generic as "I can't stand a woman who isn't clean" from an impersonal, compulsory list of mostly-meaningless abstractions.