a different thought when I read the comment "Must be clean."

My first thought was not that of showering and bathing, but that the person must be sexually clean. Must not have sexually transmitted diseases (i.e., herpes), has been tested for HIV, etc...

I don't know that was my take on that comment.

Cat hair and kitty litter ALL OVER her apartment (seriously - kitty litter grit in her couch!). Wonderful woman, but I always steered dates to my place instead of hers because I was terrified of the place. It had nothing to do with "fear of oral sex" and everything to do with nasty housekeeping. And I've been just as harsh about guy roomates who were slobs. Sometimes dudes - like me - are just neat freaks.

yeah, right back at you guys. You think your pubie hair doesn't stink? lol

You're right. Every time I see the eHarmony ad, I wonder if these are actors or real people, because if they are real people, two of the guys seem 100% in the closet, lol.

This is really offensive. Many closet lesbians manage to marry unsuspecting men.

But somehow, a guy being a little less than stereotype masculine is suddenly a closeted gay.

I thought we were past that.

Isn't it usually the women picking on men for not showering? So men understand this is a significant point of contention with women, so they shower.

It is ASSUMED and the cliche is that women keep themselves clean, the truth is there are plenty of filthy women out there.

They get used to their messy lives and it translates into their personal habits. I'll never forget the smell of one.. ugh

I did eHarmony for a while, along with a few other online dating sites. I realized pretty early on that the multi-step "communication process" was a waste of time, and didn't reveal much at all about the person. Emailing/talking/meeting the match was the most effective. So I (and most of my matches, by the way) would typically get through the checklists as quickly as possible so we could communicate like human beings.

The must-have/can't stand lists were always something I thought were a little silly. Yes, I CAN'T STAND HATERS! Thanks, that really helped me rule out someone. The real test is in a person's attitude/behavior. So I pretty much disregarded the list and my impression was that many others do the same.

I left eHarmony for a few reasons: I realized that I could do just as well picking matches as eHarmony (all that is more marketing fluff than anything), because you can't browse other members' profiles but are matched with others, you will get diminishing returns over time, and the service is expensive. Fewer matches over time made it even less worth the money.

By the way, the number of people using this service is huge, and not at all limited to the religious right. I was matched with a really wide range of people. It makes no sense to try to label them with any category. Though I must say that most of the men I was matched with really did believe the hype. Maybe they were just sucked in by the advertising.

Incidentally, I didn't find Eharmony men to be conservative or overly religious--the results of my analysis no doubt took care of that. But I did find the men to be bossy and "don't waste my time with idle chit chat." So I quit. I like idle chit chat. Guess that didn't come through in my analysis!

I am beginning to feel like these guys. Women seem to want to talk forever.

All it is is a shooting gallery where any one comment can scotch the whole future relationship even though the two of you might be compatible in every other way.

So why should I waste my time being analyzed thru a microscope for the single damning comment? I am more than a perfect person with one minor flaw that can destroy my chances with you.

I am getting into the habit of dropping the women BEFORE they have a chance to find that one nick to use to disqualify me.

Of course this brings up the other issue of why these women are alone, they do not know how to balance their expectations of men, maybe they are just closted lesbians who WANT to disqualify all guys just to feel superior.

It is all tiring, I am about to drop my subscription for this, among a few, reasons.

Here is another, just yesterday, I had sent a note to one to call me so we can hear each other's voice instead of this endless emailing back and forth. She comes back with, isn't email good enough? How about I give you my personal email address, will that make you happy? Too bad she is this creepy, I really liked her otherwise. But now I have to question if she is a douchebag in all things in life.

They want one of those, not one of those slightly sweaty ones who lets her hair get greasy from time to time.

Leave it to women to exaggerate based on a misconception. Just because a guy expects a level of cleanliness does not mean he does not like the natural smells of a woman at the end of a day after she DID shower that morning and accumulated the sweat during that day.

Don't over neuroticize it ladies. It is not about pure daisies, it is about decent levels of hygeine.

God what is it with you women anyway?

Think about it this way, you tell a guy you want him to shower once a day. Does it occur to him that that means he must smell the male equivalent of daisy fresh all the time? Of course not, it is ridiculous to extrapolate to such extreme ends.

I have to say, I'm confused by the all the vitriol towards eHarmony.

The site is run by evangelical Christians -- so what? I didn't go on the site to meet the founders, and I'm pretty sure that none of them showed up in my matches. I checked the box for "not religious" and that was that. No Jesus fans in the mix. In no way did the site, it's questions, or any of the people I met through it proselytize to me or try to make me more "godly."

eHarmony's "hook" is that instead of presenting a sea of people who can describe themselves any way they choose, you see only the people that they think are compatible with you based on a personality test. I think a lot of people misunderstand that concept. Someone in an earlier letter said they only match you with people just like you, which is flat wrong. . . they are assessing compatibility, not similarity.

Maybe it's rooted in some distrust of psychology (What the hell? Are you all Scientologists?), but I think people blame eHarmony when they don't see themselves the same way the test sees them. If you're getting matched with people you can't stand, maybe you weren't completely honest when you took the test.

I work in the clinical assessments industry, so I have some idea of how these things work (though the details of eHarmony's test and scoring rules are of course not public). The assessments are designed with controls to evaluate the validity of the answers, and are normed against particular control groups. And it's possible for a person's responses to place them outside of the test's defined categories.

Understanding this, it doesn't seem all that sinister that eHarmony will "reject" some people as unmatchable. It just means they didn't get any statistically significant results from your assessment.

And, although it DOES bother me that the site caters only to male-female matches, even this makes sense. A compatibility assessment normalized on that assumption would not be valid for a male-male or female-female pairing. Those situations would each require different scoring rules, possibly different test questions altogether, and developing an assessment that proves useful and valid is not a simple thing.

All I'm saying is what is so bad about eHarmony? That it doesn't work for everybody?

I dated two people I met on eHarmony, and got along famously with both of them. It was only two, because that's all it took -- my girlfriend and I have been together for a year, and she's moving into my house next week. So, it worked for me, when six years of trying everything else yielded nothing.

I don't like the founders of the site, and I'm sure not going to magically become a Christian because I looked at it. But I'm sure glad it was there.