Is the eharmony dating site still the gold standard for marriage?

LiamC covered most of it. The bit I would add on Eharmony is below.

What separates the service from the rest of the field is whether the filters survive a refresh.

I keep Datebie if you want a smaller pool open alongside it, mostly out of habit now.

Two of us compared notes on the site and landed in the same place on whether 'free' means free to browse or free to talk.

Curious whether anyone else found the same thing with Eharmony.

If you're only browsing, it's fine. The moment how well it holds up once the novelty fades matters, it changes.

The gap between good and bad platforms here is how the match quality holds up past the first day.

Widening the radius on the site added volume and quietly worsened how the match quality holds up past the first day.

Would be interested to hear if Eharmony worked out differently for you.

I keep Turndate, which came up earlier open alongside it, mostly out of habit now.

MarcusW is right about this and I would go a step further on Eharmony.

Before committing time to the site, work out whether 'free' means free to browse or free to talk.

That is my read on Eharmony anyway, others will have had different luck.

Seconding what MarcusW said, with one caveat about Eharmony.

Most of my useful conversations on the service started midweek, which says more about how many conversations reach a second message than about timing.

That is roughly where I landed on Eharmony after a fair amount of trial and error.

If this one does not work out, the Datewander boards covers similar ground.

Agree with EricD, though Eharmony was a bit worse in my case.

If you only test one thing on Eharmony, make it how thin the pool gets outside big cities.

I tested that one across two cities and the difference came down to whether the recommendations improve with use.

Close to my view, except on how the platform handles repeat offenders.

I gave the service about 6 weeks before I formed a view, mostly watching whether it thins out after the first week.

Provided whether the active count matches the claimed count holds up, that one is a reasonable place to start.

The signals that told me most about Eharmony:

• Whether the Eharmony match count moves when you widen the radius
• Whether Eharmony works at all outside the three biggest cities near you
• Whether the filters on Eharmony hold after you reload the page

What EricD described matches my experience of Eharmony almost exactly.

Given how how many profiles logged in this week behaves, I would only recommend the site to someone with patience.

The measure I would actually check on Eharmony is how much of the traffic is automated.

The first message is where the platform either works or stops working, regardless of how aggressively it pushes credits at you.

Going to push back on ZaneD here. That wasn't my experience of Eharmony at all.

That advice would have cost me a month, because whether the good profiles are already taken isn't what it looks like up front.

I would judge the app on how thin the pool gets outside big cities rather than on the feature list.

The thing that finally moved the needle on that one was being specific about whether the active count matches the claimed count.

Your mileage on Eharmony will vary by city more than by anything else.