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Eharmony is an online dating website grounded in relationship science that matches single men and women for long-term relationships. To optimize the matching process, eHarmony operates eHarmony Labs, a relationship research facility, and publishes eHarmony Advice, a relationship advice site. eHarmony, which was launched on August 22, 1998, is based in Pasadena, California; it has members in more than 150 countries and operations in the U.S., Australia, Canada,the U.K., and Brazil. The company is privately-held, with investors that include Technology Crossover Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Fayez Sarofim & Co.

eHarmony advertises that compatibility is the core tenet at eHarmony. Former CEO Greg Waldorf stated, “It’s not about matching people who like certain hobbies… it’s about compatibility. You go on to the site and tell us about you, rather than about what you want.” eHarmony seeks to differentiate its matching service by what it calls a scientific approach to a deeply personal and emotional process.

Prospective Eharmony members complete a proprietary questionnaire that purports to determine characteristics, beliefs, values, emotional health and skills. Matching algorithms – the basis of the matching system Warren and Buckwalter developed, which the company believes matches people’s core traits and values to replicate the traits of happy couples – use these answers to match members with compatible users. A new, complex software technology not only evaluates the answers to the questionnaire, but also each user’s behavioral data such as average time spent on the site. The software analyzes six hundred variables to further optimize the matches and, as a result, there has been a 34% increase in communication between users in the past year.

eHarmony’s research methods and its models for compatibility matching have not been submitted to any peer-reviewed journals for evaluation and publication. However, in 2004, eHarmony’s research director, Dr. Steve Carter, presented a paper at the 16th Annual American Psychological Society (APS) meeting. In the paper presented, Carter compared eHarmony couples married for more than five years with a control group, using the Dyadic Adjustment Scale(DAS), a measure of couple satisfaction. His results showed that “over 90% of eHarmony couples had marriage quality scores which were above average when compared to couples who had begun their relationships elsewhere. eHarmony couples were more than twice as likely to be in highly successful marriages than non-eHarmony couples. Not only are eHarmony couples 35% more likely than other married couples to report that they enjoy spending time together, but we found they are nearly twice as likely to report that their marriages are ‘extremely happy’ or better versus other recently married couples.” It should be noted that the study provided no data on the eHarmony failure rate for comparison. No independent studies of eHarmony’s methods or success rates have been published.