Well, I went on my first eHarmony date on Saturday. It was somewhat mixed. I thought he seemed really nice and cute, but after talking for 2 1/2 hours, I asked him something like "If you had kids, would you want to raise them as Catholic?" and he said, "Well, I already have two kids, but they live in Texas."
What?!
Theoretically, eHarmony has a way of filtering people with kids vs. not having kids, but the way they phrase it is pretty tricky! They ask each member how many children they have living full-time in the home. Then they ask if you're willing to accept being matched with members who have children living full-time in the home, to which I replied, "NO." So, since his kids don't LIVE with him, he marked "Zero kids living at home" and then they matched him up with me because I don't want to date people who have kids.
This is irritating because I don't want to date anyone who has ANY kids. I don't care where they live or how old they are. I'd guess that most guys with kids would mark "Zero" on that question because unless they live in another state (like this guy), they probably only live part-time with him, not full-time. They should have an option where you mark that you either have or don't have kids. I'm going to have to state on my profile that I don't want to date anyone who even has kids, so that the guys can "close" our match if they have children.
I'm going to send eHarmony an email about this. My first date was essentially a waste of both of our time because he has kids already. If I had known that, I never would've done all the back-and-forth questions with him and then spent Saturday afternoon with him. He was very nice, but not a match and I would've known that from the beginning had I known he already had kids.
6 comments:
That sucks. You'd think eHarmony would have already received complaints about similar experiences. Bah.
I know everyone has their own recomendation of sites, but I'd be remiss if I didn't offer up OKCupid.com. It's free, but you get *extrememly* accurate results... especially if you take to time to answer a lot of the 'user-generated' questions. I met my channie there :)
Good to know! Maybe I'll go check that out too! Interesting.
I changed my profile to make it VERY obvious that I don't want to date people with kids. Hopefully that will help avoid these problems in the future!
Hey thanks for visiting eHB! I'm glad you didn't put this against him (he didn't lie to you) or against eHarmony (eH thought 'living fulltime' is all that mattered).
This makes me curious, though. If a guy was a perfect-perfect match for you, except that he already procreated, would you still break it off? Even if this experience of his might have made him a better person to grow a relationship with you? :)
eHB
I was discussing this with a friend today and in my "ideal" world, I would find someone else. It's not like there is only one person on this planet for me. I can't say without a doubt that I would NEVER date a guy with kids, but the odds are very low.
I could go on about this, but actually it's probably a topic for a post. I'll post that in the next day or so.
What are you doing meeting someone in person without getting on the phone with them first and asking if he had kids in the first place?
I'm on eharmony too, and once we get on the phone, I ask questions such as, have you ever been married and do you have any kids.
Eharmony isn't bad, I've met some great people on there---though not the "one" yet. However, you do have to ask the important questions *before* meeting in person. I've had a few doozies when I didn't do that.
A great point. This was my first eHarmony date, in fact, it was my first online dating experience ever. I hadn't asked him about that stuff on the phone. I assumed (foolishly) that eHarmony wouldn't match me up with someone who didn't have kids because I stated I didn't want to date people with kids.
The way they word the question is tricky. He doesn't have children under 18 living with him, so it didn't screen him out of my matches. Since then, I have asked that question even before we get to open communication!
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