Is eharmony still the gold standard for daters over 40?
If you’re dating in your 40s, some online dating sites and apps are a better bet than others, especially if you want to date within your age range. While most dating apps like Tinder and Hinge tend to be more popular with the 30-and-under crowd, dating websites attract a slightly older demographic, one more interested in substantive connection than fleeting attraction.
That’s where eharmony comes in. The site has been around for over 25 years, and boasts somewhere between 38 and 45 million registered users (according to DatingAdvice), and unlike the fast-paced, dopamine-driven apps, eharmony encourages its users to take their time, emphasizing compatibility through a proprietary personality quiz that the site then uses to assign all of your potential matches with a “compatibility score” between 60 and 140, with a higher score indicating that you have more in common.
Curious if the site is right for you? Here are its pros and cons for daters over 40:
eharmony benefits
Favorable user demographics
The major benefit of a site like eharmony for older daters is its age breakdown of users. Fully 40 percent of its active users are between the ages of 30 and 39, making it the largest on-site demographic, closely followed by the 40+ crowd at 35 percent of the total user base, while the under-30 crowd makes up just 25 percent of the site’s users.
But it gets even better. According to independent research by SwipeStats, the average age of an eharmony user is 34. Eharmony told Mashable that users are 51 percent women and 49 percent men.
Compatibility-focused matchmaking
On most dating sites these days, the “matchmaking” process is little more than a game of “hot or not,” where users are given a small handful of photos and a few seconds of time to make a decision. That’s not how eharmony operates. All of its users, including paid subscribers and free accounts, complete a comprehensive personality questionnaire known on the site as the Compatibility Quiz.
Based on extensive psychological research and eharmony’s own matchmaking experiences, this quiz aims to classify people around four basic questions:
What characterizes us?
What is our driving force?
How do we organize everyday life?
How do we communicate?
Once it has this information, it can more accurately guess who you will likely vibe with and who you might butt heads with, all based on these fundamental differences in character.
It might not be a perfect system, of course, but it does offer a needed counterweight to the “picture first” approach of more superficial dating sites. If you’re in your 40s and eager for connection, it’s nice to see, at a glance, who is likely to appreciate your communication style or life goals.
A commitment to dating transparency
One glaring truth about most online dating sites is that they lack transparency. It keep its matchmaking algorithms hidden, for example, or they remain tight-lipped about its user demographics or success rates. Well, eharmony takes the opposite approach, and it’s refreshing.
Head to its Data and Research section, for example, and you’ll see it regularly releases reports about both online dating in general, always sourced from top-notch independent researchers like Pew, or about its own users in particular. Recent reports include subjects like “masculinity’s impact on dating dynamics” or the topics Gen Z and millennial daters are most likely to lie about in their dating profiles.
These reports aren’t just fun facts or curiosities you might be interested in; they’re valuable insights into modern dating dynamics, and a helpful tool for those eager to improve their dating game.
eharmony drawbacks
Paid membership required
One obvious drawback to eharmony is that, unlike Tinder or Hinge, for example, a paid membership is all but mandatory to actually use the website. With a free account, you can fill out your profile and take the eharmony personality quiz, but you can’t view other daters’ photos or send them substantive messages, so you’re really required to pull out your credit card.
Membership costs vary by location, but if you’re in the United States, expect to pay between $20 and $65 per month, depending on your subscription tier and duration. On the plus side, eharmony also regularly runs promotional sales events, often up to 40 percent off its usual price, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a good deal.
Inactive accounts
This could be construed as both a pro and a con, since it indicates a lot of eharmony users actually end up pairing off with someone, but the fact nonetheless remains that a lot of its registered accounts are inactive.
While its own on-site statistics show close to 45 million registered accounts, there are only about 10 million active users at any given moment, and those tend to be concentrated in large urban areas. Worse still, because it locks its geo-search functions to paid members, you won’t be able to know, in advance, if there are a lot of active eharmony users in your area, which definitely won’t be an issue if you happen to live near a large metropolitan area, but could be a serious problem if you live somewhere a bit more rural.
Best eharmony alternatives for daters over 40
Facebook Dating
If you don’t like the idea of paying for a dating site but still want the benefits of a massive dating pool, consider giving Facebook Dating a try. It boasts more than 20 million daily active users, and has become particularly popular with older Millennials suffering from dating app burnout.
Because it’s separate from your regular Facebook account, Facebook Dating offers a discreet way to survey your local single scene, and if you’re active on Facebook, you can even opt to find people who share your interests or with whom you have Facebook Groups in common.
Hinge
If you can’t bear to part with the app-based dating experience but still want a more mature, substantive option, Hinge is still a great choice. Its approach to matchmaking, through prompt responses, is similar to eharmony’s personality-first ethos. Its newest feature, Signals, seeks to highlight users who have exhibited thoughtful dating behavior. , This will likely help to discourage the low-effort, ghosting culture that so many over-40 daters are running away from.
Mashable
