Online-questionnaire purveyor and dating website eHarmony is offering a service that allows customers to bow out of the questionnaire part. For $5,000, willing daters can have a “personal counselor” for one year through the eH+ program.
The counselors will be either psychologists or certified marriage counselors. They’ll conduct interviews via Skype or by phone, then these coaches will peruse eHarmony on behalf of their clients. This program means that folks can avoid answering 400 questions in order to chart their 29 “dimensions” of “compatibility,” ostensibly the feature that makes eHarmony so unique. Clients can also avoid the standard dating embarrassment that comes with asking someone out or being rejected.
The vice-president for customer experience at eHarmony, Grant Langston, told Quartz:
It’s too hard for a computer to take two people and understand what they want from a physical standpoint in a way that really elicits chemistry between them. We think it’s much more likely that a human being can do that sort of thing, and of course, that’s what the counselor’s going to be asking.
That was always the iffy part about online dating: the whole computer thing. Well, now that eHarmony has discovered human matchmakers, time to shut everything else down.