eHarmony Launches Gay Dating Site

Online dating site eHarmony launched a version of its match-making service for homosexual couples Tuesday in response to a settlement late last year.

The company agreed to launch Compatible Partners after a user had filed a complaint against eHarmony, citing New Jersey's discrimination law. Elizabeth Holmes compares the company's new site with its heterosexual site for The Wall Street Journal.

Compatible Partners mirrors the features of its sister site, beginning with the same extensive relationship-preferences questionnaire for which eHarmony is known. There are just a few minor modifications between the two 34-page documents. For example, an eHarmony question reads, "I greatly appreciate the physical beauty of the opposite sex." The Compatible Partners version reads, "I greatly appreciate physical attractiveness when looking at people." The company changed so little in the surveys that it put a disclosure on the Compatible Partners home page. The notice says the site was developed "on the basis of research involving married heterosexual couples." It adds: "The company has not conducted similar research on same-sex relationships."

… Last month, eHarmony was the sixth-most-visited online personals site, with roughly 2.3 million unique visitors, according to comScore.

It's not a comfortable fit for eHarmony's founder, Neil Clark Warren, David Colker writes for the Los Angeles Times.

"It's what I did for 40 years," said Warren, 74, who is retired but remains on the board. "I never had a gay couple."
… Even Warren is finding out that gay couples might not be so different after all. He and his wife are friends with a male couple they met in Maine, where they live most of the year.
"I asked them, 'Are you guys committed?' " Warren said, "and one said yes and the other said, 'I think so.'
"And the first one said, 'You'd better be!' "

After the settlement, Dale Buss wrote that many evangelicals were upset with what they see as eHarmony's cop-out.

This community was responsible for making eHarmony thrive, especially after Mr. Warren allied himself with fellow California psychologist James Dobson and was featured repeatedly on Mr. Dobson's Focus on the Family radio show. Mr. Warren's Christian base allowed him to compete with the giants of the nascent matchmaking business, including Match.com.

Then, in 2005, Mr. Warren suggested in a couple of interviews that his association with evangelicals was hurting the company. Seeking a broader audience, he pointedly broke with Focus on the Family because "people do recognize [it] as occupying a very precise political position in this society and a very precise spiritual position," he told USA Today.

Buss writes that eHarmony's critics expected more of a fight from a company that's just eager to move on from this dispute.