Are eHarmony Profiles Public?

Your eharmony profile is visible to other members, and you can narrow who sees it. The site gives you three controls: be visible or invisible, show or hide when you are online, and show or hide that you visited someone's profile. Hiding the profile is not total, because members you have already communicated with can still see it.

eharmony says you have three options for what other members see about you.

The first is visibility: your profile is either visible or invisible. The second is your online status, which you can show or hide. The third is whether the people whose profiles you open can see that you visited.

Each one works independently. A man can be visible and hide his online status, or be invisible and still look at other people's pages. Decide on each separately instead of treating privacy as one switch.

Open Data & Settings from the dropdown next to your picture, and move the green slider in the Profile Visibility section. A banner on your Home Page then tells you the profile is hidden.

That is the whole procedure, and it takes under a minute. The banner is useful as a check, because it confirms the setting took effect without making you search for a page to see whether it worked.

This is the part that surprises men. eharmony says members you have already communicated with still have access to your profile after you hide it.

A hidden profile also no longer appears in the Matches list of other members. But members who already have you in their contacts, or have added you to their favorites, can still see it.

So hiding is not the same as vanishing. If there is one woman you would rather not be seen by, switching on invisibility will not work, because you have probably already talked to her. Blocking or removing her is the tool for that, and it is a separate step.

The Visitors setting in Data & Settings lets you look at profiles without the owner learning about it. The trade is that you then also will not see which members have shown interest in your own profile.

That cost is worth weighing. A woman who opened your page is one of the warmest leads you have. The reason to see her visit is that you can write to her first. Hiding your own visits to protect your privacy means giving up that signal in return.

According to eharmony, the Basic membership lets you browse anonymously and see recent visitors to your profile. The site presents this as something even free members can use.

Because a profile is a page other members read, what goes on it is part of your result. eharmony reviews every profile picture before it appears on the site. The Basic membership shows blurred versions of other members' pictures in most cases, so a woman on a free account may be looking at a blurred version of you.

That is a useful fact when you write the page. A woman who cannot see your face clearly decides on your words, and a woman who can decides on the face and the words together. Both need something to work with.

Settings are easy to flip and easy to forget, so run through three questions first.

Who do you want to be invisible to? If the answer is one particular woman you have already spoken with, hiding will not do it. Do you want to see who is looking at you? If so, leave your visits visible, since hiding them also hides her interest from you. Do you want a break, or an exit? A hidden profile is a break. Removing contacts is closer to an exit.

Write the answers down, set the controls to match, and check the banner. Then leave it alone for a week and see whether anything changes before you adjust again.

Assume any woman who opens your page can read all of it, and write only what you would say to her face.

a dating coach's reviews of men's profiles keep landing on the same weakness. Men list their hobbies, mention their personality type, and ask what she does for fun. It reads as friendly and tells her nothing. His advice is to open with what makes you attractive and high value, add warmth after that, and give her one specific thing she can ask about.

Privacy settings protect you from the wrong audience. They do not do anything for you with the right one. Once you have the controls set the way you want them, make the page itself worth opening.