How to Get More Matches on eHarmony

Widen your Member Preferences. eHarmony's own advice is to click the Members tab, open Member Preferences, and loosen factors like age, location and height. It also warns that narrow settings for geographic range, ethnicity, religion, smoking or drinking can leave you with only a small number of potential matches.

Log in, click the Members tab, and open Member Preferences. That page holds the settings that decide which women eHarmony can suggest to you at all.

Most men fill these in once, on the night they sign up, and never look at them again. Ten minutes of choices made in a hurry then decide the size of your pool for months. So open the page and read every setting as if a friend had filled it in for you, and you are checking his work.

Look again every few months as well. A setting that made sense when you signed up, like a tight distance before you moved across town, can go stale without you noticing.

eHarmony names the ones to watch: geographic range, ethnicity, religion, smoking and drinking. Each one on its own sounds reasonable. Stacked together, they multiply.

Picture a man who wants a woman who lives close by, shares his faith, never smokes and barely drinks. He has picked four things that each sound sensible. Together they can leave him with a handful of women. Then he decides eHarmony does not work, when the site was doing exactly what he told it to do.

Some of these settings are real deal-breakers for you, and that is your call to make. If you would never date a smoker, keep that setting where it is.

The work is being honest about which ones are genuine. Go down the list and ask of each one: if a woman were great in every other way, would this alone make me say no? If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is probably not, loosen it. You will usually find a setting or two that is really a preference dressed up as a rule.

Drinking is a good example. A man who barely drinks may have ticked the strictest option on reflex, when what he actually wants is a woman who is happy with one glass of wine at dinner. That is a much bigger group, and he was hiding from most of it.

Age is the setting men tighten most without thinking. a dating coach once worked with a client who wanted a range only a few years wide, all in the late twenties. coach told him it made no sense. The client would happily have dated a mature woman a year below his lower limit or a gorgeous one a year above his upper limit, and his own setting was hiding both of them.

Set your range to the ages you would genuinely enjoy taking to dinner, not the ages you picture when you daydream. Then add a year or two at each end. You still choose who you write to. A wider range only means the women worth writing to can reach you.

Height and location work the same way. If you would drive forty minutes for a great first date, your distance setting should say so.

Widening your settings puts more women in front of you. It does not make any of them write back. That part is still on you.

When a suggested partner looks promising, write to her soon, and make it about her. Pick one specific thing from her photos or her answers and ask about it. A short, specific note almost always beats a long, generic one. It shows you actually read her page, and it gives her something easy to answer.

A bigger pool also means more women looking at your photos and your written answers, so those need to hold up.

Lead with a clear, current photo of your face. Then read what you wrote as a stranger would. Nothing negative, nothing needy, and nothing so general that it could describe any man on the site. My test is whether she can picture it. "I like the outdoors" gives her nothing to picture. "Most Sundays I am on a trail by eight and eating pancakes by eleven" gives her a scene, and an easy question to ask you.

Get the settings wide and the page sharp, and the extra suggested partners stop being a number on a screen. They start turning into conversations, and some of those conversations turn into dates.