How to Hide Your eHarmony Profile or Online Status

Go to Data & Settings and use the Profile Visibility slider. It makes your profile invisible to everyone except the members you have already been in contact with. The same page has sliders to hide your visits to other members' profiles and to hide your Online right now status. The catch is that turning those off also stops you from seeing your own visitors, or who else is online.

Everything lives in one place: Data & Settings. The Profile Visibility slider is the main control.

Switch it so your profile is hidden, and new people stop seeing you. The only members who can still see you are the ones you have already been in contact with. It is a slider, so you can switch it back whenever you are ready to be seen again.

That exception matters. Hiding is a way to stop new people finding you. It is not a way to disappear from the women you are already talking to.

The same page has two more sliders, and they do different jobs.

• One hides your visits to other members' profiles, so the women you look at are not shown that you stopped by.
• The other hides your Online right now status, the indicator that tells people you are on the site at this moment.

Both are useful if you like to browse quietly. Both come with a trade.

eHarmony makes these two settings work both ways. Turn off your visits and you also stop seeing who has visited you. Turn off your online status and you also stop seeing who else is online.

So before you switch them off, decide which you value more. If you like knowing who has looked at your page, keep your visits showing. If you find the green dots more distracting than useful, turning the online status off costs you very little.

Hiding your profile suits a few specific situations.

• You are taking a short break for work, travel or family, and you want to come back to the same account.
• You have been on a few dates with one woman and want to give it a fair chance before you meet anyone else.
• Someone you know, a coworker or a friend of a friend, keeps turning up, and you would rather they did not.
• You want to rework your page properly without new women seeing it half-finished.

That last reason is the one most men overlook.

Hiding does not help in one case: when you want to hide because nobody is writing back. Going invisible feels like a rest, but it changes nothing about why the page was not working. If that is where you are, hide for a reason, which is to fix the page, and come back when it is fixed.

Most men edit their page in public, one small change at a time, while new women keep seeing each rough version. Hiding lets you take the page down, fix it properly, and come back with the finished one.

Start with the photos, because they are judged harshly. A woman tends to believe your worst photo, on the assumption that it shows what you really look like. Cut anything blurry, anything old, and anything full of friends. Lead with a clear, recent photo of your face where you look relaxed. Add a full-length shot and a few that show how you actually spend your time.

Then the words. Replace the list of adjectives most men write, the "loyal, funny, loves to travel" kind, with specific details. Say what you do on a Sunday, what you are cooking at the moment, or the small opinion you will argue for at dinner. Specific lines give a woman a picture of you and something easy to write about.

When the page reads like you on a good day, switch visibility back on.

Since members you have been in contact with can still see you, hiding does not end your current conversations. It also does not answer them.

Before you step back, reply to anyone who is waiting on you. If you like a woman and you are going quiet for a while, tell her. A short message saying you are away until the end of the month and would like to take her for a drink when you are back keeps the door open. A woman who hears nothing for two weeks usually assumes you lost interest.

When you are ready, move the Profile Visibility slider back and you are findable again. If you used the time well, you come back with a stronger page than the one you hid, which is the best way to return to any dating site.