Is eHarmony Legit?

Yes, in the ordinary sense. It is a real dating site and app with a Basic membership that costs nothing, a paid tier you can see before you buy, and a short video selfie it uses to check members. It cannot promise that every account is real, and no dating site can. Legit does not mean perfect, so judge it on three questions: how it handles your money, how it handles safety, and whether the women answer.

Men type this question for different reasons. Some fear losing money, some fear scammers, and some want to know whether the women there are real.

Those are three different questions with three different answers. A site can bill clearly and still have a few fake accounts. It can be full of real women and still renew your term when you did not expect it. So take each one separately.

eHarmony describes a membership of millions of relationship-minded singles. It also says it has created more than two million relationships in over a hundred countries since it launched.

Those are the company's own claims, and nobody outside it can check them. They tell you it is a large, established site, not a pop-up. They do not give you a member count, and anyone quoting an exact number of users is guessing.

Joining as a Basic member is free. You can take the Compatibility Quiz, browse members and send the first likes and opening messages without entering a card.

The paid tier adds unlimited messaging, every photo and who has viewed your page. It is sold in multi-month terms that renew automatically unless you cancel before the term ends. eHarmony does not put exact prices in its FAQ. You see them inside the app or on the subscription page once you are logged in.

That is where most of the angry stories come from. Not fraud, but a long term and a renewal that nobody noticed. Put the end date in your calendar the day you pay, and you remove most of the risk.

eHarmony describes an authenticity check. It is a short video selfie that shows you are a real, live person, compares your face with your photos and checks that the photos have not been altered.

That makes a stolen-photo account hard to run, which is the most common fake. It does not cover everything. A real woman can still lie about her age or why she is there, and the check does not make her safe to meet.

You can also block and report anyone who makes you uncomfortable.

This is the question with no clean answer, because no site publishes a count of fake accounts.

You can judge it yourself in a few messages. A real woman answers the thing you asked, in a way that shows she read it. A fake replies in a general line that would fit any man, at all hours, and pays you compliments while telling you nothing about her day. A real woman agrees to a short call. A fake finds a reason not to.

Never send money, a gift card or financial details to anyone you have not met. A request for money in the first days is the clearest stop sign there is.

You may be tempted to read what men say online and settle it that way. Treat those posts as stories, not as a count. Each one describes one man, in one city, in one month.

a dating coach's point about apps applies here. Results depend on the app, your city and what you bring to it, and a man can do badly on one and well on another. So the posts tell you what happened to one man. They cannot tell you what will happen to you.

Start with the free membership. Answer the quiz as you are, add clear daylight photos, and write two or three sentences for each question. Look at who the site shows you for a week.

Ask yourself four things. Do the women have real, filled-in pages? Do some of them reply? Do the replies sound like people? Does a short call or a drink come out of one of them? If yes, the site is legit for your purposes, and you can decide about paying with evidence.

If the pages look thin and nobody answers, you have lost a week and spent nothing.

Move to a plan within a handful of messages, and ask for a short call before a first date. When you meet, choose a public place near your home, tell a friend where you are and keep it to a drink or a coffee. Those habits settle the question about whether a particular woman is real better than any badge.