What Happened to eHarmony?

Nothing that ended it. eharmony is still running: its own site offers sign-up, a free Basic membership and a paid Premium one, it has apps for iPhone and Android, and its help center is live. What has changed is who stands behind it and how it describes the way conversations begin.

If you searched this because you could not find it, or because you remembered it as a bigger name than it feels now, the answer is simple. The service has not closed. You can sign up and take the Compatibility Quiz.

eharmony says it has created over 2 million successful relationships in over 125 countries. That is the company's own claim and it does not say how it counts one, so use it as evidence the site is established, not as a prediction of your results.

eharmony is owned through ParshipMeet Group. A Business Wire press release says the group was created to manage The Meet Group and Parship Group after The Meet Group was acquired by the parent company of eharmony.

The release says ParshipMeet Group owns and operates The Meet Group's apps, including MeetMe, LOVOO, Tagged, Skout and GROWLr. It also runs the matchmaking brands eharmony, Parship and ElitePartner. It describes the Parship Group's brands as a market leader in matchmaking. Those brands focus on serious relationships and compatible connections, and they earn mostly through subscriptions.

For a man, the useful reading is that eharmony is one of several brands run by a company that earns its money from subscriptions. That is normal in dating, and it is a reason to be deliberate about what you pay for.

eharmony's matching works through a quiz and a score. You answer the quiz, and your answers are used to suggest members it thinks fit you.

That is the part that feels different from a swipe app. Instead of judging a stack of faces in seconds, you see a smaller list of people who each did the same long quiz. It is slower, and it suits a man who wants something serious more than a man who wants volume.

eharmony's help pages describe conversations starting with a Like and a personal message. Older descriptions of the site talk about sending a Smile or an Icebreaker first.

If you read a forum post or an old article that tells you to send a Smile, check it against what the site shows you now. The way to know what works is to log in and look.

The more important point does not depend on the feature. A first message that mentions something specific from her page, in a sentence or two, will beat a stock opener on any version of the site.

A man who used the site once and got little may conclude something happened to it. The usual causes are closer to home than that.

His page may be thin: photos that hide his face, one-line answers, an unfinished quiz. His preferences may be too tight, so the list near him is tiny. Or he waited for women to write first. eharmony says very specific settings can leave you with few potential matches. It names range, ethnicity, religion, smoking and drinking. The cure is to loosen the ones that do not matter to you.

That depends on what you want. If you want something serious and are willing to answer a long quiz honestly, it is a reasonable place to look. If you want fast, casual dates, a swipe app will give you more to work with in a week.

The cheap way to find out is the free Basic membership, which has no time limit and includes unlimited matches and the ability to send and receive Likes. a dating coach's rule is to test any paid feature and judge it by results. Use Basic for two or three weeks, then count the Likes that came back, the women who replied, the plans to meet and the dates that happened.

If those numbers are healthy, Premium may help you keep going. If they are zero, the next thing to fix is your photos and your first message, not the subscription.