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A name-calling fight, complete with accusations and counter-accusations, has broken out between eHarmony.com and an offshoot of Match.com over a subject familiar to any luckless dater:
Rejection.
Chemistry.com's TV commercials and magazine ads feature young men and women wondering why their applications to join eHarmony were turned down.
The ads note that eHarmony has rejected more than one million people who are "looking for love."
No fair, says eHarmony, concerned that its rival's ads suggest that eHarmony is being arbitrary — or worse, racially and religiously discriminatory — in turning people away. It wants Chemistry.com's ads changed or dropped.
The complaint offers a glimpse into the online dating world, which has grown into a big-money business, with only a few major players.
EHarmony, based in Pasadena, Calif., says 13 million people have signed up for memberships since its inception in 2000. Dallas-based Chemistry.com, founded last year, says 2 million people have used its service.
Although some specialized services, such as the Jewish-oriented J Date, seek people from particular backgrounds, general services such as Match, Yahoo Personals and Chemistry are open to almost all adults who pay a monthly fee.
EHarmony — founded by a psychologist named Neil Clark Warren, who appears in many of the company's ads — is more selective. EHarmony, in fact, says that it has rejected about a million people since its inception.
The biggest reason for rejection, it says, is that the applicant is married. Stunningly, nearly one-third of the company's rejects (30 percent) fell into this category. Others are blocked because they're younger than the minimum application age of 21 (27 percent) or because the applicant gives inconsistent answers (9 percent), based on responses to eHarmony's 258-question application.
But eHarmony also turns people away for a more controversial reason: Being gay.
Greg Waldorf, eHarmony's chief executive, says eHarmony's matching system is based on psychological research about heterosexual relationships. Because it doesn't have similar data on gay people, he says, the company isn't confident that it can offer successful matches.
Chemistry.com on the other hand, will matches people looking for same-sex relationships.
And one Chemistry TV spot features a young black man who says that he, too, was rejected — which Waldorf says falsely implies that eHarmony rejects applicants based on race.
A Chemistry print ad shows another black model, with text that asks, "Was it my love for Buddha?" This is a particularly sensitive issue for eHarmony, which began by focusing on Christian singles. Waldorf says the "Buddha" reference could raise questions about whether eHarmony uses a religious test, which he denies.
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