According to WeAttract, the chances that you’ll marry a person suggested by one site — eHarmony.com — are one in 500, and it only makes an average of 1.5 recommendations a month. And there’s perhaps a 10 percent chance that you’ll find a relationship on Match.com in a year.
via Wired
UPDATE! I just checked my eHarmony account. My Closed folder has 465 pages containing 20 potential matches on each page.
Consider the obvious…
Say you’ve been invited to a party at a large
convention center. At the party there is a random collection of 5,000 single men and 5,000 single women, and they are all between the ages of 21 and 35.
What is the likelihood that every man or woman there will hook up with a compatible member of the opposite gender? Would you peg the odds at 10%?
20%? 30%? Sounds like a problem for a statistics class, but it’s much more than that.
Do the odds improve if the random collection of singles is expanded from 10,000 to 10,000,000?
I’m not a math wiz, but I would surmise the answer is NO.
So why on earth are most adults married? Because
a lot of them have obviously married the wrong person. They’ve been pressured by friends and family to “settle down”. It just isn’t realistic to expect that EVERYONE is going to find the “perfect” mate…in fact, I think it’s unrealistic for even 30% of the population to find that theoretical “Mr. Right” and “Ms. Right”. Matchmaking services such as eHarmony are selling snake oil, unrealistically raising people’s expectations.
In my own family, I have one cousin who has been married 5 times, another cousin who was married
5 times (he died at age 49 so the figure could have been higher!), and an aunt who has been married four times. Insane, isn’t it?
Relax, and look on the bright side…you haven’t yet chosen the WRONG person.
Besides, how many people can say truthfully that they’ve turned down 9300 people? 🙂