Clearly this was not a prestigious or well-known professional organization; in fact, by all appearances the Brazilian Association for Interpersonal Relationship Research is a dummy organization, and its journal Interpersona is basically a vanity press for interpersonal dating researchers to get work e-published

Measures of personality were collected from a sample of married couples before they met and twice after they were married. Results showed evidence for assortative mating but not for convergence in an average couple.� As far as I could tell, the only relevance to eHarmony was that all three coauthors were employed there. This was clearly a red herring.

I then reviewed the second study (Carter and Buckwalter 2009). This piece was coauthored by Steven R. Carter and J. Galen Buckwalter (both of eHarmony; the following conflict of interest disclosure appears at the bottom of the title page: �The reader should be aware that the authors are employed by, and have a financial interest in the success of, eHarmony, Inc.�). This piece

investigates the effects of a broadly adopted online matchmaking site on the nature and quality of married couples formed. Measures of personality, emotion, interests, values, and ple of married couples who had been introduced by an online matchmaking service, and from a sample of married couples who had met through unfettered choice. Results showed that couples introduced by the online matchmaking site were more similar. . . . We conclude that online matchmaking services based on predictive inference and proscribed selection can be observed to have a significant and meaningful impact on marital quality.

In other words the eHarmony team concluded, unsurprisingly, that couples introduced through an online dating service (say, for example, eHarmony) tended to be more similar than couples who met randomly-and that this similarity would likely lead to a better or longer-lasting marriage. That was it; I read the entire study, and there was not a single word about any evidence for the claim that eHarmony is based on scientific principles, or that its much-hyped, carefully constructed �29 Dimension� questionnaires were scientifically valid.

I then became curious about the journal in which this piece appeared, Interpersona. Why were eHarmony’s top scientists publishing their research in a journal I’d never heard of? I did some research and discovered that it’s published by something called the Brazilian Association for Interpersonal Relationship Research, which I had also never heard of. I did an online search (in late 2011) and found a grand total of six hits for this organization on the World Wide Web (the Journal of the American Medical Association, by way of comparison, has nearly ten million hits). The fact that eHarmony’s top researchers published here raises serious questions.

Dr. Warren’s Research

I also searched for evidence that Neil Clark Warren, the marriage and relationship expert behind eHarmony, has created important work in, and published on the subjects of, search of several academic databases (including PsycInfo and MedLine) did not reveal a single article published by Neil Warren on the subject of marriage, compatibility, or relationships. If Warren has been researching the subject for the past thirty-five years as is claimed (�based on his 35 years of marriage counseling and studies of thousands of married couples, eHarmony founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren exhaustively researched what makes marriages succeed and fail�), why hasn’t he published it? You would expect that a scientist or researcher who has spent decades studying a topic would have published on it. (Warren is author of several books on relationships, though anyone can write a book of relationship advice.)