The Chemistry.com Experiment

I saw those really catchy ads (see below) on television how people were rejected by eHarmony for what ever reason. Someone I know told me and a few others about a personality test that Chemistry.com uses to help match people. It piqued my interest and I decided to sign up and give it a try. I was/am not looking for someone to date, so it was more for informational purposes. Really ... it was for research. Shut up!


After 30 minutes of answering questions, setting my preferences and taking a couple of tests, Here's what I learned about myself:

You are a NEGOTIATOR/builder:

You care about the big picture. You are comfortable with large, ambiguous issues. You carefully weigh all of the variables involved, and regularly come up with imaginative solutions to complex problems.

You are friendly and humane. You have a big heart; you tend to trust people and sympathize with them easily. You want to make others happy and self-confident. So you work to build supportive networks among friends and kin.

Your empathy and kindness spill over into a desire to make the world a better place. And with your resilience and creativity, your ability to do many things at the same time, and your cleverness with words, you can be remarkably effective at improving the lives of others.

You are ambitious for your family and friends, but not always for yourself. You like an environment of sharing and consensus and you enjoy working in teams and planning long term.

You tend to be socially well-adjusted and skilled at inspiring others to reach their goals. So you are an empathetic and engaging companion.

I tend to agree with their assessment ... except for being socially well-adjusted, because I am damn near afraid of conversing with new people. I have come a long way since my move from NY to TX, but I am still a work in progress. I decided to give the website 2 weeks to see if would accurate in finding a potential match for me. The results were not great.

The site sends you 5 matches per day and you have to decide whether you have "no interest" or a "high interest" in the people that are chosen for you. If you have an abundance of "no interest" in the selections the system is suppose to automatically adjust to find more suitable matches. In theory that sounds great, but it never actually worked for me. All my matches were not looking for someone like me, mainly Black males. I was frequently matched up with people looking for every other race besides "Black or African-American." I wondered why I was being matched up with someone who isn't looking for my ethnic background, so I decided to send a message to Chemistry.com's customer service.

I signed up on June 2, 2007 and I have a question regarding the potential matches. Is there a reason why I am being matched with people not looking for my ethnic group? With numerous pages of questions to survey my personality to find a compatible match, the majority of the matches sent to me are not looking for African-American males. I know it may seem discriminatory, but why can't these people be removed from my matches?

A day later, this I got this email in response to my inquiry:

Thanks for your question about matching at Chemistry. We hope that this email gives you the information you need.

How does advanced matching work? Our system uses two criteria in selecting matches for you: personality type and matching preferences.

Personality type: We look for members whose personality types are compatible with your own.

Matching preferences:Our system also considers your preferences regarding age, location, ethnicity, etc.

Each match is a combination of these two criteria: some matches will be of a highly compatible personality type but may not meet all of your preferences, while others will meet all your preferences but their personality type may not be the most compatible with yours.

Learning about you along the way. Our system learns about you through your feedback as you use the site and refines the matching criteria over time to bring you more of the matches you like.

Want to adjust your matching criteria? Click Chemistry to return to the site and change your preferences.

So I guess Chemistry.com is all about personality and doesn't really factor in race, which as much as we try to be PC, is a big factor in find someone to date. For me, I don't care about a person's ethnic background, but some people do. The email suggested that I change my settings to fix my problem, but there is no option to only find matches looking for your ethnic background. You can only select the ethnicities you are looking for, but not the other way around.

Does the mean the site is worthless?

Not necessarily because from the matches that were gathered I was interested in about 30% of them, so it worked in that respect. But those I were interested in were not be interested in my ethnic background. I think the system for selecting matches should be adjusted to only gather results from the user defined ethnic groups, and then further match the results based on personality. It could only bolster the companies success because people are getting what they want.

In my case, I think the current system doesn't work for me because of my location. I am an area where White men are looking for Latino or other White men; Latino men are looking for White or other Latino men; and the majority of Black men are looking for White or Latino men. If I were in Atlanta, DC/Maryland, or NYC areas I the people whom I am matched with would be more suited for me. I could test this theory but creating other account in different areas of the US ... but I don't want waste anyone time ... and I am lazy, so forget it.

If anyone reading has used or is using Chemistry.com: what is/was your experience?

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