"Long-lasting" is an adjective that could be applied to the eHarmony Personality Profile, which I had plenty of time to fill out while waiting weeks to hear back from Warren. The 436-question test was a mix of multiple-choice, free-form and true-or-false questions about me and the man I hope to meet. When I was finished, I received a long evaluation telling me that I have a strong sense of humor, am optimistic, verbal and "may sometimes talk too much." Accurate. Though I couldn't help noticing that these were the qualities I had ascribed to myself by answering hundreds of questions. After 436 queries, I had clearly hoped that the eHarmony compatibility algorithm whatnots would be able to present me with driving directions to the home of my future Prince Charming. It was a little deflating when they simply informed me that I crave "excitement and a variety of activities."

Soon after I got my profile, I began receiving matches, without having coughed up a single cent. I couldn't communicate with them without paying, but I could check out their online profiles. Phillip from New York was "enthusiastic about activities and planning." A perfect match! No, seriously. The last book he'd read was "The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian," which he enjoyed because he "loved the 'primal' feeling of the narratives!" Eh. Shero from Kansas (I never figured out how to control the geography of my matches) wrote in his profile that, "family is a word that means security and happiness to me. Hence, I won't be enjoying going out, partying, watching TV or sports unless my family is with me." Next!

Then there was Curtis from Kansas, who wrote that the one thing that is most important to him is: "Romance and Jimmy Buffett ... I find romance in so many things, and when I taste it I want more. Then there is Jimmy Buffett. I love to go to his concerts. I do every year, and usually wear a straw hat with a 4-foot inflatable shark on it." The last book Curtis read? "A Salty Piece of Land." By Jimmy Buffett.

This is why I am not cut out for online dating. If I happen to fall in love with someone only to discover he's a parrot-head, I will learn to live with it. To know it from the get-go ... well, to be frank, it's going to hinder my ability to fall in love.

But I wasn't as interested in whether my matches had a thing for Buffett so much as whether they had a thing for Jesus. Since one of the popular urban legends about eHarmony is that if you reveal in your profile that you don't regularly attend church or aren't Christian, you won't get any matches. It's true that about a dozen of the Personality Profile questions touched on faith, but they were nondenominational. I was asked to identify myself as "Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Shinto, Other, Spiritual but not affiliated with a religious group, or neither religious nor spiritual." I admitted I was not affiliated with any religious group and didn't attend religious services. I wrote that faith was not an important part of my life and that the religious affiliation of my matches didn't matter. In short, I was honest, but checked off all the "wrong" boxes. I got more than 20 matches anyway.

Yet there were undertones that were hard to miss. Two of my matches "closed" our connection -- sending the message that they weren't interested in hearing from me based on what they saw in my profile. One, Aaron from Florida, wrote that "the physical distance between us is too great." But his profile revealed that his pastor is the most influential person in his life and that God is one of the things he can't live without. Mark, from Ohio, didn't offer a reason as to why he was closing our match, but according to his profile, God is one of the three things he is most thankful for, and one of the five things he can't live without.

"We never had the desire to be a Christian dating site," said Warren. But there's a reason that Christians have done better than others at eHarmony. The company did not advertise for its first two years, leaving word of its existence to spread through the Christian community where Warren was best known. "I knew quite a few people in the Christian world and I would take any opportunity I could to get on television," said Warren of the early days. In addition to appearances on secular shows like "Politically Incorrect" and "Oprah," Warren also did time on Christian airwaves. "I was on every program I could get on; it just happened that I could get on more Christian programs," he said. Warren said that when 10 eHarmony couples were featured on the "Focus on the Family" radio program in 2002, the company got 100,000 new registrants -- producing far better odds for those who had accepted Christ to find like-minded singles. It's not that eHarmony was "restricted" in the country club sense of the word. But it was definitely self-selected.

That seems to be changing with the ubiquitous eHarmony television and radio campaign. According to Warren, the company spent $50 million on national advertising last year and is headed toward $80 million this year. The numbers of non-Christians now aware of the site make it less and less of a conservative, faith-based pool. Some of the eHarmony users interviewed for this article acknowledged that their group of matches had tilted to the political right, but many told stories of having been matched with secular liberals, artists, stoners, organic farmers. None of those interviewed considered themselves religious, and none cared that eHarmony's founder had an evangelical background ... as long as it didn't have an impact on the site.

During the course of our conversation, Warren peppered me with questions about my family and did a little diagnosis on my own love life. When he discovered that I am single at 30, Warren surprised me. I figured that a religious man -- who runs a pro-marriage matchmaking site no less -- would tell me to get a move on. But he didn't. Instead, he urged me to wait until I found my perfect match. "I can tell you," said Warren, sounding very sad as he recalled counseling couples who hit and spit at each other in his office, "that it is just awful to be in a bad marriage." He asked about my family, and I told him that my parents were about to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. He immediately asked, "Do they like each other?" Yes, I responded, very much. "Well there you have it. I can tell you that that's the most important thing they ever gave you," he said. Warren believes that parents who are actively engaged in their own relationship give their children the best chance for future happiness.

It sounds like the kind of family-values claptrap I tend to summarily reject. Kids who grow up with unhappily married or single parents have happy lives, too. Maybe they develop different kinds of emotional muscles than I have, but who's to say that's a disadvantage?

Yet I found myself agreeing with Warren that if parents are married, then ideally their marriages would be about intellectual and sexual and social companionship with each other and not simply about kids or money or vows or other ties keeping them together for the sake of being together. That doesn't seem a bad dynamic to celebrate. And that's what Warren was saying. He was comparing his 70-year-married folks to my 40-year-married folks and admitting that I had gotten the better deal. For Warren, matchmaking seems not to be about marriage for the sake of marriage (or for the sake of church and country), but about the quality of the unions we form.

I was wondering if faith -- Christian faith -- plays a crucial role in Warren's estimation of a good marriage when -- boom -- he asked me about my religious background. When I told him about my Baptist mom, Jewish dad and Quaker education, he was interested, and told a story about visiting a Quaker meetinghouse in Princeton while he was a theology student there. But then he asked, "Has your mom maintained any of her background?" No, I said. "That's too bad," Warren replied. He didn't ask about my dad.

As for my romantic prospects, Warren had some grim news. He said that because I was bright, I "lose at least 95 percent of candidates because of IQ." Great. Apparently, I also need someone articulate, ambitious and energetic. In short, as Warren said, I am "looking for a rare, rare, rare person." He laughed when I told him that I had received more than 20 matches but that only a couple sounded even remotely appealing. "Well, you'd be lucky if you found one in that batch," he said, adding that one is all I need. When I asked if he had a guess as to why most of my matches had been Chinese or Indian, he surmised it was because I had checked that racial difference didn't matter to me. Then he offered this advice: "I would say that if indeed racial things are not a big issue -- and frankly they would not be for me -- then I can tell you that there are so many great qualities to Asian people and I would be looking at Asians. I don't know why you were matched with mostly Asians, but I do know that some of the really strong people in this country who are available and smart and quite Internet savvy are Asians."

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