E-Harmony: Self-Serving With A Purpose

E-Harmony markets romance and wedded bliss to single people who are looking for love online. But the problem with this is twofold. First, it gives people false expectations for their relationship and secondly, it makes people seek self-serving relationships.

Relationships are difficult because they have a good deal of gravity involved in them. What I mean by that is the exhilaration of the relationship that can bring you to the top of the mountain of bliss can also dump you in the pit of despair. Relationships are terribly fickle and don’t work many times, especially since people aren’t willing to make them work. The expectation that you would get married from signing up for E-Harmony is unrealistic.

The problem with a self-serving relationship is that when it fails to meet your needs the relationship ends. Putting your partner first and caring for him/her before yourself is not in the Hollywood vision of romance and it’s not in E-Harmony’s advertising. The site is a matchmaking service and does little to offer relationship advice. E-Harmony is the agency that provides the service and the members are the product.

I would like to say that Christian couples aren’t like those on E-Harmony, but they divorce just as much as anyone else in society. As husbands and wives or as boyfriends and girlfriends, we ought to be loving others by putting their needs before our own. Not seeking to satisfy our personal needs for love and affection, but seeking to love selflessly. For it was Christ that said, “There is no greater love than for a man to lay down his life for his friends” and that ought to be the purpose of our relationships.