A Funny Thing Happened...

You all know my horror stories and disappointment with match.com. Well, this past weekend, eharmony.com sent me an email offering me a great deal on 3 months of membership. Never one to turn down a great deal on an online dating service (???), I whipped out the credit card and signed up.

For those of you not in the know, eharmony is famous for it's "29 dimensions of compatability" where you take a rediculously long personality test, and then it matches you with people who are supposed to be good personality matches for you. Well, ok, it's not quite that simple:

1. Answer a whole lot of questions about yourself that are used to determine your personality
2. Answer some more questions about yourself
3. Pay eharmony
4. Receive multpile matches in your inbox
5. Read through the profiles of matches that you have and see if anyone sounds interesting
6. (this is where it starts getting funny) IF you're interested, choose 5 multiple choice questions from a list of about 50 and send them to the person you're interested in.
7. Wait for response.
8. Receive response from person, along with his 5 multiple choice questions.
9. Respond to his multple choice questions.
10. IF he decides you sound interesting, then he sends you his must-haves and can't-stands.
11. Send him your must-haves and can't-stands.
12. Wait.
13. IF he decides you still sound interesting, he'll send you three open-ended questions.
14. Answer questions, and send back 3 open-ended questions for him to answer.
15. Only THEN can you begin "open communication" and talk/email freely without this strange facilitated process.

The whole experience is quite funny.

"So where does the duct tape come in?" you might ask.

Well, you see, some of the questions you have to fill out at the beginning are questions whose answers are displayed on your personal profile that potential suitors see. There are questions like "what are you most passionate about" and "what are you most thankful for?" and sometimes they have you write your own answer and sometimes you have to choose from their check-box answers.

One of the questions is "What are 5 things you can't live without?"

I was struggling to answer this question (is there truly anything I can't live without?). So I came up with a mixed list - friends & family, my space heater (since my room has no heat), Trader Joe's Peppermint Joe-Joes, and vacations were all relatively easy ones to think of, but I was left with one blank. A friend in town from Vermont was reading over my shoulder and said, "duct tape" with such an "of course!" tone to his voice that I immediatly typed it in and hit "save."

Here's the thing: without fail, EVERY person has asked me about why "duct tape" made the list. And they're all expecting a great answer. And I can't really tell them that it was because a friend said it and I just wanted to be done with the survey...