If you’ve watched TV in the past year, you’ve seen commercials and infomercials that feature bizarrely happy people who were brought together by the awesome power of Dr. Neil Clark Warren’s 29 dimensions. Raw animal magnetism and trial and error are a thing of the past when you can pay $50 a month to let eHarmony find a permanent spouse for you. eHarmony is the fastest growing internet dating service, claiming more marriages than any other personals web site. However, a week long search didn’t lead me to a single human who would admit to looking for a wife on the Internet.

So I signed up myself.

For 45 minutes I enthusiastically answered questions about my emotional temperament and relationship skills. Some of the questions I found disturbing, such as the option to exclude specific races and religions from your search. Or how the very first question’s only options for sexual orientation are “man seeking woman” or “woman seeking man.”

According to eHarmony, I am a marriage reject. The site did not return any matches, of any race or religion, anywhere in the world.

Instead of a potential husband I got a personality profile that told me insightful things about myself. Apparently I am “excellent at listening to the concerns and ideas of others.” And I may want “time and opportunity to weigh pros and cons of decisions.”

eHarmony went on to assure me that it wasn’t me and this sort of thing happens to 20% of the people who apply. I later discovered they screen out clients who are separated, depressed, or are emotionally unbalanced.

This can be a good thing in the shadowy world of online dating, but probably not such a good sign for me.

A competing site, Match.com, was taken to court for fraud in November, according to Reuters. Customers accused the site of hiring attractive people to go on dates so customers would keep their subscription and tell their friends. Yahoo! Personals has been accused of fabricating profiles to make their site seem like it has more appealing users.

Instead of selling their service with fake dates, eHarmony appears to filter out any users who may fall outside the category of “normal.” eHarmony’s target audience is very traditional, middle-aged heterosexuals. And when everyone using the service is already very conventional, it seems to be a lot easier to match similar personalities.

There’s not really anything wrong with looking for a spouse on the Internet if you’ve exhausted all of the other options, such as actual human interaction. If the only way you can be happy is with someone identical to yourself, eHarmony may be the place for you.