At least that's what researchers from Northwestern's Relationships Lab are saying in this article from the New York Times about how online matchmaking, not dating, sites work.

Researchers who studied online dating found that the customers typically ended up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they studied, and that those dates often ended up being huge letdowns. The people make up impossible shopping lists for what they want in a partner, says Eli Finkel, a psychologist who studies dating at Northwestern University’s Relationships Lab.

“They think they know what they want,” Dr. Finkel said. “But meeting somebody who possesses the characteristics they claim are so important is much less inspiring than they would have predicted.”

Also of interest in the article, EHarmony.com is allegedly responsible for 2% of the marriages in America last year, at least according the survey EHarmony.com comissioned. It seems that the main problem with online dating is that 1) people pick and choose potential dates on faulty criteria and 2) people project too many expectations onto others based off of intangible information (as Lux Nightmare, editor of Boinkology.com noted in this Digital Cafe segment).

 Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love from the NYT