Online Dating Blog

If you are using eHarmony, you’ll know that as a part of your profile you fill our your “Must Haves” and your “Can’t Stands”. At the risk of stating the obvious for those not familiar, “Must Haves” are the features you expect your match to have while your “Can’t Stands” are the qualities you don’t want your match to have.

These different qualities are used early in the communication process at eHarmony to either help you eliminate potential bad matches or offer encouragement that you should continue to communicate with your match.

Photo by Katie Tegtmeyer

Recently, eHarmony released their top 10 “Can’t Stands” for women using their service. You can check out their full breakdown of these different areas here but a quick breakdown of the list is as follows:

10. Forgetful/inconsistent
9. Lazy
8. Illegal Drug Use
7. Anger/Loses Control
6. Messy
5. Deviousness/Drama
4. Cheating
3. Being Mean
2. Manipulate or Takes Advantage of Others
1. Lying

Thoughts on the List

My first thought is that I’m surprised to see cheating come in at #4. Lying makes sense at #1, and in a lot of ways, cheating is just another form of lying. That said, I’m surprised to see the suggestion that more women dislike being mean than cheating. I guess in my mind cheating would be on everyone’s “Can’t Stand” list!

Other than that, the list makes sense. Still, I remember when I was using eHarmony always thinking to myself, “Who’s going to admit to being a cheater or a liar or whatever?” It’s not like we’re going to find people listing those qualities in their profile!

Lying is the worst of all. Everyone is going to say they aren’t liars: the honest ones will be telling the truth and the liars will be lying…but everyone will give the same answer. So the one area that is hated the most is the toughest to detect! Go figure.

I always felt like the “Must Haves” worked better because you could compare your “Must Haves” with theirs. The closer you match in these areas, the better.