AD CAMPAIGN THREATENS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TWO ONLINE DATING SERVICES

You think the dating scene can be cold and unforgiving? It may not be half as frosty as the tempestuous relationship between two of the biggest players in the online dating business.

A name-calling catfight, complete with accusations and counteraccusations, has broken out between eHarmony and an offshoot of Match.com about a subject familiar to any luckless dater: rejection.

In its latest ad campaign, online matchmaker Chemistry.com shows no love for eHarmony, its older and larger competitor. Chemistry.com’s TV commercials and magazine ads feature young men and women wondering why their applications to join eHarmony were turned down.

“I mean, I am a good person. Right?” asks an actress in one of the TV spots, as a giant red “Rejected by eHarmony” graphic slams onto the screen. The ads note that eHarmony has rejected more than 1 million people who are “looking for love.”

No fair, says eHarmony, concerned that its rival’s ads suggest that eHarmony is being arbitrary — or worse, discriminatory — in turning people away. It wants Chemistry.com’s ads changed or dropped.

To that end, the company’s outside legal counsel, Lanny Davis (who spun the media for President Bill Clinton during his “relationship problems” with Monica Lewinsky), recently asked NBC and People magazine to stop running the ads, or at least insist on some fine-print qualifiers about what “1 million rejected” really means.

The complaint offers a glimpse into the online dating world, which has grown in just a few years into a bigmoney business with tens of millions of participants.

Privately owned eHarmony says more than 13 million people have signed up for memberships since its inception in 2000. Dallas-based Chemistry.com, founded last year, is a fastgrowing upstart that says 2 million people have used its service. It is part of IAC/Interactive Corp., which had $6 billion in sales last year and which also owns dating industry leader Match. com, as well as Ticketmaster, HSN (formerly Home Shopping Network) and the search engine Ask.com.

Although some specialized services, such as the Jewish-oriented JDate, seek people from particular backgrounds, general services such as Match.com, Yahoo! Personals and Chemistry.com are open to almost all adults who apply and pay a monthly fee.

EHarmony — founded by a clinical psychologist named Neil Clark Warren, who appears in many of the company’s ads — is more selective. The company acknowledges that it routinely rejects certain types of people.

EHarmony, in fact, says that it has rejected about a million people since its inception. But the company insists that the reasons aren’t arbitrary, that it has never collected any fees from those it rejected and that Chemistry.com is trying to suggest otherwise.

The biggest reason for rejection, it says, is that the applicant is married. Stunningly, 30 percent of the company’s rejects fell into that category. Others are blocked because they’re younger than the minimum application age of 21 (27 percent) or because the applicant gives inconsistent answers (9 percent), based on responses to eHarmony’s 258-question application.

“We were founded with the mission to find happy, lasting relationships for people,” Greg Waldorf, eHarmony’s chief executive, said. “It pains me that we’re being put down or criticized for ensuring that we’re doing the best job possible for our members.”

But eHarmony also turns people away for more controversial reasons. One is being gay. Waldorf says eHarmony’s matching system is based on psychological research about heterosexual relationships. Because it doesn’t have similar data on gay people, he says, the company isn’t confident that it can offer successful matches to same-sex couples. “I’m not saying anything precludes us from going into the same-sex market in the future,” he said. Chemistry.com, on the other hand, matches people looking for same-sex relationships.

Chemistry.com says its ads are designed simply to highlight differences between it and eHarmony. “We’re saying, ‘We’re a very accepting, nonjudgmental’” service, said Mandy Ginsberg, Chemistry.com’s general manager.