I broke down and figured I'd give eHarmony a chance to augment my pool of potential dates.
Results are generally... interesting. I've met a couple of people in person already, and I'm at the "open communication" stage with a bunch of others.
eHarmony is no magic bullet. It's not going to magically find your soul mate and send out your wedding invitations. However, I've found that I can trust it this far at least - it's only paired me up with people who are at least intelligent, likable, and generally worth talking to, even if there's no immediate chemistry or romantic vibe going on. This alone is a pretty big step up over relying on random in-person encounters, which seem to have a much lower success rate.
My general strategy has been to meet people in person ASAP if they seem to have any interest at all in doing so. I don't trust the internet with this sort of thing - I know I'm MUCH more eloquent when I'm sending emails than when I'm sitting there in person, so I tend to expect the same in return.
I have a feeling that my personality profile is not strongly typed AT ALL, as it has usually been in most Myers-Briggs tests I've taken, and I'm getting matched up with DOZENS of women (where most of the women I've talked to have been provided MANY fewer matches, and men on message boards I frequent have sometimes been classified as "unmatchable"). My guess is that landing in the middle has opened up matches on all sides of the spectrum, and that can't be a bad thing. Being weakly typed has always meant I've been a sort of wishy-washy person with fickle interests - I almost always end up with INFP, but other than N all the letters are so weak as to be almost meaningless. To a large extent, who I am and how I act is always defined by the people I'm around, and while that generally means I'm well liked it also means I don't leave much of an impression or stand out particularly in anybody's mind. This has always been my weakness with women - they don't want a person like that, they want somebody who will take command of a situation and impose his will upon it. That's just not me...
I forgot how expensive dating was. I've already blown the $140 I won playing poker on Friday - hey guys, at least your cash is going to a worthy cause!