Yes indeed, and I have no problem with their choice to serve only those who fit with their mission.
If they had only been honest and up front about it, and as soon as I said I was "separated" they said "sorry, we're not the dating service for you", it would have been fine! I would have respected that and moved on.
But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.
The "separated" issue makes sense because on Planet Dating "separated" can mean anything from "The divorce papers have arrived and I haven't updated my status yet" to "I'm still living in the same house as my spouse and we have sex in between rows, but I'm not sure where this is going" to "I didn't mention I was married? Oh. Well. Sorry."
But I suspect incompetence rather than malice. They simply didn't care enough - or weren't self-aware enough - to do a basic sanity check on status before onboarding. Or perhaps decided to add the check later and didn't have the spare braincells required to rearrange the onboarding sequence.
You are right, and I ran into a few of those variations including "we still live together and sleep together, but we don't feel any emotional connection any more."
And point well taken about suspecting incompetence rather than malice. Or not even incompetence. I can easily imagine some poor overworked web developer (maybe someone like me!) trying to meet their deadlines and business requirements and not even realizing that the "funnel" should have had a filter at the very top instead of waiting until the end to note the error.
This is why I try to put myself in the shoes of whoever is using my app and hopefully look at it from their perspective. I try not to just to ask myself if the interaction I'm building meets the technical requirements, but how will the person feel who is using my app?
It may have been incompetence instead of malice (eg they only implemented the marital status filter a while after designing the onboarding form). Either way that sounds really annoying, though.
> But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.
It doesn't sound like an "active lie," but more like a badly designed on-boarding form (a.k.a. a potentially innocent mistake). They should have presented the dealbreaker questions first, but they didn't.
If they had only been honest and up front about it, and as soon as I said I was "separated" they said "sorry, we're not the dating service for you", it would have been fine! I would have respected that and moved on.
But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.