Keeper

Engineering love at first match. 1 in 10 today.
Dating apps: 1 in 10,000.

[Keeper @KeeperAI]

Finding someone to marry is harder than ever.

We used to marry for practical reasons and grow into love. Now we hold out for a soulmate.

That’s good! Marriages today are much happier. But soulmates are extraordinarily rare, and too many people are struggling to find theirs.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

Keeper is still low n. We haven’t hit the automation level required to clear our quality bar at scale, so the median user today is just sitting on a waitlist. Unlike all of our competitors, we won’t offer a match we don’t believe can lead to marriage.

This approach has challenges. It’s harder to generate short-term revenue. It’s harder to fundraise. It gives more ammo to our critics. But we believe it’s the right thing to do, and the only approach that works over the long term.

Same vision since day one. The hard part hasn’t been knowing what to build, it’s building it. The problem is deceptively complex, which is exactly why no one’s solved it yet.

We get closer every day, and I believe we’ll be there by end of year.

When we do make a match offer, our historical hit rate says you’re 50,000x more likely to marry that person than anyone the swipe apps ever put in front of you. Soon we’ll be able to offer that quality of match at a reasonable price to everyone on earth.

[Wes Myers (itl) @realwesmyers]

I've had success on every dating app. But only on Bumble have I met more serious girlfriends.

The reason is that I'm too good at talking to women.

On Hinge I can cold-message girls I have no business with and talk my way into the date. Bumble's mandatory double opt-in means she has to want me before I get to say a word. It filters out the ones I'd have just talked into it.

[Wes Myers (itl) @realwesmyers]

Looksmaxing is what you get when every other way for a man to prove himself is taken away.

Women cover their own costs now, so income is table stakes, not a differentiator. Costly signals, like homeownership, are out of reach for the median guy. So the status competition relocated.

Except where income rewards effort and compounds over time, looks are genetic, peak early, and only depreciate. Men traded a game we could grind for one most of us can't win.

[Wes Myers (itl) @realwesmyers]

Thursday is the best night for a first date.

It's close enough to the weekend that if the date is going well, it doesn't have to end. It can run long, and "what are you doing this weekend," can lead naturally to a quick second date.

But it's still a weeknight, so a bad date can end on its own. "I have an early start tomorrow" is true. Nobody has to invent a reason to leave.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

Couples who idealize each other a little, who see their partner as somewhat better than the partner sees himself, stay together longer and report more satisfaction over time. Not delusion. A small, generous overestimation. The people who see their partner with perfect accuracy do worse.

(Murray, Holmes & Griffin, 1996, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

The case against marriage is always made by pointing at bad marriages, which is like making the case against surgery by pointing at the ones that killed someone. A good one is among the best things that happen to a person and a bad one among the worst. The entire game is getting the match right, not avoiding the category.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

There's a finding called the Michelangelo phenomenon: the right partner sculpts you toward the person you were already trying to become. Not who they want you to be, who you aspired to be. A good marriage isn't two finished people. It's two people drawing the ideal self out of each other.

(Drigotas, Rusbult, Wieselquist & Whitton, 1999, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

There's a specific grief in realizing the person you'd have been happiest with is statistically out there and you will simply never be introduced. No app surfaced them. No friend connected you. No structure existed to cross your paths.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

Arranged marriages get mocked in the West, but strip away the coercion and what's left is a good idea: that people who know you well, and who are accountable for the outcome, can help you make a better choice than your own dopamine does at 11pm on a Saturday. The coercion was the problem. The intermediary wasn't.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

good marriage > committed partnership > happy single > unhappy single > bad marriage

Worth repeating because society has forgotten that a good marriage is the best outcome, not a tie with the alternatives. It's the ideal.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

We have the self-reported height of 30,000+ men.
Nobody is 5'11".

Every guy who's 5'11" quietly rounds up to 6'0" and you can see the exact bar where the lie happens 👇

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

A happy marriage and kids who turn out well is the one form of success you can't buy or fake and the one that almost everyone, in private, at the end, counts as the real scoreboard.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

"Men date with their eyes, women date with their standards."

We pulled the real non-negotiables from 80,000 daters. mostly wrong.

Women hard-reject on looks just as often (30% vs 32%). but men are 12x more likely to make AGE a dealbreaker.

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

"We just grew apart" is the polite version of "we never built anything sturdy enough to hold us together."

[Jake Kozloski @jakozloski]

Married couples can take more career risk, not less. With a partner covering the downside, you can quit to start a company, take the lower-salary higher-upside job, or go back to school. The single person has no safety net and is forced to play it safe. One more reason to marry early.

[Chris Williamson @ChrisWillx]

A matchmaking service ran a survey.

Asked if they'd marry "down" on three axes, women say no far more than men, every time:

“Earns less” — women 12x more likely to refuse.

“Less intelligent” — 6x.

“Less educated” — 4x.

“Marrying down" is a near-dealbreaker for women and a non-issue for men.

Consistent across all three. — @jakozloski, KeeperAI

[Wes Myers (itl) @realwesmyers]

Saying "I love deep conversations" on any dating platform is a huge midwit tell. Nobody having truly deep conversations stops to say to themselves "wow, this is a deep conversation."

[Wes Myers (itl) @realwesmyers]

Women get told to test a man to see if he can handle them. But a man who's good at handling problems got there by refusing to take on problems he doesn't have to. Your test is the problem. He'll solve it by removing you from his life.

[Wes Myers (itl) @realwesmyers]

Top 10 favorite dealbreakers I've seen listed by men on Keeper:

10. She has dreads but no piercings
9. She posts on IG every time she cooks alfredo pasta
8. Most of her exes are ESL
7. She has no tattoos but goes to festivals
6. She wears primarily Converse
5. Her mom is her best friend
4. Her ride or die is a career waitress
3. She has dated a man with a hard part
2. She's a beer girl
1. She has braces in her late 20's and several Jason Voorhees tattoos

[Wes Myers (itl) @realwesmyers]

"I have high standards" is often just a way to never risk getting rejected. Someone with real standards knows what they want and is happy when they find it. The picky ones never are. They find a dealbreaker in everyone, fast, and it's always something different. They reject first so nobody can reject them.