Women on Keeper are 1.6 times more likely than men to say that a partner’s sense of humor is a top priority. That’s 30% of women compared to 18% of men. The old advice to "make her laugh" is valid.

Women on Keeper mark a partner's ambition as a top priority at nearly 2x the rate men do. 30% vs 17%.

People on Keeper want kids less as they get older. At least our pool is beating the allegations of "the youngest generation doesn't want kids".

On Keeper, women require a college degree in a partner at nearly 2x the rate men do. 57% vs 30%.

Among users who've gone through Keeper's full preference-ranking flow, women mark a partner's finances as a top priority at nearly 4x the rate men do. 18% vs 5%.

How rare is a good match? We estimate that the chance of two random people falling in love and getting married is between 1 in 100,000 and 1 in 10 million. Your social circle gives you much better odds. Friends help filter for factors like age, values, education, and socioeconomic status. That's the only reason meeting through people ever worked. But those ways of meeting people have been fading for decades. Friends, church, community, all of it (Rosenfeld, PNAS). The farther you move away from those circles, the closer you get to the raw odds. And the raw odds are terrible.

I have a theory that anger at AI-generated content scales with how strong a sexual selection signal that content is. Most upsetting: dating profile photos and bios, music, art, long-form writing. All of these are courtship displays. Least upsetting: legal documents, code, customer support replies. Nobody cares because no one is choosing a mate based on these.

Your visual system takes in ~1 MB/second. A face judgment forms in 100 ms. A real first impression runs 3-4 minutes: ~200 MB. Knowing someone well enough to bet a life on it: hundreds of hours. Call it a terabyte. A swipe runs on a couple MB of photos and 2 KB of text. 1 TB vs. 200 MB vs. 2 MB. There's a reason swipe apps are so bad at predicting chemistry, let alone commitment.

6.3 million dating preferences on Keeper, sorted by how important users said each one was. Looks are the biggest category overall, but they're almost never must-haves. The dealbreakers are values and personality. Height and age are usually nice-to-haves.

Call it a year of dating, spending five hours a week together before deciding to get married. That adds up to around 250 hours of conversation. A swipe app grabs a few photos, applies six filters, and then suggests a match. It shouldn’t be surprising that the hit rate is so bad.

Every ethnic group in dating has the same #1 preference: itself. Keeper data, 76k single-ethnicity daters who filter by ethnicity: White 85% Hispanic 80% Black 73% East Asian 72% Mid. Eastern 71% South Asian 67% Pac. Islander 63% 7 of 8 groups show it decisively. The 8th (Am. Indian, n=291) is a coin flip with White. People assortatively mate across basically everything, including ethnicity.

Taller women demand taller men until they hit 5’10” and then the floor falls

Everything in matchmaking matters a little bit. There is no silver bullet. You make a great match by all the little things adding up.

Philosophy is as male-coded as Football. Across 4.1M listed interests on Keeper, men are 5x likelier to list Philosophy — tied with Gaming, Politics, and Football. The women's list starts at 9x (BTS, a South Korean boy band) and goes to 26x (Acrylic Nails).

Average minimum height women ask for on Keeper: 5'9" Average American man: 5'9" Oof

“The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.” - Benedict XVI

Dealbreakers are local. SF women filter out: long hair, submissive, homebodies NYC: selfish, nonchalant, mustaches, and yellow teeth LA: bad hygiene, face tattoos, narcissists (most distinctive by metro, Keeper data)

A 2000 study found that relationship quality improved when couples did activities that were new to them and spiked physiological arousal, versus comfortable date-night defaults. Optimize for novelty and adrenaline if you want a happy marriage!

A 2023 study randomly assigned newlyweds either a joint bank account or separate ones. The joint couples stayed in love. The separate couples saw their love fade much faster. Like good habits, love is built by properly structuring your environment — not just through willpower.