The One - Behavioural Matchmaking Experiment

Self-reported preferences are a terrible way to find a partner. I'm testing what works instead.

The Question

Every dating app asks you what you want. Tall, funny, ambitious, likes dogs. You fill in the fields and the algorithm finds someone who matches your answers.

The problem: people are bad at knowing what they want. They describe their ideal partner based on who they think they should want, not who they actually respond to.


The Experiment

The One is a behavioural matchmaking experiment. Instead of asking participants what they’re looking for, it observes how they respond - to scenarios, to tension, to ambiguity, to other people’s decision-making patterns.

The hypothesis: revealed behaviour predicts compatibility better than stated preferences. The experiment is ongoing and the dataset is growing.


Why I Built It

Partly because the problem is genuinely interesting. Partly because building it required me to think carefully about product design, survey architecture, behavioural data, and what a matchmaking system actually needs to do to work. Those are muscles worth exercising.


Current Status

Live at theone-matchmaking.netlify.app. Multiple form variants deployed. Actively collecting responses.

Join the experiment · Follow #TheOneExperiment on LinkedIn

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