One of the most basic questions we ask as human beings is what makes us fall or stay in love. Why do we feel chemistry with some people but not others, and why do some relationships succeed while others fail? Our society offers contradictory answers. Do opposites attract, or do birds of a feather flock together? Does absence make the heart grow fonder or is it out of sight, out of mind? No one person can ever answer these questions. Even hundreds or thousands of people sharing their experiences cannot answer them, because each person’s story is inevitably fragmentary, selective, and one-sided.
We went into relationship science because we believe that questions about falling or staying in love are not just for poets and philosophers—they can be answered through science. For the past two decades, we’ve been trying to answer these questions using traditional research methods in psychology and sociology. We learned a lot, but it wasn’t enough. What we realized is that the answers to these questions lay beyond the bounds of existing social science. What we needed was to understand the entire life of a relationship, from its earliest origins to final conclusion.
Online dating apps – the most popular way people meet their partners nowadays – record every search, swipe, and message people send on their platforms. This is the most comprehensive data available on the development of romantic connections. But dating companies are not run by scientists; they are for-profit corporations with a very different incentive structure. While many dating companies have their own research units, they are situated within a corporation and not accountable to the broader scientific community. Aside from all that: they are focused on the dating stage; we want to continue following people even after they form relationships.
So, what’s the solution? Scientists don’t build dating apps and then track people over time… or do they? The prospect felt daunting; we love our day jobs, and – let’s face it! – we’re a lab group, not a large company. But building our own app would allow us to feed the science directly back into app development. We could build a dating app that was not based on profit margins but on the extent to which app features led to more rewarding connections among our users.
That led us to our next question. Who is this app for? Finding a partner looks different at different ages and life stages; your expectations and goals at 20 are very different from those at 50. Rather than developing a one-size-fits-all app, we wanted to tailor our features and content to best serve people at a particular point in their lives. We immediately thought of students – and young adults more generally – who are the most vibrant and visible part of our university community.
For now, we’re limiting the app to students at the University of Michigan. We want to learn as much as we can in our own backyard before considering expanding further.
It’s a remarkable two years later, and thanks to a number of special people without whom this would not have happened, we are thrilled to make Revel a reality.