It’s hard to imagine the experience of dating without swiping. But ‘Overtone’, a new app from Hinge founder Justin McLeod, will soon make this a reality. Instead of split-second and often shallow decisions, the new model is based on a curated matchmaking service. The matchmaker is AI, of course, promising a tech-bro hack for compatibility – a concept that romantics, astrologists and relationship scientists have puzzled over for decades. “Arranged marriage has the same concept, but your parents are AI,” wrote one user on X. Compatibility, a longstanding buzzword relationship science, is the key criterion on which Overtone will curate its matches. “We make only the introductions that are worth making, grounded in relationship science and thoughtful reflection,“ writes McLeod. Scientists have dedicated entire careers to studying love, chemistry and attraction, and the idea that technology could know greater truths about compatibility is nothing new: the first algorithm-led matchmaking models came into use back in the 1960s. One of the earliest was TACT, or Technical Automated Compatibility Testing, which once matched a man with his younger sister – similarity isn’t always all that. But when it comes to predicting compatibility prior to meeting (after that, it's a different story), objective truths have been difficult to come by.
“You can predict who's popular, but you can't predict who's compatible” – Paul Eastwick
“We have some machine learning studies going back about a decade now where we've been trying to do exactly that,” Paul Eastwick, author of Bonded by Evolution and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, where he heads up research at the attraction and relationships research laboratory, tells Dazed. “You take information that people report about themselves before potential partners meet each other, and you look at their preferences and their personality and all their attributes, and you can predict who's selective, and you can predict who's popular, but you can't predict who's compatible.” While it’s not yet clear how exactly Overtone’s AI matchmaking model would work – a company spokesperson tells Dazed it is based on “the study of how people connect and what makes long-term relationships work” – Eastwick is sceptical. “If by relationship science, you mean we're going to give people a bunch of questionnaires and assess their preferences and their personalities and match people up, it doesn't work that way,” he says. “We tried that. We've tried that a billion times. You really can't predict much better than chance who's going to like whom when people sit and self-disclose.” But despite its dystopian undertones, Overtone is likely to hold some appeal to those exhausted by the worst – i.e. most time-consuming, laborious, futile and superficial – features of the modern-day dating experience: the swiping, the dead-end chats, the choice overload. Although she hates the current crop of dating apps, Indigo, 28, says she would be interested. That both parties would have to give over more information, as it seems, would hopefully make for a more considered match. Then there’s the appeal of “not having to think about it that much,” she adds, and of the app’s shift away from infinite choice, which has started to feel like its own prison. Instead, Overtone offers tech-enabled hyper-curation, an experience so frictionless that we don’t have to do anything. We can rest our thumbs, sit back and wait for a ‘perfect’ match to be presented by technology.
“Will we have to wait to be told by AI that we're compatible before we fully believe it, losing trust in our own instincts, judgement and emotions?”
I myself am not averse to having these decisions taken away from me. When I’ve used dating apps, I’ve been caught at my most shallow, making split-second judgements and searching for similarity rather than difference. Even if we believe we know what we’re looking for, is this level of self-actualisation actually available to us, or even possible? We might have a list of things we think we want in a partner, but research shows that when presented with a real-life person, those things often go out the window. In one study, 74 per cent of people chose to go on a date with someone who showcased two of their personal dealbreakers. Many of us have experienced being attracted to or even falling in love with people who, if we encountered them on a dating app, we wouldn’t give a second glance. But because Overtone is a dating app, after all, it’s offering an even more privatised future of dating. Down the line, will we feel, even more than we do today, that love is something we’re not capable of finding ourselves? Will we have to wait to be told by AI that we're compatible before we fully believe it, losing trust in our own instincts, judgement and emotions? Perhaps compatibility is not static or pre-determined. For Eastwick, certainly, it is something that evolves. And in many ways, it’s a beautiful thing that we can’t predict it or have it handed to us, that we have to feel our way through the world to get there. “[Compatibility] is what enables a lot of people to find relationships who are not immediately, you know, the most desirable people in the room,” says Paul. However it is you get there, you probably do have to be in the room for that compatibility to emerge.