The Column – Human Styles
If you have a great desire to get married. If you are alone or alone and in life you haven’t gotten one right in love, or love hasn’t gotten you right. If you no longer know what to answer to your family when they ask you: when are you getting married? There is a solution: you pay and you will have a wedding. Not just any wedding, the kind you do with someone at random, just for the sake of it. Just turn to Keeper, the digital cupid, Eliana Monti 2.0, where those who want to see their marital status written as married can satisfy their desire.
It’s the new online platform that provides for your social status and it works like this: women enter for free, more or less like in the disco in the 1980s. Men, on the other hand, pay. And a lot. The first phase is a kind of personnel selection: ad hoc questions, various documents, characteristics, desired. But you won’t decide who you marry. No, shut up, you’ve already done enough damage. The algorithm will create infallible matches, which will lead you to a safe wedding. An algorithm that will tell you who, how and when you will be with forever.
Specifically. You sign up and answer more than a hundred questions: personality, values, ambitions, income, assets, aptitude tests. Even photos are screened by artificial intelligence to verify that you match the other person’s aesthetic desires. Love as personnel selection. With multiple documents. Then the algorithm, which crosses over eight hundred compatibility factors, presents you with only one candidate at a time. A. No catalogue, no binge of profiles.
The founder, Jake Kozloski, a New Yorker, happily married – he is keen to underline this – built everything on a simple reasoning: dating apps make money by keeping you single. More swipes, more subscriptions, more money. Keeper turns the model on its head: you only earn if you get married. This is why men sign what is called a “marriage bounty”, a kind of bounty on their marriage. The price? About fifty thousand dollars, to be paid only after a wedding or after eighteen months of cohabitation. The women evaluate first and decide whether to grant the appointment. What if you get divorced? Your business: Keeper does not refund. The algorithm did its job. If you’re not reliable in matches, it’s not Keeper’s fault.
According to internal data, one in ten dates would lead to marriage. Numbers to be taken with a pinch of salt, because they are self-certified. But logic has its own charm: if you only collect after the wedding, you have every interest in making the right choice.
And if love is now a question of venture capital, at least one thing hasn’t changed: finding someone to share your life with isn’t that simple. Now, however, to the question, when are you getting married? You can answer: it depends on the algorithm.
