Open Relational Lab — a more honest service for closeness

The essence

Open Relational Lab is the idea of a more honest dating service that does not disguise holding on to the user as the search for closeness. What interests me here is not another swipe interface with the paid secret of “who liked me”, but an open public-good system that tries to match people more meaningfully, more transparently and more carefully.

Why at all

Modern dating feels like it has broken motivation. Formally it promises to help you find a partner, but in fact it too often looks like a machine of endless search, where a person optimises themselves for the feed, shows the most advantageous version of themselves and gets stuck for a long time in an interface of uncertainty. For the metrics of an app that is convenient. For living people it is not a given.

I want to think about the opposite logic: what if a service benefits not from stretching out loneliness but from genuinely helping people understand faster who suits them, where there is potential for closeness and where it is better not to spend months on a beautiful illusion.

What it should stand on

I do not want to build such a thing on the magical idea that “AI knows love better than people”. Rather the opposite: on a careful assembly of several research layers that are almost invisible in ordinary dating apps.

values, life scenarios and attitudes to the future;
adult attachment and habitual patterns of closeness;
the style of conflict, of restoring contact and of experiencing stress;
everyday compatibility: sleep, rhythms, bodily habits, noise level, temperature, space;
social and cultural context, not just a set of profile checkboxes;
cultural preferences as an additional layer of the portrait: films, series, music, favourite fictional worlds.

MBTI can exist here at most as an understandable user-facing language at the entrance, but not as a scientific foundation. If one relies on research, the basis of such a service should be deeper: Big Five, attachment, values, dyadic coping, communication patterns and real markers of everyday compatibility.

How it differs from ordinary matching

Instead of “you are 93% compatible because you both like coffee and travelling”, I am more interested in an explainable matching that shows:

what exactly makes the two people match;
where they may have a resource for closeness;
where the zones of likely tension are;
which things they should discuss before they romantically idealise each other.

That is, this is neither an oracle nor a digital matchmaker. Rather it is a research tool that reduces the amount of random noise and makes the very entry into a relationship a little more honest.

The speculative layer

A separate, more experimental layer of the project is connected with the fact that plausible relational personas can be assembled from rich profiles and everyday or conflict scenarios modelled. Not in the spirit of “a neural network will predict your fate exactly”, but as a way of looking at possible mismatches in advance: who argues how, who withdraws into silence, who is always cold under the blanket, who loves silence and who feels emptiness without background noise.

At the junction of AI, psychology and speculative design this is almost a laboratory of digital closeness. And here the project acquires an important art&science shade: it studies not only the matching of partners but the very idea of whether part of a relational future can be modelled in advance without turning a person into a set of predictors.

What is already clear

ordinary matching claims are strongly overrated and poorly verifiable;
simple similarity works more weakly than is usually thought;
for the quality of a relationship what matters more than beautiful typologies is attachment, communication, values, coping and behaviour over time;
bodily and biorhythmic things such as sleep, chronotype and everyday synchronisation are not magic, but they can be an important additional layer;
such a product has to be open-source and explainable, otherwise it will too quickly become one more black box about attention manipulation.

Results / potential

If this is brought to a clear form, the result will be not just one more dating app but an open counterexample to a market where people are usually sold endless search. What interests me here is both the public layer and the research one: whether it is possible to make a service that treats closeness not as a retention funnel but as a complex human task, where transparency, reflection and a good question are sometimes more important than a beautiful algorithm.

Original (Russian) →