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Today, we treat marriage like a quest for “the one.” But this idea of marrying your soulmate is relatively new.
For most of human history, courtship was more about practicality than chemistry. Couples often grew into love as they built their families, but no one expected love alone to pay the bills.
For the elite, marriage linked families to secure wealth, property, and political standing. For ordinary people, marriage pooled labor and resources to ensure household security. Attraction and personal choice mattered, but only within tight social and economic boundaries.
This arrangement is known as the institutional model of marriage: logistics first, emotions later.
Over the 20th century, marriage underwent a dramatic shift – from institutional marriage to mid-century companionate marriage and finally to today’s individualized, love-centered soulmate marriage ideal.
As marriage evolved, it brought us greater happiness. But it also made finding the right spouse more challenging than ever.
Mid-20th-century America embraced “companionate marriage.” Love was important, but filling your prescribed role mattered most. Husbands earned the paycheck and led the family, while wives managed the home and raised the children. Being a good spouse meant playing your position well. You loved each other, but it was more about being a solid team than sharing a cosmic connection.
The life script was to marry young and start a family early. Nearly half of brides married before age 20, and most had their first child by 24. Once you met someone “good enough” to marry, you married them and got to work.
Living solo was uncommon. In 1950, only 9% of US households were single-person homes, and most young singles lived with their parents.
For women, freedom from your family came bundled with a marriage license. Before marriage, parents tracked their daughters’ whereabouts, screened their dates, and sometimes even tagged along as chaperones. Many women married simply to get out of the house. Conversely, unmarried men past a certain age often found their sexuality under question.
Until reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, divorce required proof of fault, making separation costly and complicated. Married women had limited legal and economic rights, and many employers enforced marriage bars, dismissing female employees once they got married. College and early jobs for women were largely viewed as training for marriage and motherhood. Divorce was strongly stigmatized.
In 1960, just 5% of U.S. births were to unmarried mothers; today it’s around 40%. In 1960, only 6% of women aged 35-39 had never married. By 2021, that number was more than 25%.
Before the 1960s, your future spouse probably lived down the street. In 1932 Philadelphia, one-third of married couples lived within five blocks of each other before marriage. One in six shared the same block, and one in eight the same building.
Small towns worked similarly. If your neighbor was available, you very well might have married them.
The spouse-finding system ran on local institutions like churches, schools, and civic groups that organized youth social life and, by extension, courtship. When the local supply was constrained (for example, skewed sex ratios within your ethnic or religious group) you widened your circle to adjacent communities until you found someone, and no farther.
Beginning in the 1960s, cultural, legal, and technological changes sent the companionate marriage model into decline:
As women gained degrees, careers, and financial independence, marriage became a choice rather than a necessity. Many delayed marriage to enjoy young adulthood – work, friendships, travel, and personal growth. We stopped seeing marriage as an economic institution and started seeing it as a venue for fulfillment, meaning, and deep emotional connection.
Marriage shifted from “roles first, love helps” to “love first, roles negotiated.” The search target changed too: not just someone you can build a life with, but someone who fits the life you’re already building.
Today, it’s hard to imagine marrying the kid down the street because we get married much later in life.
In 1950, marriage marked the beginning of adulthood. You graduated, got married, and left the house. Now, we spend our twenties discovering who we are and learning to live independently. Marriage is no longer the starting line but the capstone of young adulthood, typically happening a decade later than it used to.
Our twenties turn dating into a mobile marketplace. From 2010 to 2015, 61% of people aged 25-29 moved at least once, many into cities. Over a lifetime, Americans move about 12 times. At 18, you likely still have nine moves ahead of you.
Every move refreshes your social and romantic networks. Moving for work or school may mean leaving behind a medium-term boyfriend or girlfriend who’s not willing to make the same move – your lives taking you literally in different directions.
Our options have expanded well past who lives on our block or sits in our pew. We have all the people we meet at every stage of our lives through school, work, and social groups. We also have dating apps that put (what feels like) millions of singles a thumb-swipe away.
Meeting online is now the dominant on-ramp to relationships.
With later timelines, higher mobility, and a vast digital marketplace, today’s young singles face larger, constantly refreshing choice sets. And as our dating radii have grown wider, our preferences have narrowed.
Ask couples from a previous era why they got married and you’ll hear responses like, “He was a good guy,” “She was nice,” “He had a steady job,” or “Our families knew each other.”
Ask newlyweds today and you’ll probably hear “He’s my other half,” “She completes me,” or “Our love feels like home.”
Marriage expectations have evolved from “someone decent to start a family with” to “the one person who fits me perfectly.” Where we used to satisfice, we now optimize.
Nine out of ten married adults say love was a primary reason they got married – far surpassing practical considerations like financial stability. Modern couples expect marriage to deliver higher-order goods: emotional intimacy, personal growth, and a stable sense of self. Feeling “known” by your partner is among the strongest predictors of relationship satisfaction.
Soulmate marriage isn’t just companionate marriage with better branding. We expect our partner to be our best friend, trusted confidant, passionate lover, able co-parent, and source of belonging and identity. We expect them to deliver continuity and transcendence, novelty and familiarity, predictability and surprise, comfort and edge.
We assume we’ll eventually find this person – if only we search long enough.
When couples have the time, skills, and compatibility to meet these elevated expectations, the payoff can be extraordinary. The best marriages today are often better than the best marriages of previous eras.
But searching for a soulmate is slow, costly, and anxiety-inducing. “Good enough” is no longer good enough – now the bar is “near perfect.”
The situation on the ground is rough:
With such high expectations, small disappointments become dealbreakers. Commitment weakens when attractive alternatives seem only a tap away. If you feel surrounded by better options, it’s easier to become dissatisfied with any single option.
Soulmate-level connections are incredibly rare, but dating apps create an illusion of abundance. You feel like thousands of potential soulmates are waiting in your phone, ready to fall in love. In reality, the apps offer a sea of ordinary, imperfect people and no effective way to surface the genuinely outstanding matches.
Older generations view this endless optionality as a bug, not a feature. They worry for their kids and grandkids, feeling lucky to have come of age in simpler times. They didn’t need to evaluate every possible option. When they liked someone, they committed and stayed.
With more options, thinner commitment, and faster churn, the market is richer but attention is scarce. We’re constantly needing to prove ourselves earlier and more often. Matches our grandparents would have considered marriage material don’t even make it to a second date.
You’re not wrong for wanting more. Human progress happens precisely because people want more. Your grandparents had 4 TV channels and the local library. You have every book and TV show ever created, and an algorithm to tell you exactly which one you want right now.
Your soulmate exists. When you meet them, you’ll know it. And you deserve a way to find them.
Keeper was built precisely to solve this.
We match on short-term attraction and long-term compatibility using:
We look for:
Keeper doesn’t drown you in maybes. We hunt for the one that matters. It’s the first system built to find your soulmate across the whole market.
Because one match is all you need.
