Our Doomed Relationships Are So Predictable Their Demise Can Be Profited On

Relationships enlarge our hearts while totally screwing up our ability to be cynical statisticians. Falling in love is a feeling of reckless creation. You feel like you might start putting Gatorade on your wheat Chex. With every queasily sweet text message exchange, you feel as if you've discovered another province of a new world. The new sex you have is a little different from the old sex: life's incandescence is restored.

But from the outside view—from the cynical statistician view—your relationship is utterly unoriginal. The particulars are particular, but the varieties of peculiarity are as old as dirt. Latin love poetry sounds like a more belabored version of every teenage Tumblr.

SwanLuv is a Seattle startup based on this very principle—on the fact that love is radiant but mundane. Its business plan is difficult to explain. It's a marriage planning charity, but it's also a divorce speculation market. Here's how it works: couples planning marriages but lacking money for a wedding apply to SwanLuv for funding. Chosen couples receive free money (up to $10,000) with one significant string attached: the money is only free if the couple never gets divorced. Upon divorce, the money retroactively becomes a business loan—the couple pays it back with interest. This is tempting, especially for a millennial freelance writer like me, who could maybe afford a tray of hot dogs and a clown/priest in the way of wedding ceremonies. If I ever do get married, I want all the old-fashioned (read: unaffordable/unnecessary) shit, which I definitely can't buy now. Getting that money myself almost seems harder than keeping a marriage together.

The SwanLuv people have carefully insisted that SwanLuv won't make money off divorces directly. This is, as far as I can tell, half-true in a sneaky way. They won't pocket the funds—the interest they accrue from divorces is returned to the pool of money from which the marriage funds are drawn. Where they make real money is affiliate deals—when they give you money, they recommend, for example, a catering company, which pays them for the referral.

However, keeping that cycle going requires disproportionately funding nascent breakups. They depend on the predictability of your love's viability. SwanLuv only makes money by being smarter than newlyweds about predicting whether getting married is a good idea.

I contacted Scott Avy, the main dude of SwanLuv, hoping to ask him about my suspicions. He told me he didn't have time for my questions. I suspect that this was kind of a low-key fuck you, which I don't blame him for, because my questions were pretty annoying.

So, instead of interviewing that guy, I talked to my friend Kate, a counselor who knows how to dance with swords, who was at the time of our interview eleven days from marriage. I wanted to see if she thinks about her future marriage statistically—whether, for example, she thinks divorce statistics matter. "Absolutely they do," she said. "I thought they were worth considering all along, and they've informed the way we've worked on problem areas of the relationship." Kate and her fiancé share a high level of education, religious affiliation, and an understanding of the dark places mental illness can take you—what Kate charmingly refers to as The Pit. But, she said, she didn't select a boyfriend that way—she just happened to find somebody who's very statistically viable, as well as cute: "I could have been armed with all the theoretical knowledge in the world, could have decided to get a statistically promising partner… and if my gut had steered me otherwise, forget it. No one loves by calculation."

It's true. But do people divorce by calculation? How predictable is your relationship, exactly?

It seems like the answer is: very. Psychological models about what causes divorce have become pretty robust. Dr. John Gottman, a relationship science guy, predicts with eerie skill whether a couple's marriage is durable. He looks at couples talking to each other, then makes a forecast about whether the relationship is lasting. In one study, he was 95 percent correct. How he does that is a whole other article. But the very fact that he makes such accurate assessments means our behavior is pretty goddamned predictable.

Then there's the fact that unless you manage your life exclusively in cash or with encryption—unless you're an especially cautious criminal, in other words—much of the data about your life is purchasable. Basically, every service you use is recording your behavior patterns all the time. From the mass of that data, correlations emerge. Your spending habits may have already pegged you as a future divorcee. The way you trawl the profile pictures of your attractive acquaintances might make you seem desperate. As might the think-pieces you read about the predictability of divorce.

Any interested party, in other words, can get a psychological profile of you that's much more penetrating than the Myers-Briggs profiles of medieval times. Whatever type of alcohol you drink in whatever quantity you do makes you a category of person you don't know exists—a category in some credit card company's database which might indicate you shouldn't be trusted.

Just to be clear, I have no idea whether SwanLuv will do any of these specific things. But those are just a few of the tools available. If the people at SwanLuv are clever—I assume they are, based on their very slick branding—then they will surely know more about your relationship than you do.

The most annoying question I asked Avy was whether he would place a SwanLuv wager on his own marriage. Kate kindly put up with this question. "Oh, I'm gonna so WIN THAT," she said, "show me the money!"

Meanwhile, I would answer differently. I believe in numbers. I believe I'll die of heart disease, because that's the average thing to do. I believe that if SwanLuv offers me money for a marriage, that means the obviously correct intuition is that my marriage is doomed. The only smart move, as far as I'm concerned, is to assume that if SwanLuv wants to pay for your marriage, you shouldn't have one. However, this cynicism may be self-fulfilling, may in fact be why I'm not married, whereas Kate, after our interview, e-mailed me, "Also I AM GETTING MARRIED IN ELEVEN DAYS CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT???" Given her answers, I can—I would bet on Kate's marriage myself.

Though it hasn't yet launched, Avy says the demand for SwanLuv's services has been "explosive." It'll be online just in time for Valentine's Day.

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