What Couples Therapy and Dating Apps Both Fail to Measure
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
Dating apps operate before a relationship's pattern exists — they can only measure two individuals' stated preferences, not the interaction pattern the two of them will eventually create together, because that pattern doesn't yet exist to be measured. Couples therapy, by contrast, typically arrives after the pattern has already calcified into something painful enough to seek help for. Both miss the actual formation window.
The formation window — the early months where a couple's pattern is still soft, still being negotiated turn by turn — is the single highest-leverage period in a relationship's life, and it is almost completely uninstrumented. No product is built to observe two people while their pattern is actively forming, because that period doesn't look urgent from the outside. It looks like ordinary early-relationship life.
By the time a pattern is obvious enough to bring to a therapist, it has usually been running, reinforced, for years — which is real work to undo, and worthwhile work, but it is not the same problem as catching a pattern while it's still forming. Prevention and treatment are different disciplines, and relationships currently only have access to the second one.
The measurement gap between "before the pattern exists" and "after it's painful enough to treat" is exactly where a relationship's future gets quietly decided. Nothing currently sits in that gap. That's the opening.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai