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I always imagined the main benefit of AM was that “married” is an indicator of having passed some basic standards of behaviour - i.e. they are at least fit enough to have been married once.

It seems like a plausible business model too, since presumably cheaters aren’t expecting long-term relationships and will be back for more.

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I think you're vastly over estimating the barrier of entry to marriage.

There’s noise as well as signal for sure but I maintain that marriage is absolutely a useful fitness filter. At the very least, at least one other person has agreed to enter into a long term relationship with them. It will filter out unsocialized basement dwellers, for example.

Sure, there are drunken Vegas marriages to strangers which fall apart 24 hours later, but I think those are the exception.

That's still a very low barrier to entry: sure, they managed to get married, but they apparently can't commit to a long-term relationship.

It’s a higher barrier to entry than a possibly-fake profile pic and a possibly-fake bio.

It’s a very high barrier relative to “no barrier”. (Also: remember that open long-term marriages do exist with the voluntary consent of both parties.)

What I mean is it only weeds out a few true negatives, but produces a ton of false negatives and false positives.

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