BEHIND THE APP
This team’s app can improve your love life
Paired: Couples & Relationship
Questions, Quiz, Games, Advice
Break-ups are hard and rarely inspiring times. But when Paired co-founder and CEO Kevin Shanahan broke up with an ex-girlfriend, it sparked an idea.
“I was doing a lot of soul-searching about what went wrong and how to make my next relationship easier,” says Shanahan. “I was using lots of dating apps and wondering why we don’t really have any digital solutions to help us keep partners after we’ve found them.”
With a professional background in health and education apps, including brain training app Peak and language learning app Memrise, it made sense that Shanahan would build this solution himself – alongside fellow Memrise alumnus Diego López.
What we really hit on is making caring for your relationship fun.
– Kevin Shanahan, CEO and co-founder of Paired
Paired is designed to foster better communication and connection for couples. You and your partner literally pair up your accounts and answer quizzes that spark conversation, test your knowledge of one another and help you tackle sensitive topics. Every question is research-based and tips are written by relationship academics and therapists.
In fact, one of the first people Shanahan contacted to collaborate on Paired was Jacqui Gabb, professor of sociology and intimacy at The Open University. Gabb immediately came on board as the app’s chief relationship officer.
Gabb has spent more than 25 years researching relationships. Her award-winning research project “Enduring Love?” studied how long-term relationships are sustained over time.
“The difficulty with studying relationships is that you learn lots about relationship science and know how relationships work, but it’s hard to do anything with that other than write it up in academic journals and books,” says Gabb.
She describes Paired as her “light bulb moment”. “I realised we really can use relationship science to help couples and change behaviours,” she says.
Your Paired journey begins with a Relationship Checkup, in which you answer questions about how satisfied you feel with your work-life balance, your emotional connection with your partner and more. Your partner will then answer the same questions to see how your responses match up.
From there you can delve deeper, answering question packs that cover the kind of dates you enjoy, the value of compliments, the influence of your parents on your relationship behaviour, and, of course, your sex life.
“The prompts raise tricky subjects that you might not feel comfortable raising yourself,” explains Gabb. “But the app opens a door to that conversation.”
If you’re aiming to improve a particular area of your relationship, you can search for conversations by topic – from dealing with financial situations to managing conflict. Paired is not designed to provide counselling for failing relationships, but to boost and support working relationships.
“What we really hit on is making caring for your relationship fun,” says Shanahan. “It can feel like a bit of a drag to work on your relationship and it can feel heavy to have difficult conversations with your partner. What we’ve done is make it something you enjoy and a positive in your life.”
The app’s prompts raise tricky subjects that you might not feel comfortable raising yourself.
– Jacqui Gabb, Paired’s chief relationship officer
Paired users are not expected to spend hours in the app. “A lot of the magic is happening outside the app,” says Shanahan. “The conversation is started in Paired but the real discussion happens when couples get together in the evening.”
Yet it’s working. Gabb has carried out a study on Paired that showed couples who used the app regularly over a three-month period reported almost a 36 per cent improvement in relationship quality.
The team has also received lots of great feedback from Paired users. Take students Allie and George, who are in a long-distance relationship. “Paired really helps us both to know that we value what the other has to say,” says Allie. “I’ve found that I’m able to express myself better in writing and [George] feels the same way – his answers are often very thoughtful and incredibly cute!”
Shanahan is now in a relationship once more and uses Paired himself to keep that partnership healthy. “I met Alice one or two months after we founded Paired and she has played a big role in the development of the app. She’s been the first tester for every feature,” laughs Shanahan.
“We use the app about three times a week and still find it useful. Though sometimes she wonders if we’re doing QA [quality assurance] or using it for real!”