Why We're Building
Beyond The Sparks
— The Problem with Dating in Tulsa

I want to tell you the honest version of how this started — not the polished pitch, but the real one. Because I think if you're a single in Tulsa reading this, you'll recognize the problem immediately.

It was the summer of 2025. I had spent a significant amount of time watching the way people meet — or fail to meet — in this city. The pattern was impossible to miss: intelligent, genuinely good people, doing everything right on the apps, going on dates that led nowhere, and quietly concluding that either something was wrong with them or something was wrong with Tulsa.

Neither was true. The problem was the method.

What's Actually Broken About Dating in Tulsa

Apps optimize for one thing: engagement. They need you to keep opening the app. That means showing you an endless feed of people — not the right people, just enough people to keep you scrolling. The business model depends on you not finding a match quickly.

The result in a mid-size city like Tulsa is particularly brutal. The dating pool is real but not enormous, which means the same profiles cycle through endlessly. You've seen everyone within ten miles. You've matched with half of them. Two-thirds of those matches never made it to a real conversation.

And when you do get to a first date, you're discovering in person what a profile could never tell you: whether the energy is right, whether the timing is right, whether this person wants what you want. That's three to six weeks of texting to find out something you could know in twenty minutes of face-to-face conversation.

What We Decided to Build Instead

The answer seemed obvious once we named the problem clearly: build something that gets the right people in the same room before they meet, rather than hoping chemistry emerges from randomness.

That's what the SPARK Profile became. Not a quiz for fun, but a genuine compatibility assessment — five dimensions that research consistently links to relationship success. Social energy. Partnership values. Attachment patterns. Relationship vision. Love language. Five things that photos can't tell you and proximity doesn't predict.

And instead of a website or an app, we decided to build in-person events. Because we already knew the answer to "apps vs. in-person" — every study says the same thing. You need to be in a room with someone to know if there's a spark. The SPARK Profile just makes sure the room is full of the right people.

Why Cabinboys Brewpub

We spent several months thinking about venue before we committed to Cabinboys. A great venue for a dating event needs to do a few specific things: it needs to feel warm and real, not corporate or transactional. It needs to be genuinely comfortable — somewhere people can stay for three hours and not feel like they're overstaying. And it needs to facilitate conversation, not compete with it.

Cabinboys does all of that. It's a real brewpub with genuine community energy, excellent craft beer, and a space that was designed for people to linger and talk. It felt like the right room for the kind of connections we were trying to create.

What's Coming

As of November 2025, we're finishing the SPARK Profile software and preparing to launch our first live events at Cabinboys in early 2026. We've been testing the compatibility matching with a small group, and the early results are exactly what we hoped for.

If you're in Tulsa and you're tired of the apps, we'd love you to be in the room when we open the doors. Take the free SPARK Profile quiz at beyondthesparks.com — that's step one. We'll handle the rest.