If you’re keen to try your hand at matchmaking, there’s $100K that might have your name on it. Former OnlyFans model Aella is offering a hefty finder’s fee to anyone who introduces her to her future husband. She’s hoping that she can engineer her way to true love, but is that really possible, or is money just going to complicate things? Seeing hoped-for romance treated as a bounty hunter’s job is a little unusual, but it just might work.

Aella is a former content creator on OnlyFans, a sex researcher, and a Substack writer. While active on the adults-only platform, Aella was known for earning six-figures per month for her content. She transitioned from being an adult content creator, to being a data-driven thinker whose primary topics were sex, relationships, and human behavior. Her background in data-driven research work supports her logic for approaching love in a systemic way, instead of more of a “fairy tale” approach.

When it comes to finding a romantic partner she feels like legally binding herself to, Aella’s already proven that she’s serious about putting her money where her mouth is. She tried to outsource her search for love by employing a dating service that quoted her $100K if a successful match was made. She gave the dating service months of effort, but it yielded no actionable results. Her solution? Crowdsourcing. She’s making the same offer that she would have paid to the dating service available to the general public, shifting private matchmaking to an open-market optimization process

Her current offer is $100K for a successful introduction that leads to marriage. Her criteria for a spouse: polyamorous, “ominous sexuality,” a desire for children, their own financial independence, strong sense of self-acceptance, intelligence, and must be a stable person. Her process involves applicants filling out a survey with logic puzzles, political questions, porn preferences, and emotional self-awareness tests. This application isn’t just open to anyone who stumbles upon it, they have to have been referred to her by someone who can vouch for them. She’s also offering a secondary “pregnancy deal,” which ties an additional $300K to financial security and a willingness to participate in child-rearing.

In a time where we spend most of our lives online enjoying feeds that have been catered to each of our specific interests, it’s worth asking whether finding love can be optimized. Finding love through data and engineering doesn’t sound very romantic, but that’s essentially what dating apps are already doing. Optimizing your search for love the way Aella is choosing to do, does have its potential pros and cons. Pros: filter out mismatches early, save time searching for someone you click with, assessment of lifestyle compatibility is built into the search. Cons: genuine chemistry, emotional spontaneity, and unpredictable problems with a potential match could all get lost in a checklist. Apps already rely on filters, but filters only weed people out based on mismatching; they don’t call people in based on shared values and vision. Research shows a gap between stated and real mate preferences. In other words: We have no fucking clue who the right person is for us, until we meet someone we really want to make it work with.

So can true love be bought or engineered, or is that kind of love something that defies optimization? Aella believes that data, criteria, and incentivized searches might just be able to replace randomness. Should love really be left to an algorithm, or is there beauty to be found in the chaos?