The Marriage Pact
The Elon Marriage Pact caught us all by surprise when graphics first popped up on social media on April 19, and campus has been buzzing as students fill out the 10-minute survey and receive their matches. If you’ve been living under a rock and this is news to you, we’ll fill you in. The Marriage Pact essentially takes all of your survey answers, runs them through a special algorithm, and pairs you with your perfect match on campus. What happens next is up to you.
Elon is one of six campuses where the Marriage Pact has found a home. Since its launch at Stanford in 2017, the program has created 26,562 matches, one of which actually got married. So, don’t knock it until you try it.
The software was created by two Stanford undergrads in their Econ 136: Market Design class after they discussed the difficulties of maintaining a long-term relationship in college, but their shared fear of ending up alone afterward. The solution: present students with their perfect match; a plan they could keep in their back pocket until the time was right. Within a week of its release at Stanford, over half of the campus had signed up.
The Elon Marriage Pact also aimed for 50%+ participation, and over 700 students signed up within the first few days. Most participating students got their matches last Wednesday night, so we asked a few of them to spill the tea.
“I don’t really know many people who took it seriously. I think it’s a really funny and fun way to connect people at Elon,” one student said. “My friends and I took it just to see who we would match with, and our results were quite funny.”
Another student, who actually got matched with someone in her friend group, said “We just exchanged a couple funny emails back and forth about getting married, because honestly at the end of the day I didn’t take this seriously at all, I kinda just did it for fun and for a silly moment.”
“I saw it all over my Instagram and it seemed like a fun and interesting idea,” another student said on her reasoning for doing the survey. “I don’t think I was expecting anything to come of it, it was more of a no harm, no foul sort of thing.”
Overall, Elon students saw this more as a funny way to connect with new people at Elon, not as a viable way to meet the love of their life. It is a fun experience, and a silly convo to have with your friends if your match is someone you know. Most students said they followed their match on Instagram or exchanged emails, but didn’t communicate past that. But who knows? Meeting people is hard and dating apps are brutal, so maybe we’ll see more of these couples pop up in the fall?
We agree that the Elon Marriage Pact was a good and silly way to wrap up the semester and a fun mental break from finals, and we’re excited to hear more stories and jokes. We hope the Marriage Pact comes back in the fall and we can continue to laugh over our “perfect matches.”