OCT 3, 2024 | NEWS | By Grace Ersfeld-O’Brien
In recent weeks, Colorado College’s Marriage Pact has been a topic of discussion all across campus. Some people know the basic premise, but for those who don’t: students take a brief quiz and the algorithm matches them with someone who is deemed compatible with them based on their responses. The idea is that in a number of years, if you and the person you’re matched with are still single, you will get married because you’re most compatible with one another. In other words: it’s a backup plan. This year, 1,343 CC students participated in the Marriage Pact, well over half of the student body.
The Marriage Pact is an organization that was founded in 2017 by a student at Stanford in a business and marketing class, and the two girls running it at CC discovered it on TikTok, where they found out they could apply and interview to run the operation at their school (a la “The Social Network”).
The stint that the YikYak alternative Fizz had last year was a product of the same marketing class, as students have to design and market a product as part of the course –– one of the girls behind the Marriage Pact at CC was paid “almost 1k” after being hired to promote Fizz.
The two people running it at CC asked to remain anonymous because they feel the project is “almost silly,” and that they “didn’t necessarily want to be tied to something that wasn’t entirely serious, and could cause a lot of chaos –– even if it’s fun chaos –– in the community.”
The Marriage Pact is active at roughly 80 other colleges. Most do the pact annually, and the organization recently received a $5 million grant to expand the site as part of a seed round of venture funding. The grant covers server and payroll expenses. As of now, no profit is being made off of the product.
One Marriage Pact organizer at CC said she didn’t begin trying to keep her identity secret, but “as more people wanted to know who was behind it, I began leaning into the secrecy, and eventually it made more sense to keep it private.” She noted that their Stanford counterparts said that at most schools, people know the identities of the people who started the pact.
The CC representatives met with two Stanford girls “almost daily,” who acted as touchstones to discuss marketing on campus and troubleshoot post-launch.
“For example, we noticed early on a lot less involvement from the senior class, so we set about pushing it harder to senior group chats and working hard to spread the message by word of mouth,” one organizer said.
They noted that the pact is technically supposed to be a backup plan, but part of the point is also to meet someone while in school.
“College is a really fantastic time to meet your significant other –– you’re both at the same school, so that’s something that unites you from the start,” said an organizer at CC. “It’s often been implemented at larger schools, which is more where the idea of ‘someone you might not have even met’ comes from, but CC being so small and niche can make the argument for trying to meet someone here even stronger.”
People running the site on campuses “cannot see identities tied to stats or people’s matches,” so the theory that the pact is an elaborate ruse to collect personal information is debunked. The pair found that the ratio of men to women was off — 35 more women than men –– before the deadline was extended.
Initially, they found the imbalance to be shockingly large; the revelation that there was only a difference of 35 in the heterosexual market made more sense when considering that there are, according to an organizer of the pact at CC, “a lot of queer women on campus.” For the women who were not matched, the algorithm set them up with an ideal “friendship match.”
In terms of what stats stood out the most, the pair were most interested in tracking the times people were sending out secret admirer emails, which had the strongest uptick in the final hours before matches were set to come out, in what they perceived to be a sort of last-ditch effort to connect with crushes on campus given this somewhat rare opportunity.
They also noted that YikYak was one of their most effective marketing tools, as their posts on the platform generated waves of activity, and people independent of the team behind it began posting about it.
There is, however, a lingering question posed by the statistics: why is there so much more buy-in from women?
There is, of course, the gendered proclivity women have culturally to “want to find love,” considering that if one just wants to hook up, dating apps are far less convoluted. The “sweet and cutesy” nature of the project is what they believe appeals to the female audience.
That said, word of mouth is largely the way the project gained momentum, and since female-identifying people tend to gravitate toward its promotion, they don’t always have access to male-dominant networks, which explains the deficit at CC which apparently “happens at every other school.”
Nabila Argueta ‘25 says that “the pact is interesting because it’s truly blind dating,” as opposed to Tinder, “where you can see everything and make an instant judgment.” In a generation that, Argueta reasons, lends a market to these dating apps because we’re often “too scared to actually approach someone we like,” the app is a remarkably pure way of going about modern dating, in a sense.
On the other hand, with the algorithm, if you choose to go out with someone you’re paired with, “you already know a lot of their defining characteristics, things that aren’t exactly written on their forehead” which you would typically find out in conversation. This factor in a way could be a pitfall in the dating process, the same way cyber stalking your crush stops you from asking questions that could lead to more interesting topics that actually build connection.
Maddy Golier ‘27 thinks the pact’s generation of discussion on campus points to a dichotomy of attitudes at CC, which is “very much a hookup or getting married type of scene,” and “the pact reflects the latter.” She notes that those belonging to the “hookup culture are probably wishing for a destined-marriage-type of CC relationship,” and that the pact speaks to a sort of repressed desire to connect with people more deeply.
That said, the algorithm isn’t really geared toward dating; it’s intended to be a back-up plan, and according to the girls who made it, 30% of people meet up with their match, and 5% end up in a relationship of one year or more at other schools.