It’s 9:59 PM and I’m sitting in the library, reading Hamlet—or maybe more accurately, avoiding doing so by playing Semantle, my favorite Wordle variant. A tantalizing email drops into my inbox. The subject line reads: “Love loading….” At last. Contact from the mysterious algorithm overlords who will hand down the life-altering decision promptly, no doubt. Matches will be “forthcoming before 11pm,” says the email.
Okay. I take a deep breath to center myself and my increasingly queasy stomach. I can make it another hour. Finally, the clock on my computer ticks up to 11. A seed of dread that had been germinating in my stomach suddenly sprouts, its disquieting tendrils shooting through my body. Fate holds silly little me in its all-encompassing hands. I check my inbox, and sure enough, there it is: a single email to determine my future, one notification to cement all my prospects. In a way, it’s freeing, not having to worry about all that anxiety of finding a partner. The machine does it all for you.
I open the email, and I see my person’s name. I don’t know them; I have never met them. Apparently, we are in the 99.7th percentile for matches. I breathe a sigh of relief; I’ve heard horror stories of percentiles as low as 3—what do you do if you’re stuck with such an incompatible match? I gather myself and walk into the next room, where my friends are sitting at a table. To my shock and dismay, I find them laughing about their matches. “Should I DM them now, or as a reward for finishing my work tonight?” asks one. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to contact mine. He’s got a summer McKinsey internship on his LinkedIn,” moans another. A third says some of the most offensive words I have ever heard: “Marriage Pact is so silly, I did it for fun, but it really is such a stupid concept.” I can’t believe my ears—none of my so-called “friends” are treating this sacred, hallowed institution with the reverence it deserves. They should be judiciously picking out color palettes for the tablecloths at their weddings, not chuckling and returning to their econ problem sets. What gives?
It is a little strange that Marriage Pact is a seemingly ubiquitous topic of conversation for about two or three weeks in February, yet is also treated so flippantly. Over the last few weeks, any time a piece of information about Marriage Pact or Datamatch was released, it instantly became fodder for dining hall discussion and a flood of Librex posts. Even the silence from the people running Marriage Pact turned into a daily Librex post asking when the results would be released. Our treatment of the whole Marriage Pact event is tinged with irony.
The idea of the Marriage Pact should make sense to those people who believe that the world can be perfectly reduced to a series of logical propositions and can be perfectly mapped by human reason. If we can determine love through reason, an expansive enough survey—and boy is that Marriage Pact survey long!—should theoretically be able to find an ideal match. It could be a neat solution to what seems like a complicated problem, and I think this potential is part of what tickles our fancy. Whether or not you do believe that there is a potential algorithmic solution to finding a partner, that kernel of hope is exciting. It’s a nostalgic throwback to those name compatibility calculators from middle school, the ones that told us that our friend Emily was 93% compatible with her crush Will based on the indisputable scientific evidence wired into the computer.
On the other hand, plenty of people love the Marriage Pact for its absurdity. Most of us are convinced that we experience love and romantic feelings in such unpredictable ways that they must be uncapturable. How can some questions, answered on a scale from 1 to 7, possibly come close to replicating that tight, floating feeling we get in our stomachs upon developing a new crush? Perhaps one of the most central parts of Marriage Pact can help explain both our skepticism and our fascination with it: it doesn’t account for physical attraction. It plays into a fantasy of actually loving someone for personality and inner beauty, and it pushes against the tendency to perceive physical attraction as an indicator of potential interest. We want to believe that it’s possible for us to experience attraction regardless of what the other person looks like, but we are doubtful.
We love Marriage Pact because our brains tell us it shouldn’t actually work out. We don’t have to be attached, but we can be intrigued and amused. We love it because we (or maybe I should switch to the singular first person here) feel lonely and atomized at this strange place we call Yale University, and it offers a hope of connection both to someone new and to the people around us. Even writing this article, I’ve had many excellent conversations with people about the idea of Marriage Pact. The answer might be even simpler: we just love to talk about romantic feelings. The secrecy and guardedness with which the topic tends to be treated in our younger middle and high school days creates a certain giddiness and attraction to conversations about it. In other words, we talk about Marriage Pact because it’s fun to talk about; it is an incredibly low stakes way to get the rush of gossiping about romantic feelings without actually having to be emotionally invested in anything or anyone. We like to talk about Marriage Pact because we just want harmless conversation at the end of a long, stressful day of work and classes. Marriage Pact gives us an easy outlet for all these things we crave, and does so at absolutely no cost but a few minutes of our time.
Marriage Pact is full of contradictions. At most, it seems like Marriage Pact users sign up to meet a new friend. Still, the whole affair is advertised and treated in conversation, however ironically, as a romantic service. We joke about its absurdity, but we might harbor a seed of hope anyway. The Pact imposes a rationalist framework on something that seems so whimsical and inexplicable. It takes your loneliness and turns it into a point of conversation for you and your friends, even if you don’t end up matching with your mathematically determined soulmate. In short, there’s something appealing for everyone. Whatever your preferred explanation for the phenomenon of Marriage Pact, I say we should embrace its wonderful perplexities. After all, couldn’t we all use some lower stakes from time to time?
It’s 9:59 PM and I’m sitting in the library, reading Hamlet—or maybe more accurately, avoiding doing so by playing Semantle, my favorite Wordle variant. A tantalizing email drops into my inbox. The subject line reads: “Love loading….” At last. Contact from the mysterious algorithm overlords who will hand down the life-altering decision promptly, no doubt. Matches will be “forthcoming before 11pm,” says the email.
Okay. I take a deep breath to center myself and my increasingly queasy stomach. I can make it another hour. Finally, the clock on my computer ticks up to 11. A seed of dread that had been germinating in my stomach suddenly sprouts, its disquieting tendrils shooting through my body. Fate holds silly little me in its all-encompassing hands. I check my inbox, and sure enough, there it is: a single email to determine my future, one notification to cement all my prospects. In a way, it’s freeing, not having to worry about all that anxiety of finding a partner. The machine does it all for you.
I open the email, and I see my person’s name. I don’t know them; I have never met them. Apparently, we are in the 99.7th percentile for matches. I breathe a sigh of relief; I’ve heard horror stories of percentiles as low as 3—what do you do if you’re stuck with such an incompatible match? I gather myself and walk into the next room, where my friends are sitting at a table. To my shock and dismay, I find them laughing about their matches. “Should I DM them now, or as a reward for finishing my work tonight?” asks one. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to contact mine. He’s got a summer McKinsey internship on his LinkedIn,” moans another. A third says some of the most offensive words I have ever heard: “Marriage Pact is so silly, I did it for fun, but it really is such a stupid concept.” I can’t believe my ears—none of my so-called “friends” are treating this sacred, hallowed institution with the reverence it deserves. They should be judiciously picking out color palettes for the tablecloths at their weddings, not chuckling and returning to their econ problem sets. What gives?
It is a little strange that Marriage Pact is a seemingly ubiquitous topic of conversation for about two or three weeks in February, yet is also treated so flippantly. Over the last few weeks, any time a piece of information about Marriage Pact or Datamatch was released, it instantly became fodder for dining hall discussion and a flood of Librex posts. Even the silence from the people running Marriage Pact turned into a daily Librex post asking when the results would be released. Our treatment of the whole Marriage Pact event is tinged with irony.
The idea of the Marriage Pact should make sense to those people who believe that the world can be perfectly reduced to a series of logical propositions and can be perfectly mapped by human reason. If we can determine love through reason, an expansive enough survey—and boy is that Marriage Pact survey long!—should theoretically be able to find an ideal match. It could be a neat solution to what seems like a complicated problem, and I think this potential is part of what tickles our fancy. Whether or not you do believe that there is a potential algorithmic solution to finding a partner, that kernel of hope is exciting. It’s a nostalgic throwback to those name compatibility calculators from middle school, the ones that told us that our friend Emily was 93% compatible with her crush Will based on the indisputable scientific evidence wired into the computer.
On the other hand, plenty of people love the Marriage Pact for its absurdity. Most of us are convinced that we experience love and romantic feelings in such unpredictable ways that they must be uncapturable. How can some questions, answered on a scale from 1 to 7, possibly come close to replicating that tight, floating feeling we get in our stomachs upon developing a new crush? Perhaps one of the most central parts of Marriage Pact can help explain both our skepticism and our fascination with it: it doesn’t account for physical attraction. It plays into a fantasy of actually loving someone for personality and inner beauty, and it pushes against the tendency to perceive physical attraction as an indicator of potential interest. We want to believe that it’s possible for us to experience attraction regardless of what the other person looks like, but we are doubtful.
We love Marriage Pact because our brains tell us it shouldn’t actually work out. We don’t have to be attached, but we can be intrigued and amused. We love it because we (or maybe I should switch to the singular first person here) feel lonely and atomized at this strange place we call Yale University, and it offers a hope of connection both to someone new and to the people around us. Even writing this article, I’ve had many excellent conversations with people about the idea of Marriage Pact. The answer might be even simpler: we just love to talk about romantic feelings. The secrecy and guardedness with which the topic tends to be treated in our younger middle and high school days creates a certain giddiness and attraction to conversations about it. In other words, we talk about Marriage Pact because it’s fun to talk about; it is an incredibly low stakes way to get the rush of gossiping about romantic feelings without actually having to be emotionally invested in anything or anyone. We like to talk about Marriage Pact because we just want harmless conversation at the end of a long, stressful day of work and classes. Marriage Pact gives us an easy outlet for all these things we crave, and does so at absolutely no cost but a few minutes of our time.
Marriage Pact is full of contradictions. At most, it seems like Marriage Pact users sign up to meet a new friend. Still, the whole affair is advertised and treated in conversation, however ironically, as a romantic service. We joke about its absurdity, but we might harbor a seed of hope anyway. The Pact imposes a rationalist framework on something that seems so whimsical and inexplicable. It takes your loneliness and turns it into a point of conversation for you and your friends, even if you don’t end up matching with your mathematically determined soulmate. In short, there’s something appealing for everyone. Whatever your preferred explanation for the phenomenon of Marriage Pact, I say we should embrace its wonderful perplexities. After all, couldn’t we all use some lower stakes from time to time?
