By Claire Leibowitz and Allie Worchell
Photo courtesy of Vox.com
Because of the challenges of meeting new people in a pandemic, Marriage Pact launched on campus to give students a chance at finding their most compatible GW partner.
The Marriage Pact is a service that originated in a Market Design class at Stanford University. The algorithm uses “psychology, market design and computer science” to create the survey, according to the Marriage Pact website. The service was originally created for students to have a last-resort option for the future if they weren’t ready for a relationship at the moment. At GW, the service was used to create a sense of unity on campus.
“The goal at the end of the day was for all of us to build a community in some capacity,” said Hyatt Aronoff, a sophomore studying Public Health at GW.
Aronoff worked on the Marriage Pact along with three other GW students, Neha Panigrahi, Emily Berman and Kerrie Finegan. Aronoff crafted the social media posts and captions.
“Through the Instagram, people were laughing and submitting hilarious answers and building a community around this shared platform,” Aronoff said.
The team noticed a positive reaction from the student body. With a 40% of undergraduate students participation rate, Aronoff considers the Marriage Pact a success. Not all matches were romantic, as there was an imbalance between heterosexual participants. The 1:2 ratio meant that “a little more than half of the people got relationship matches.”
Another challenge was getting everyone to take the quiz. Aronoff explained how participation ultimately depended on how peoples’ friends responded. The team used Instagram and Direct Messages to recruit more students. “Getting people to pull the trigger and actually sign up was definitely most challenging,” he said.
The algorithm behind Marriage Pact is kept a secret. “It was two months in the making, meeting with people at Marriage Pact and talking about our community and figuring out graphics and eye-catching stuff. We wanted to know how to reach as many students as possible,” Aronoff said.
And the graphics were successful: freshman Jack Bloom saw someone post something from The Marriage Pact on their story. He thought it was cool and “did it because everyone was taking it.” Bloom said he didn’t want to feel left out.
When taking the survey, Bloom felt it was detailed. “I think that’s kind of interesting. It was a little spicy,” said Bloom. The detailed questions included questions on politics, kinks, would-you-rathers and deal breakers.
The algorithm paired Bloom with a match, and they chatted through Instagram Direct Message.
“I did it because it was a fun story,” Bloom said. “I think it’s a cute idea, and I was expecting it to be fun for like a week.”
Bloom called the Marriage Pact at GW a “fun little fad.” Many people took the questionnaire just to see what could have been.
“It was well done. I used it just for fun, and I think the majority of people just did it for fun, too,” Bloom said.
Maia Chameides, another freshman, didn’t have as much luck as Bloom. Due to the imbalance of heterosexual men and women who took the survey, Chameides was one of 992 women who received a friend match.
“My friend Maddie, who I met this semester, got my initials too which was so funny,” Chameides said. “We are already so close and we had such different answers but we are very compatible.”
Although she was expecting a love match, Chameides was very happy with her results.
“My match and I might be planning a wedding as a joke, like a kind of dinner thing just because it was so funny that we matched,” said Chameides.
“It was a really fun experience,” Aronoff said. “We hope potentially to make this a tradition, and we just hope it was a fun way to build a community. It was an amazing experience on our end.”
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