As winter begins at Northwestern, with the season’s first snowfall arriving earlier this week, students face a flurry of changes, ranging from picking Winter Quarter classes to seeking out future romantic relationships. The Marriage Pact has similarly gone through a shift this academic year.
The annual questionnaire, designed to find students’ “the one,” matches students using a relationship psychology-based algorithm.
This year, 3,853 students from NU participated in the Marriage Pact, a survey that analyzes demographic, values, analytics and feedback data to match participants. Students are asked about their preference for race, religion, politics and other core values to ensure the highest compatibility between pairings.
In previous years, participants were asked to rank their preference for a platonic or romantic pairing, meaning they would be matched with someone with a similar inclination, Weinberg senior Vincent Chen said. This year, the question was noticeably absent, Chen said.
Getting rid of the question defeats the purpose of the Marriage Pact, McCormick sophomore Shin-yi Wang said.
“It definitely made the matches less accurate because someone who’s not in a relationship could 100% be paired up with someone who is,” Wang said.
Since participants cannot indicate their preference for a platonic or romantic match, Chen said the missing question may pose a problem when the pairings are revealed — people could want different levels of a relationship, he said.
SESP senior Sophia Suarez said the very title of the survey implies a higher level of commitment in choosing to participate.
The questions on the survey aim to match students for long-term compatibility, judging core values rather than surface-level traits, according to the Marriage Pact website.
“The questions indicate something a little bit more serious than just (meeting) casually because they’re talking about if you want to marry someone within your race, religion, political values and being open to certain things,” Suarez said.
However, many students, including Suarez, see the Marriage Pact as just an entertaining activity.
Wang said her favorite part of the process is the anticipation leading up to the reveal.
“My friends and I will try to guess who we got based on the initials and the major,” Wang said. “It’s just really silly and fun to play detective.”
It may even be an educational experience, Suarez said, helping people figure out what they want in a partner.
Being able to evaluate likes and dislikes within a relationship is not only a way to learn something about oneself, but also provides an opportunity to see how compatibility works, Suarez said.
“It’s always fun to think about the possibility of finding someone who (has) the same interests and goals as you do or is interested in the same things as you are,” Suarez said. “Maybe you don’t like something and they like something else, and it’s very compatible.”
Nevertheless, some students have found the Marriage Pact to accurately predict compatibility.
In her freshman year, Suarez received a friend match, which, she said, can happen when more one gender with a certain sexual orientation filled out the survey than the other and got her roommate. Although it was not the match she was expecting, she said the experience made for a funny memory.
“It was creepy because we were really close,” Suarez said. “The algorithm was perfect because we had a lot of the same thoughts, and it was so cute that we got put together.”
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— For Valentine’s Day, NU students reflect on Marriage Pact experience
— Students reflect on Marriage Pact experiences
— For some NU Marriage Pact participants, matches are close to home
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source dailynorthwestern.com ’
