If there’s anything our student body can all agree on, it’s that this school is too goddamn small. Can you even remember the early days of our first year, before we all started playing Two Degrees of Separation? When the walk through the Starbucks lounge wasn’t strewn with the faces of old flings and frenemies? When your bestie could excitedly say they’d met someone, and it wasn’t your ex-situationship’s old hookup? Yeah, me neither.
Over the past two weeks, Marriage Pact has taken (a subset of) campus by storm. Maybe senioritis and my overall jaded demeanor have thrown me out of the loop, but I only spotted one of the flyers the day it was supposed to close. Recap time: Marriage Pact is an amorphous, vaguely benign organization that exists shrouded in mystery. It’s unclear where HQ might be, but my guess is somebody’s mom’s basement. They bring “the marriage pact” to willing campuses, in the form of an algorithm that calculates your PERFECT MATCH!!11!!1! from all the other folks on campus that share your desperation.
In the ’90s, “Friends” introduced us to the concept of a marriage pact: if you and a friend of your respective gender preferences were still sad and single by a certain age, you’d cut the waiting and get married. Personally, I’m more tempted by the prospect of a sham marriage for tax purposes, but if awkwardly moving in together and silently wondering if and when you’re gonna start being romantically interested in your buddy before planning your shared graves is what’s going to float your boat, good luck!
I know, I know, who am I to turn up my nose at OMIGOD TRUE LOVE!!! So in the interest of investigative journalism, I got out my little phone and scanned the little QR code and prepared myself for some ridicule. Marriage Pact asks you a series of biographical questions and political compass-style stuff about your values, and also requires you to say which ethnicities or religions you absolutely do not want to be matched with. Yikes. Anyway, I filled out the form, and bam! Wedding bells started to ring. Wait, false alarm, it’s just been 15 minutes and the Rush Rhees bells are hungry for blood — marriage, they’re hungry for marriage, just like all fourteen hundred (!) of us who signed up for a wifey, husband-y, or spoucey.
Like a true detective, I attempted to piece together the whole Marriage Pact story. Since the organizers were secretive, a secret they shall stay; I did hear from a friend of a friend that the poster design artist went around at 3 a.m. to flyer so no one would see her. Honestly, I’d do the same, but I also wouldn’t be leading the Rochester crusade for matrimony. Once you signed up for the pact, a first round of emails went out with the major of your (current) “most compatible match”. A second email gave you their initials (so you could start planning your embroidered bathroom towels). Finally, the day matches were revealed, and you got a sneak peek of your true love’s initials, which in some cases were different from the previous week’s. Chaos! Confusion! Frantic custom towel order cancellations! For the folks who had been determinedly chasing their match, what a game changer! Call off the bloodhounds! Open up Facebook! WE GOTTA GET MARRIED BEFORE WE’RE OLD AND SHRIVELED, DAMN IT!
My fellow girlboss and former club advisor, Cat Crawford, found herself in the dugout of this dangerous game. From what she described, the underclassmen were going kind of feral and “hunting down” their matches. It’s still unclear to me whether the goal of this flash dating event is to find you that “haha if we’re still single at 30, jk jk unless…” type of rapport, or if we’re just treating this as a more reliable Tinder, complete with guaranteed ghosting after the match. Another of my friends dared to ask the question on everyone’s mind: Does this actually work? Who’s even signing up for this?
Matches were revealed last Tuesday night, to a resounding response of “huh, I guess that’s someone who goes here.” I attempted to poll the student body to learn about the wedding invites I’m sure to receive within the next six months, and found a divide among students in relationships. Some filled it out, and some didn’t, claiming their relationship was too new, or too serious, or too fragile. “It seemed like a bad idea,” one source told me. Fun fact for the rest of you: Marriage Pact came to UR four years ago, amid the COVID stuff, so people were really invested. I was first introduced to the concept of this Nobel prize-winning algorithm (seriously, it’s all their website cares about) from stories of my friend’s notoriously toxic on-and-off relationship. The two of them filled out the pact and then had a massive fight when they didn’t get matched … I’m not sure what the moral of the story was here, but thank god they broke up.
In a shocking turn of events, some folks have connected with their match! But for every real-life date, there are five ignored Instagram DMs. I heard of a student reaching out to their match, only to find that the two of them were in the same twenty-person class and that failing to recognize your soulmate’s existence is probably not the best start to an epic romance. Another flavor of awkwardness is the plague of past failed connections: what if you got matched with your rite of passage freshman year fling? What if you got matched with your ex? No amount of fancy economic hand waving could make me go back to that, so watch yourself, Marriage Pact. Maybe we could have included a section for your campus ops instead of asking how single we were (a real question, and answering ‘in a relationship’ did not force you to exit the form). Personally, I got MP’ed with one of my residents, which kinda kills the possibility of any normal interaction we could have had, ever.
While some lonesome students took the pact very seriously (I believe there are a few preemptive registries floating around, and did you know that you can get married in Mount Hope Cemetery for $40 an hour?), other dastardly scoundrels took it upon themselves to destroy the sanctity of Marriage (Pact). Imagine the dismay of a poor pre-med first-year, who excitedly opened their match only to find it was their Chemistry professor. That’s right, folks: even Sarah Mangelsdorf herself went on the marriage market! Totally for real, and not entered under false pretenses by a funny bastard. There’s never a better time to be on Fizz than when some innocuous interpersonal event takes the nets by storm, and the MP memes DELIVEREDIn this day and age, it sure is hard to believe in anything: one of my friends very confidently set up a Marriage Pact date in the dining hall, which I think would make me drop my phone in the river. But even the rare romantics got scorched in this crossfire: my absolute catch of a friend, Ro, got a fake person as his match. Hannah, whoever you might be, you don’t deserve the touching love letter he sent to your @u.rochester.edu address. Ro is gonna get so many marriage proposals in life, and you’ll rue the day you turned him down. (With that said, if any readers are interested, feel free to reach out to us for a second chance at a match)
Sitting inside Boulder Coffee with a French Toast Latte (seasonal) as I procrastinated writing this piece (year-round), the murmurs of a first date drifted over from the table next to me. Reader, this guy WOULD NOT STOP TALKING. Not only did he jump from his parents’ divorce to “Fellowship of the Ring” to “The Legend of Korra” back to Fellowship, but his poor date barely got a word in. I was on the brink of asking them both for a quote about this awful date, when they MADE PLANS for ANOTHER. Maybe some people just like being talked at? Maybe they were part of the same really restrictive religion and have the smallest, most horrible pool of potential life partners you could imagine? Maybe love works in mysterious ways, and you don’t need a stupid algorithm to spit out one person you gotta spend the rest of your life with. Maybe she was born that morning and had never heard of pop culture before. If my only option were that guy, I would probably sign up to get hitched to a stranger, too.
Wrapping up this season of single sadness, almost two hundred unlucky heterosexual women were denied their God-given right of a husband, and were instead directed to ‘friend matches’, which is just a nice way of saying ‘fellow spinster, you can grow old with’. Once again, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that this school is goddamn tiny, and do you really want to marry anyone you took Calculus with? Extend your stay by four years for another shot at Rochester luv, or just take the L and start looking at retirement homes with your bestie.
Maybe I’ll have better luck in grad school.
