The marriage pact is an age-old custom: If two friends can’t find love years into the future, they agree to be one another’s “Plan B.” Today, some Duke students are embracing this strategy in search of their lifelong partner, just in case traditional dating doesn’t pan out.
The tradition’s success on campus comes in the form of two student-run platforms: the Duke Marriage Pact and Fluke Marriage Pact, which both play cupid for Duke’s single population.
“If someone better comes along in your 20s, more power to you. We hope you don’t need us,” The Duke Marriage Pact advertises on its website. “But … better safe than sorry.”
Duke Marriage Pact
The Duke Marriage Pact “is something that hopefully people are going to remember and take with them for the rest of their life, even if they don't ever talk to their match or reach out to them,” said junior Margaret Cole, one of the two Marriage Pact product managers at Duke. “… The goal is to create a campus tradition that stays with people.”
The Duke Marriage Pact, an online matchmaking service that uses an algorithm to pair students, returned to Duke for its fourth year. The survey was open from Nov. 18 to Nov. 25, attracting 2,776 participants — more than 43% of Duke’s undergraduate population.
The Marriage Pact originated in 2017 as a final project for a market design class at Stanford University. When Stanford students Liam McGregor and Sophia Sterling-Angus developed an algorithm that applied Nobel Prize-winning economics to optimize and match compatible long-term romantic partners, the Stanford Marriage Pact was born, attracting over 4,000 sign-ups in its first iteration. Since then, the Marriage Pact has spread to 100 college campuses across the country and produced over 285,000 matches.
When the Marriage Pact made its debut on Duke’s campus in January 2021, it drew in more than 4,500 participants, amounting to approximately two-thirds of the undergraduate population.
Based on student responses to an online survey of around 50 questions covering demographics, politics and religious affiliation, the Marriage Pact promised to “find [students’] optimal backup plan out of everyone on campus.”
In an effort to achieve that goal — although most survey questions are standard across all Marriage Pacts — Cole curated several questions related to success and competitiveness, which she believed would resonate with Duke students.
She shared that the turnout for this academic year’s Marriage Pact was “exceptional,” highlighting that few other campus traditions and surveys engaged as many people. Cole credited the success to “the buzz that we were able to create on those first and second days [advertising the survey] that made people really want to tell all their friends about it and get involved.”
In a shift from previous years, the survey was released in November instead of February in an effort to avoid low turnout. In the past, the Duke Marriage Pact and the Fluke Marriage Pact — a similar project from The Fluke News, the campus’s satirical news organization — were released around the same time, sparking confusion and a low response rate, Cole noted.
Sophomore Katie Li, who completed the survey, felt that the timing of the service’s release was not ideal. She noted that the marriage pact was set close to finals, which she characterized as a time when people lack the “time [and] energy to meet up with a complete stranger.”
Sophomore David Boham echoed Li’s experience, stating that he would prefer to participate in the matching service at the beginning of the semester.
“The farther you get into the semester and the farther you get into your experience at Duke, the more closed off you are,” he said.
The lopsided ‘heterosexual marriage market’
The Marriage Pact was not executed without its challenges. Because the algorithm strives to offer one-to-one matching, the service extended its survey deadline when 294 more women signed up than men.
To address the lopsided “heterosexual marriage market,” the Marriage Pact team encouraged students to continue sharing the Marriage Pact to “straight (or bi) men” and “rescue one of our unmatched women from the waitlist,” according to an email sent to all participants one day before the service closed.
In an effort to avoid last year’s predicament, Cole shared that they specifically targeted sports teams and campus groups with a predominantly male membership.
The imbalance in the pool meant that not all women were going to receive a romantic match. One person who received a friend match was Li, who filled out the Marriage Pact at the last minute at the urging of her roommate. Although Li viewed her match’s Instagram, she did not get in touch with her because she was not looking to make a new friend when she signed up for the service.
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“I feel like it's kind of creepy … just to reach out to them and be like, ‘hey, we were matched, although I'm not your first choice and you are not my first choice either,” she said.
Boham echoed Li. He filled out the Marriage Pact to see “what the hype [was] about,” since everyone he knew was taking part in it. Despite matching in the 97.78% percentile of all possible pairs in this year’s Marriage Pact, Boham found “cold-reaching out” to his compatible match “unwarranted.”
“I don't think we live in a society right now where people are very comfortable with cold-meeting up as much as the marriage pact would imply,” he said.
Boham’s match did not reach out either.
When asked about her experience filling out the questionnaire, Li spoke about the highly specific, detailed questions, especially those related to private sexual preferences. However, she explained that she participated in the Marriage Pact “just for fun.”
“I feel like everybody in this day and age is pretty open, especially people from my generation,” she said.
Immediately after the introduction of Marriage Pact on Duke’s campus in 2021, some students and faculty raised questions regarding the service’s data privacy policy, as the matching startup evolved to become a commercialized business. Others voiced concerns that virtual matchmaking and its algorithmic nature is unlikely to spark genuine connections, as it fails to take into account “personality quirks and that ineffable spark of chemistry.”
Some students have opted for alternative matchmaking services such as the Fluke Marriage Pact, which has become a campus tradition in its own right. Matches are overseen by members of The Fluke News rather than being managed by technology.
Fluke Marriage Pact
Students still searching for love via the internet before Valentine’s Day can give it a second go with The Fluke News Marriage Pact, which opened Jan. 12. The 52-question Google Forms survey has been run by Duke’s satirical newspaper The Fluke News since 2021.
This year’s marriage pact is led by Makayla Doyle, “head czar” of the marriage pact and a Fluke staff writer. She shared that her unfortunate experience being matchless last year prompted her to join the marriage pact team during her sophomore year.
“I was like ‘I am so funny,’ ‘I am going to find love.’ And then I just never got matched. I was so offended,” Doyle said, adding that her goal for this year’s survey is for everyone to receive a match, even if it is a “friend” match.
What type of consultant are you?
To differentiate itself from the Duke Marriage Pact, The Fluke has catered its questions to specifically capture the quirks and personalities of Duke’s student population.
Questions ranged from asking for students’ LinkedIn profile URL to “What country could you run and why?” and “Are you over your ex?” The humor behind these questions aims to connect Duke students in a more personal way than the Duke Marriage Pact, whose questions Doyle believes “feel removed.”
Junior Martin Heintzelman, editor-in-chief of The Fluke, noted that most of the work is “trying to use stupid questions to dig at real traits that people have.”
For example, students could respond to the “what is your major question?” by selecting either:
- Future Consultant (Premed)
- Future Consultant (Prelaw)
- Future Consultant (CS)
- Future Consultant (Engineering)
- Future Consultant (Econ)
- Following your dreams (Broke)
- B--- (Program II)
Heintzelman shared that The Fluke team was particularly “proud” of this question — a jab at Duke’s pre-professional culture and an apt illustration of how tailored The Fluke’s pact is to its audience.
Match day
The survey is scheduled to close on Jan. 31. Afterwards, a team of 15 Fluke staff writers plan to congregate in a classroom for six to eight hours with a box of donuts and buckle down on creating matches. The team will begin with non-negotiables including class year, religion, gender and sexual orientation.
“We don’t want to be matching seniors with freshmen,” Heintzelman said.
When evaluating the niche questions on the form, the matching team said it aims to match students whose answers share the “same vibe” according to Doyle. This could mean similar dealbreakers, interests and behaviors.
Though, this year’s survey omitted one contentious question: What’s your height?
“I think it's way funnier to match people based purely on the ugliness of their responses and not anything else, right?” Heintzelman joked.
The Fluke aims to email respondents with their match on the morning of Valentine’s Day — which, while romantic, may be a bit too late for matches to make a reservation at the highly coveted Cucciolo Osteria.
‘Chatting about love’
To further draw a deeper distinction between the Fluke Marriage Pact and the Duke Marriage Pact, The Fluke ramped up its production quality for this year’s rendition.
First-year Torrey Lin assumed the unofficial role of managing video production. He recalled that the Thursday before the survey was released, the team sat down to brainstorm how to maximize its reach over social media.
Inspired over winter break, Lin took charge of The Fluke's first marriage pact promotional video. He shared that the scene from the film “Crazy Rich Asians” where rumors of protagonists Rachel Chu and Nick Young’s romance rapidly spread around Singapore helped him visualize his first video.
“They are all texting each other, and everyone’s connected … that's the base inspiration for [the first video].”
To emulate the scene, Lin asked staff writers to submit funny voice memos discussing the marriage pact. Some included “Last year I got matched with my sister!” and “Let's be honest, there’s no way you are getting married otherwise.”
The first promotional video was released on The Fluke News Instagram the same day as the survey.
In the second video, Lin and Alex Hermoso, a sophomore and staff writer for The Fluke News, sat around a fireplace reading the haiku responses to the question “Are you over your ex?”
Hermoso and Lin aimed for the video — inspired by fireside chat skits from South Park and Saturday Night Live — to create a juxtaposition between a “distinguished and proper” setting and “stupid” commentary, calling it “Chatting About Love.”
To address data privacy concerns, the Fluke Marriage Pact team is briefed about “the importance of being discreet” about the pact.
“It is ultimately a spreadsheet with the personal information of 1,100 Duke students, and that's not something that we're interested in giving out or abusing in any way,” Heitzelman said.
The Excel spreadsheet with the data responses is only available to Fluke staff writers.
So, computer generated or hand-picked by your classmates, will you find love this year?
Editor’s note: Martin Heintzelman is the Blue Zone Editor for the sports section of The Chronicle’s 120th volume.
Michelle Voicu is a Trinity sophomore and an associate news editor for the news department.
Lucas Lin is a Trinity sophomore and a university news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.