Nearly 1,000 Lafayette College students may have found their lifelong lovers on Monday, that is, if they trust the ins and outs and tricky algorithms of the nationally-recognized Marriage Pact.
The Lafayette extension of Marriage Pact — launched on March 3 — offered students the chance to find their potential life partner or “optimal backup plan,” matching pairs of students through a compatibility survey. The program, which has been brought to college campuses across the United States, claims to use “Nobel Prize-winning economics,” according to the company’s website.
The pact matched 997 Lafayette students, 36.5% of the student body, with their supposedly most compatible match, according to anonymous data collected by the questionnaire. Of the participating students, 556 identified themselves as women. The freshman class year participated the most with 300 responses, with a steady decrease for each successive class year.
Bianca Vaneri ‘27 said that she decided to start the Marriage Pact at Lafayette after seeing a post on the anonymous social media platform YikYak that encouraged someone to apply to bring the program to the college.
“It was not something I ever planned to help launch,” Vaneri said. “I really was just filling it out because I have a friend at Northwestern who did it.”
“I never expected them to reach back out to me,” she continued. Vaneri eventually worked with two other Lafayette students, Sasha Carter ‘27 and Fola Fayemi ‘28, and two representatives from Marriage Pact.
Together, they worked to tailor the Marriage Pact experience to be the best fit for Lafayette. For example, Vaneri said the Marriage Pact — which has been active on 100 college campuses since its 2017 founding — typically releases the majors and class years of participants’ matches ahead of the reveal date, a tradition that the Lafayette team felt would make matches too obvious given the small student body size.
“They don’t want you to feel like it’s an outside organization coming in, and so they try to emphasize that it’s the Lafayette Marriage Pact,” she explained. “So they were specifically putting it in our hands, like we’re the team launching it and they’re just helping from the sidelines.”
Olivia Gonzalez ‘28 participated in the Marriage Pact because she thought it would be a “good way to meet new people.”
“I’ve seen it online before, trending on TikTok and stuff, so I thought that it was really cool that it came here to Laf,” she said.
Gonzalez said she ended up being matched with an acquaintance at 100% compatibility, one of just six such matches. She found out her match ahead of the release date after she and her match’s initials spent a few days at the top of the compatibility leaderboard.
Gonzalez said that her participation was “just for fun,” even with the perfect match.
“I was talking with my roommate about it,” Gonzalez said. “We’re saying that this was so much fun. Everyone on campus was buzzing for a few weeks, and it gave you something to look forward to.”
Bella Crapanzano ’26, on the other hand, was surprised when she matched with a total stranger.
“I genuinely didn’t expect that,” she said. “I expected to at least know the name, but I had never heard of him.”
Crapanzano’s match only reached out to her to tell her that he hadn’t taken the pact seriously, a sentiment which she shared.
“I just thought it was a nice experience to meet someone else that I probably wouldn’t have interacted with, period, other than this,” she said.
Liu ‘25 and their boyfriend took the Marriage Pact questionnaire out of curiosity regarding the pact’s algorithm.
“Our thought process was like, if the Marriage Pact algorithm isn’t strong enough to predict that we are compatible enough to be dating already, then it’s probably not a very good algorithm,” Liu said.
The verdict? The couple was 99.28% compatible, according to the Marriage Pact results.
“I refuse to be either surprised or unsurprised,” Liu said. “I am tickled, however. I am pleasantly tickled.”
Still, Liu remains skeptical regarding the pact’s accuracy.
“I think it’s very heteronormative,” Liu said, citing problems some of their friends who identify as asexual had with the pact’s unskippable questions regarding sexual preferences.
“Your love is not defined by an algorithm, and your friendships are not defined by an algorithm,” Liu added.
Multiple students declined to comment, citing negative interactions with their match.
