Graphic by Melanie Duronio ‘26.
By Melanie Duronio ’26
Managing Editor of Web & Features Editor
On an unsuspecting fall afternoon, word spread amongst students that an Instagram account had posted for the first time in over a year with the caption, “Lovebirds. We’ve missed you.” Mount Holyoke College Marriage Pact was back, once again promising companionship for its followers.
The Marriage Pact is an annual matchmaking service that takes place on multiple college campuses across the country, describing itself as “at the frontier of applying science and technology to serve genuine, meaningful relationships.” Founded by two Stanford undergraduates in 2017 and entirely student-run, the service is designed as an alternative to dating apps that helps college students find their “best backup plan” for love.
Since its launch, the Marriage Pact has been established at 86 schools across the country — including all of Mount Holyoke’s fellow Seven Sister and Five College Consortium schools. The Marriage Pact has amassed 407,480 participants “and counting” nationwide, according to its website. This year, 631 of these participants were Mount Holyoke students.
However, the goal of the Marriage Pact is not to guarantee a relationship or perfect pairing. Instead, it is to match applicants with someone they are compatible with, whether that be as a friend or a romantic partner.
“We believe there are three types of relationships that matter in everyone’s life: your romantic relationships, your friendships, and your relationship with yourself. In real life, you nurture all three of these types of relationships at once — so why is it that they’ve been kept in separate products since the dawn of the internet?” the Marriage Pact remarks in its official About Page.
Mount Holyoke’s Marriage Pact was advertised as such, with even “lonely firsties” being able to participate, as @mohomarriagepact stated in an Instagram post on April 1, 2021. This semester, Mount Holyoke’s Marriage Pact opened on Nov. 13 and closed on Nov. 20 at 5 p.m., two days before Thanksgiving break.
“I think it’s a great idea. I think it’s really sweet, really well done. And they were really quick to give us the matches,” Camila Juarbe ’26 said. She added that “the website was pretty” and the questions “were funny.”
Although she did not end up meeting her match in person, Juarbe still liked the experience. However, she felt the date of this year’s Marriage Pact could have been adjusted.
“I think that the time in which it came out could’ve probably been next semester, like maybe not before the break. Just because then people would’ve been able to meet up with their match,” she explained. “I thought maybe I would be besties with my match because that’s how they [MoHo Marriage Pact] advertised it … But it didn’t turn out that way. [Though] I don’t know, I didn’t expect anything of it.”
Izzy Leake ’26 filled out the Marriage Pact with the hope of “meet[ing] someone really cool and be[ing] friends with them.” However, they also did not meet up with their match, having “realized it was more about doing it for fun and because my friends did it … I also thought it would be funny to maybe match with a friend or acquaintance I already know, so since I did not know my match I did not feel the need to reach out.”
The service uses a survey of 40 to 50 questions to match applicants with a compatible partner. Questions pertain to a wide range of topics, including applicants’ political views. Answers are given on a scale of 1 to 7 — strongly disagree to strongly agree — and are then processed through the Marriage Pact’s algorithm. Matches are calculated and assigned before being delivered to applicants’ inboxes, along with their compatibility percentage.
“I think a strength is that … [there were] pretty specific questions,” Juarbe said. “Some of them were funny, but others were about political views and stuff like that, which I think is really important if we’re going to really do a match.”
However, Leake did not find the questions to be as useful. “I feel like the survey should have focused more on things like personality traits and sense[s] of humor because those things can indicate whether you get along with someone. Instead, a lot of the questions were about values and preferences, which are also important, but I wish the main focus was on personality.”
Leake also found The MoHo Marriage Pact’s main drawback to be that it was not “reflective of [Mount Holyoke’s] culture,” feeling that one question asking “whether you would support your child if they were gay” normalized homophobia and was “out of place” compared to other questions.
“It also rubbed me the wrong way when they had more options for how to describe [one’s] own gender identity, but not as many options for which gender identities you would want to match with,” Leake said. “I feel like the questions should have been more tailored to queer and trans people because that is a larger population at our school compared to most colleges.”
However, the Marriage Pact questions can vary. According to a graphic uploaded in a Stanford Daily interview, questions such as “I believe in star signs” and “My partner can be ‘just friends’ with an ex” were created by the original Stanford team, and both were included in this year’s MoHo Marriage Pact as part of a curated list.
“To arrive at [this] curated list, hundreds of questions are considered, and even some of the final ones are left out by some campuses with which they partner,” The Stanford Daily reported.
As such, Leake noted that there was no option to choose between searching for a friend or a “romantic connection” this year despite “[having] that option last time they did the Marriage Pact a few years ago,” indicating that questions do have the potential to be changed or added.
Overall, the Marriage Pact places no guarantee on matching students with “the one”; it can only promise a compatible match through a carefully crafted algorithm. Ultimately, the power is in the applicants themselves to decide whether or not their Marriage Pact match is truly right for them. “I think they should do it next year,” Juarbe said. “I would do it again.”