BY REBECCA GAGNON ’23
STAFF WRITER
The newest buzz on and off the Mount Holyoke campus has been the MoHo Marriage Pact. The @mohomarriagepact Instagram page and an email sent out to the Mount Holyoke community let Mount Holyoke students know about the latest opportunity to find a new friend or romantic partner.
“The MoHo Marriage Pact was a team of Mount Holyoke students and a couple of our friends from Stanford,” Madelynn Hardtke ’24, one of the creators of the MoHo Marriage Pact, said. “The Stanford team has launched Marriage Pact at a bunch of schools, and they are the ones with the algorithm, along with all of the marketing knowledge. The Mount Holyoke team were the people who had all the knowledge on Mount Holyoke, so we adapted the questions to fit the College’s population.”
Hardtke also said this was an activity that the team hoped would bring together the Mount Holyoke community in a time of uncertainty and help everyone find their perfect match — whether that be romantic or platonic.
“I feel like sometimes [while dating] you just want there to be more of a prompt that is specific to your own community,” Phoebe Murtagh ’21 said. “I have thought multiple times that there should be a Seven Sister-specific dating app or something. Like, I don’t need the entire world, I just need more reasons to talk to people in a community that I already have.”
According to The Stanford Daily, the Marriage Pact began in 2017, when Stanford students Sophia Sterling-Angus and Liam McGregor sent out a survey they called the “Stanford Marriage Pact.” This idea came from the joke that if two friends haven’t found someone by a certain age, then they would marry each other. Sterling-Angus and McGregor sent out the survey and used an algorithm to find participants’ perfect matches.
The Marriage Pact has since expanded to other colleges, including Mount Holyoke.
“Technically, we are not allowed to reveal a lot about the survey because it is classified information,” Hardtke explained. “But it leans on research from psychology, economics and computer science [and is] basically designed to make the best match in the community. It was heavily adapted for Mount Holyoke because we were the first [gender-diverse women’s college] that they ran the pact at, so previously, there wasn’t an option for just platonic matches. We changed a lot of gender[ed] language. A lot of the questions were adapted because Mount Holyoke is such a different campus from other colleges, so I think we created a pretty awesome and different experience for Mount Holyoke students than any other school that has experienced the Marriage Pact before.”
The survey was written to take about 10 minutes to complete and was sent out to the whole Mount Holyoke community. Once a person completed the survey, they had the opportunity to send it to others to pass on the message.
“When I took it, I honestly didn’t know what it was going to ask me or expect of me,” Lauren Gruen ’23 said. “I was surprised to find while it does ask you very early on if you are interested in a romantic or platonic match, it was all the same questions. It had a point where it was like, ‘How many kids do you want?,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t think my friends need to care,’” Gruen added.
Gruen explained that, although she didn’t know what the survey was going to ask, she was surprised to find that there were no questions about general interests. She talked about how things such as hobbies, favorite movies or preferred music types were excluded and expressed how she thought those were important pieces of general information that a romantic or platonic match should know.
“I thought it would be fun, and I might meet someone cool,” Murtagh said, discussing their reason for participating in the survey. “I thought the [survey] was fine, but I did [hear] some good points from friends. One of my closest friends knows that she doesn’t want children, and … two … questions were based on theoretical children, which isn’t helpful for her purposes.”
“I do think, if I created it, I would add a question or two about basic interests,” Gruen said. “Just so people have a starting point. Just a couple of questions that it said at the beginning like, ‘By the way, here are some basic interest questions and we will supply the answers of these to your match’ would have been helpful.”
Gruen expressed how this basic information about her match would have been useful while she was reaching out to them. Since she didn’t know their pronouns, major or class year, Gruen felt a bit weird contacting them and thought that the basic information would have helped her.
“I was matched with someone I have known for a year and have worked with on [SGA] E-Board,” Murtagh laughed. “So [they’re a] cool person, but I already knew them. So [it was] unsuccessful?”
However, there have been some success stories that Hardtke has heard.
“Obviously, we haven’t had a lot of time to see how the matches turned out,” Hardtke said. “But from what I have heard from a couple of people already, I know someone has made a super good friend through it [and] there have been a couple of dates that went pretty well, so I am pretty confident in that.”
Gruen stated that she would complete the survey if it came back, and Hardtke hinted that there might be a redux of the survey next year.
“If people have any success stories they want to share [about] how their matches turned out, they can always get in contact with me,” Hardtke said. “I would love to hear about it so we can further help strengthen or change the activity for future years. I am also really excited to hear how the hard work turned out.”