Just after 10 p.m. on Feb. 24, Sawyer Library erupted into chaos. Students abandoned problem sets and tutorial papers in search of their friends. Williams Students Online (WSO) crashed. 

A few moments earlier, individualized emails from Marriage Pact fell into student inboxes. The emails revealed their recipients’ most compatible match at the College, concluding a weeklong saga that took campus by storm. 

Crushes, exes, and strangers alike were drawn together by the Pact’s mysterious algorithm. The Record spoke to some of its 1,360 participants — nearly 60 percent of the student body — to learn more about their quests to find true love. 

Created at Stanford as part of an economics course assignment in 2017, Marriage Pact asks participants several questions about their values, preferences, and habits on a scale from one to seven. Through its matching algorithm, the Pact is intended to pair users with their “most compatible marital backup plan,” according to its website. 

The algorithm has seen some success: One of the survey’s founders, Liam McGregor, told The Associated Press that about 30 percent of matches meet up in person, and of those, one in nine date for at least one year. At the time of the interview’s publication, 611,731 people nationwide had taken a chance on the Pact.

After hearing about Marriage Pact’s success at other institutions, two students — who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the possibility of social repercussions — reached out to the Marriage Pact team last summer about the possibility of introducing it to the College. “It seemed like a fun little social experiment to bring to a small school like Williams and to try out in an environment where everyone claims to know everyone — or is at least one or two degrees away from anyone else,” one of the organizers said. 

The organizers originally set a personal goal of 1,317 participants, an expectation informed by participation rates at Amherst, where students have participated in the Pact annually for several years. “We were hoping for at least half the student body, and we were surprised and pretty happy with the amount of people that filled it out,” one organizer said. “It seemed to become a big trend on campus. That was a fun week to be a part of.”

The student body’s widespread participation in Marriage Pact was unprecedented. In the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, for example, only a few dozen students at the College turned to Datamatch — a similar matchmaking service created by students at Harvard — to seek out romance. 

A fall 2024 survey by the Record exploring students’ sexual satisfaction found that only 35 percent of 388 respondents had used a dating app while at the College. The most commonly used dating site was Tinder, followed by EphMatch, a dating service periodically accessible through WSO, and Hinge. 

Marketing was key to Marriage Pact’s success at the College, as frequent emails with hints about matches generated widespread suspense. While the Marriage Pact team at Stanford managed the algorithm and emails, the organizers were in charge of “social marketing” at the College, which they said included spreading the word to friends, clubs, teams, and “outspoken members” of each class year to increase sign-ups. 

A dive into the data 

Of the survey’s 1,360 participants at the College, 340 were first-years, 363 were sophomores, 287 were juniors, and 354 were seniors. Fifty-five percent of participants were women, 41 percent were men, and 3 percent were nonbinary. When the gender imbalance was the most stark, there were 223 more women than men, but by the time the survey closed, the gap had shrunk to 193. The organizers did not have access to data about participants’ sexualities. 

“Initially, it was the freshmen who were leading, and people at Marriage Pact said that usually the freshmen and sophomores go all out with it because it’s a bit more exciting for them,” one organizer said. “But as we kept moving on, it was almost the same across all grade years — except for juniors, which we theorize was because a lot of them are abroad.”

Almost all participants matched with someone in their own class year. “It’s kind of like, ‘If your grades don’t touch, nor should you,’” one organizer joked. 

The Pact’s matchmaking methods sparked speculation among many students. Even the organizers, however, were unsure of the algorithm’s exact details. “They keep the algorithm a secret,” one organizer said. “I’ve heard of a couple who took it together, had the exact same answers, and matched. But I think there’s also something where if you two are opposites, that might bring you together.”

The organizing duo had no involvement in the matching process, nor could they see any results — but they did have a say in some of the questions on the Pact’s survey. Of the 40 questions asked, 30 are standard across all colleges that participate in Marriage Pact, asking respondents to indicate agreement with statements like “It’s important my kids be raised religious” and “I would never bring a hookup home to an unmade bed.” 

But the organizers picked the final 10 questions from a list provided by Marriage Pact. The choice allows students to tailor the survey to their institutions’ campus culture: An article in The Associated Press, for instance, described how Georgetown’s survey focused more on politics and ambition, while Stanford’s asked about careerism and spontaneity. The two organizers said that they selected 10 questions for Williams students largely at random. 

Initials and intrigue

On Feb. 20, Marriage Pact emailed the 598 students who had already filled out the survey with the initials of their most compatible match at that point. The following day, it sent students their match’s major — though as more students joined the Pact throughout the week, many of the matches changed. 

Some students, eager to discover the identity of their potential match, flocked to academic buildings, where bulletin boards display the names and photos of majors in a given department. The less ambitious scoured WSO.

This strategy proved difficult, however, as Marriage Pact provided students with just first and last initials. In order to identify a student from their initials alone on WSO, users also need to know their middle initial, if they have one. 

Greta Vaughn ’26.5, like many other students, embraced a trial-and-error approach. “I went on my email and I would just put in the initials with any possible middle initial,” she said. After doing so, she was one step closer to solving the mystery of her match. 

Recognizing this campus-wide strife, Asa Shepard ’27 built Williams True Find, a website where students could input their match’s first and last initials and see a complete list of possible sweethearts. “I had some extra time on a Thursday evening, and I wasn’t about to go through everyone on WSO,” Shepard said of his decision to create the site. “I think giving people a site to go to that lists potential matches naturally increases speculation, increases drama.”

When Ellie Walker ’27 received her match’s initials, she went straight to Williams TrueFind for answers. “There was only one ‘TL’ that came up as a sophomore,” she said. The sole result happened to be Walker’s girlfriend, Tatum Leuenberger ’27. The couple decided to fill out the survey, which Walker called a “silly little thing,” even though they were already in a relationship. 

“I was like, ‘There’s actually no way,’” Walker said of the search result. Despite doubts, the two were indeed paired by the Pact four days later. “I just think it’s really cute. It’s nice bragging rights,” she added. 

Ultimately, 450 students visited the website for a peek at their prospects, Shepard said. 

When Marriage Pact at last revealed the final pairings on Feb. 24, WSO crashed due to the overwhelming flood of students rushing to glimpse their beloved.

Destiny or disaster? 

Marriage pact might have been successful in bringing about love at the College — but only time will tell. 

After Abdiel Perde ’28 and Maria Fareti ’28 — teammates on the track team — matched, the pair began calling one another pet names like “husband” and “my shorty.” “It’s pretty funny, but some teammates have told us they’re getting tired of it,” he said. 

In a few other instances, Marriage Pact deemed existing campus couples like Walker and Leuenberger perfect for one another. 

Claudia Russell ’25 and Jesse Shapiro ’25 — who have been dating since their first year at the College — decided to fill out the survey after learning that it inquired about relationship statuses, assuming it would not pair either of them with single students. Despite completing the survey independently, the couple matched, leading many of their friends to joke that the process was rigged. 

“[The final email] initially went to my spam,” Shapiro said. “I kept checking and looking at different places, and then it finally came up. And I was like, ‘Oh my God. Claudia Russell. Yeah, there we go.’” 

“I was like, ‘There’s literally no way,’” Russell said. She opened the email in Sawyer alongside many of her friends, who looked at their matches together. 

“Everyone was talking about it,” she added. “It was like Christmas morning.” 

In some awkward cases, however, Marriage Pact identified a spark that had already gone out. 

Vaughn and her match had a brief romantic history but ultimately decided against pursuing anything serious. “When I got that individual, the exploration of that relationship was already wrapped up and tied with a bow and put off to the side,” Vaughn said. “I’m sure a lot of people had a similar experience where they didn’t even get a chance to meet someone new because they already knew [their match].” 

On Feb. 23 — the day the survey was set to close — participants received an email announcing that the deadline would be extended one day due to a gender imbalance in responses. 

“Right now, we have 28 more women than men in our heterosexual marriage market,” the email read. “Because our algorithm matches 1:1, this means 28 heterosexual women’s submissions could go unmatched.” 

But some still went unmatched: At the moment of the reveal, Marriage Pact sent an email to 92 “unlucky” participants, explaining that the matching pool wasn’t even and they would instead receive an “optimal friend match.” 

Two of those friends were Eden Murphy ’27 and Yunae Zou ’27. But they were thrilled at this result. The two were randomly matched as roommates in their first year and have been inseparable ever since. In fact, they decided to room together again this year and have previously joked about committing to a marriage pact of their own, agreeing to tie the knot if they don’t find love elsewhere. 

“I actually thought it was the cutest thing ever,” Zou said. “We make so many jokes about an ‘invisible string’ … but it’s so cute that we got algorithmically matched.”

While some in search of love may have been disappointed by the friendship match, Murphy offered a different perspective. “I chose to think of it as, like, ‘There is no man you’re more compatible with than you are with Yunae,’” she said.

Reflections on romance 

Though some students acknowledged that the tight-knit nature of a small campus like Williams could create awkwardness for the Pact’s users, others felt that its interconnectedness worked in the Pact’s favor. Shapiro said that at a school as small as the College, students are likely to know their match or know someone who does, which only heightens the intrigue. 

Still, the Pact created an opportunity for new connections. “This was an example of a way that people could break out of their little bubbles,” Russell said. “A lot of the time, our teams and clubs can feel very insular, and if you have a friend group, that’s your friend group until you graduate — so the opportunity to be matched with a new person, when you don’t necessarily have to do the first step of reaching out, I think was exciting for people.”

Russell added that the high marriage rate among College alums, as well as two events hosted for seniors, commonly referred to as “First Chance” and “Last Chance,” give students a strong impression that they might meet their spouse during their four years at the College. “There’s a lot of talk around it, but people are like, ‘Okay, where is my person?’” she said. “Marriage Pact is an actionable thing where people can find [them].”

Murphy appreciated that the Pact broke the ice for students. “Nowadays, especially on a small campus, no one is going up to each other and asking to get a cup of coffee,” she said. “It’s a beautiful idea that, regardless of how the algorithm works and its accuracy, it’s bringing two people together who maybe otherwise wouldn’t have thought of each other in that way.”