The Marriage Pact, a student-run organization at colleges across the U.S, launched this week at Tulane. The Marriage Pact was started by two undergraduates in 2017 at Stanford University, where they designed a 10-minute questionnaire with the goal of finding the single best person from your campus for you to spend your life with.

The Marriage Pact runs every response through a custom matching algorithm in order to give each participant the name of their supposed best match on campus. Freshman Lexi Liu, along with freshman Grace Annino and a few others are Tulane’s partners with the Marriage Pact. 

“I became interested in [the Marriage Pact] because my sister had it at her school, at Duke,” Liu said. “I tried to fill it out to see what it would take me to, and as soon as I put in my Tulane email, it stopped me right there and was like ‘sorry, you don’t have an email affiliated with this school, but we will reach out to you to see if you want to bring it to your school.’ People from the Marriage Pact set up a Zoom call with [me and my roommate Grace Annino], and they said they wanted to work with us. We had to come up with marketing strategies that were completely unique to Tulane. So, we thought of the Fly, the Commons, The Boot, stuff like that would engage Tulane students … Two juniors at Stanford made the graphics for us. We came up with the themes for them.”

Liu, along with the other partners, had the chance to come up with 10 unique questions in addition to the questions on the standard questionnaire. 

The Marriage Pact had almost half of their responses on the day it launched, and freshmen and sophomores made up the majority of the responses. 

“The first day, responses went up really really fast, and each day since then, it’s been going up,” Liu said. “The first day it went up by like 1000, the second day it was like 300, then 200, then it’s been like less than 100 responses each day since. The main thing is that it has mainly been freshmen and sophomores filling it out. Seniors make up maybe 200 of the responses. But compared to freshmen, maybe like 900 freshmen filled it out.”

Because the program matches people 1-1, that means in order for everyone to end up with a match, there needs to be even numbers of people’s preferences. That has been a challenge for the Marriage Pact team at Tulane. 

“Right now, there are 2334 responses. And there are 797 heterosexual girls who will not get a match,” Liu said. “We are trying to get to 50% of undergraduates responding, right now we are at 27%. We are trying to do everything possible, but we are running out of ways to get people to fill it out.” 

Despite the challenges, Liu said she feels as though the Marriage Pact has been a success at Tulane.