Can Date Drop save us all? Stanford’s problem with gamifying love
Marriage Pact and Date Drop have been propped up as solutions to students’ romance problems. Students might be in love with the wrong answer.
If you haven’t heard of Date Drop, the new campus-based matchmaking platform and now cease-and-desist recipient of Marriage Pact, odds are that your friends are still sneakily matchmaking your Stanford email as we speak. Participants are directed to sign up with their school email and fill out a detailed survey with Likert-scale questions ranging from “I subscribe to traditional gender roles in relationships” to “I approve of President Trump.”
The promise of these platforms is tantalizing and ambitious. Based on relationship psychology, the algorithm is meant to match you with the most compatible person every week. Date Drop, which markets itself as a way to “Go on dates without swiping” joins a growing collection of attempts to combat loneliness on campus. Mass isolation and a dwindling social scene are problems which have caught the attention of students, alumni and the administration alike. University pages provide guidance on “navigating loneliness,” and posts about feeling alienated populate the Fizz news cycle every other week. We point the finger in lots of directions — some argue that it’s the targeting of frats and co-ops since the 2010s, others believe Stanford’s hyper-competitive nature stifles relationship maintenance and makes usual opportunities to meet people, like school clubs, unattainable and difficult in their own right. Izzy Myerson described the cultural whiplash she experienced transferring from the University of Chicago to Stanford. UChicago, an institution known for its academic rigor and being a place “where fun goes to die,” still did not prepare her for the lack of social work spaces on campus or the erosion of school traditions. Growing loneliness and shrinking fun are not promising for a school where the winds of freedom should blow.
Romance is a different beast entirely. Marriage Pact, a forerunner of Date Drop and startup found at 100+ college campuses, is a longstanding campus tradition. Each year, thousands of students follow the same ritual — clicking through the service’s minimal black pages, each question bringing them closer to their perfect match. A study by Marriage Pact found that 66% of Stanford undergraduates labeled themselves as “desperately single.” Through their purported psych-based algorithms, Date Drop and Marriage Pact promise scientifically-backed perfect pairs. It’s love at first sight as your match’s name and email are shipped to your inbox in an almost Amazon-esque fashion.
Despite the marketing fanfare of these projects, it seems that the average student opts in casually. Most claim their participance is “just for fun” and to join in on a campus tradition. A hypothetical silent minority who takes their Date Drop seriously seems almost romantically naive, as if they weren’t in on such a carefully orchestrated, tongue-in-cheek campus joke. After all, if you were truly so desperate to find a partner, you would simply join a platform like Hinge. “No one actually takes it seriously,” one upperclassman told me my freshman year about Marriage Pact, “You do it just to do it.” This perceived frivolity in student circles in tandem with mass loneliness is perplexing but understandable because the process is gamified with funny prompts and clean-cut questionnaires. Here, rejection takes the form of an amorphous silence. There are no hard feelings when there’s no one to face, after all. Participants of Marriage Pact and Date Drop find themselves involved with a form of short-term entertainment and excitement, a quirked simulation of the pre-dating butterflies rather than the real deal. Yes — there are no sparks, but there’s also no chance for burns.
On a campus that’s rampant with “situationships,” repressed crushes and missed connections, it becomes clear that the solution presented by these projects isn’t “finding the right person” but calming widespread anxiety about romance at Stanford. Date Drop and Marriage Pact boast even less direct contact than dating apps while advertising optimization. This painless experience is a feature rather than a bug; making a product easy to use is a priority in design. You can speculate why Marriage Pact’s main page advertises “628,977 participants and counting” and “your most compatible marital backup plan on your campus, down to the percent” rather than other metrics, like successful relationship pairings. The priority is more users and virality, which is key to a startup’s growth but perhaps not so conducive to romance. This is a tradeoff that results in design choices which differentiate Date Drop and Marriage Pact from other dating apps.
Incentives to participate seem endless as the promise of an optimized match is hard to resist. The alarm with platforms like Date Drop and Marriage Pact is not their lack of success (I’d like to think I’m in on the joke) in matchmaking but what their fortification reveals about and cements in campus culture. These efforts emerge at an inflection point in youth culture, when get-love-quick schemes seem especially urgent. Most Stanford students are “desperately single” but relegate themselves to the crumbs of digital romance. And we’re not alone. Gen Z has been characterized as suffering from a “loneliness pandemic,” and contradictions about Gen Z’s love and sexual habits have been prodded at by cultural critics, with such kindly tokened terms like the “Great American Sex Drought.” Jia Tolentino writes that Gen Z sits at a cusp where sex is now less stigmatized and widely present but somehow not reached for. Tolentino’s assessment of Zoomers centers the liberalization of sex through the Internet — from online discourse on finding “high value” partners to how social media has provided “regular, quantified measurements of [our] market appeal.” Marketized love is a phenomenon visible in our culture, be it the subject of criticism in films like Materialists or objects like dating apps. The dating market is a term that recognizes the economics inherent to love — choices, risk, supply and demand.
It should be unsurprising then that Marriage Pact, a Stanford-born solution to this problem, was a final project for an undergraduate economics class. This impulse to attach metrics to love is nothing new, but the costs have worsened as the intention of these metrics is scaled to modernize dating. By overly investing in romance’s risk minimization and algorithmic perfection, we’re inadvertently dulling the fundamentals of love through tech. The low-risk, high-reward gamification of romance acts as a catalyst for a fully economized dating market. Optimization necessitates the reduction of people to metrics, and our new prescriptive romance is tested on lonely college students. But now we must ask: is anything lost by submitting to the instinct to “manage” and make the market efficient?
Perhaps so. Stanford is no stranger to optimizing the social scene. In her Palladium article “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” alumna Ginevra Davis argues that the “wild unfettered joy” once created by campus Greek life was pushed to the margins as the administration unhoused fraternities and co-ops. In their place, Davis writes, are empty, shiny community centers that hold the ethos of community but rarely the spirit. This parallels current tech solutions to the Stanford dating problem. These sleek solutions largely eliminate the messy, human parts of romance and thus produce something that is incomplete at best and harmful at its worst. Our desire to optimize above all else has led us to forget that so much of life is not only better unplanned but demands to be. Worse, we’ve begun to prefer the diet version of romance. We’ve forgotten that the clichéd butterflies and scars, scary as they seem, are crucial to real love’s beginning.
Our attempt to elide these for the sake of optimization actually allows loneliness to continue untreated. It’s no wonder Gen Z is seen as a tragedy by onlookers. All they see is paradox: a crowd that is lonely and hungry, with shrinking stomachs for love.
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