By Marisa Young | Staff Writer
In case a current college relationship doesn’t work out, don’t worry — the Baylor Marriage Pact offers students a compatible match to fall back on.
Back for its second consecutive year, the Baylor Marriage Pact is an online survey that uses data to match students based on highest compatibility.
Participants in the pact answer approximately 50 questions pertaining to religion, politics, health and lifestyle habits. The Marriage Pact then pairs students with aligned answers and emails each student the name of their match, even citing the percentage of compatibility. After receiving their match, it is up to the students to initiate contact.
Dallas senior Lauren Goree is the student responsible for bringing the Marriage Pact to Baylor. After listening to a friend about the impact it had on her campus in Notre Dame, Goree said she was inspired to initiate that experience at Baylor.
“I was hearing these stories about people getting matched up with each other, and most of the time it doesn’t work out, but that’s the fun of it,” Goree said. “I hope that students will take the opportunity to meet someone new that they may be compatible with.”
Currently, the Marriage Pact has been used on 109 campuses nationwide since 2017, and has made 314,488 matches, eight of which have actually gotten engaged, Goree said. She reached out to the national website in 2023, and the team deemed Baylor “a perfect place” for their program. From there, Goree organized a small team to add roughly 20 questions to the Marriage Pact’s existing survey.
By introducing the Marriage Pact to Baylor, Goree hoped to “bring people together that wouldn’t otherwise meet.”
“While we have a great freshman year experience where you can meet people, after a while, you kind of just stop meeting people, and it’s like there’s no momentum,” Goree said. “I wanted people to have experiences where they put themselves out there, and just get fun stories from it.”
By nature, the Marriage Pact forces students to recognize compatibility beyond physical appearance, Goree said. Whether or not they mean to, people often only gravitate toward people who look like them. The Marriage Pact overrides students’ comfort zones in this aspect by using data about value-based preferences.
“I feel like sometimes we’re biased toward the type of people we want to meet, or the type of people we interact with,” Goree said. “This is a great way to meet someone you are compatible with, that you might not be able to tell from the surface.”
Exactly one Baylor couple has gotten engaged after meeting through the 2024 Marriage Pact, according to Goree.
Eagle, Idaho, sophomore Elli Reyna took the Marriage Pact with her friends on a whim. Though she “didn’t take it seriously at all,” Reyna felt the survey may not have allowed an entirely accurate reflection of her values.
“I felt like ideally there should be a little more personalization, maybe somehow being able to emphasize your unique interests,” Reyna said.
That being said, Reyna said she ironically ended up getting matched with her best friend, which “made perfect sense” because they are so alike. While fun to participate in, she believes networks like the Marriage Pact could speak to an underlying issue of loneliness and lack of social skills among college students.
“I think that this kind of thing could be a problem if you were relying on this to connect with people,” Reyna said. “I think it should be more a way of expanding a pre-existing social circle, as opposed to creating it in itself.”
People who struggle to form organic relationships may look to sites such as the Marriage Pact as a beacon of connection and substance, amidst a pervasively temporary culture.
“I think a lot of people have trouble truly connecting with people and meeting people on a deeper level, especially because hook-up culture and a general sense of apathy are a very prominent part of our culture today,” Reyna said.
Since she is graduating this year, Goree said she is looking to “pass the torch” to someone else to organize the Baylor Marriage Pact.
“If someone is really passionate about it, they could come up and take the reins,” Goree said.
