The Tartan

By Nina McCambridge

On Feb. 13, the Aphrodite Project will release how it matched up 588 Carnegie Mellon students — both romantically and platonically (about 89 percent of matches were romantic in 2021, according to a page on their website that you can see if you create an account). The application, which closed on Feb. 9, consisted of questions covering everything from personality type to politics to kinkiness. Missing was any information about appearance: Project Aphrodite is all about character.

If you’re not a first-year, then you’ve likely heard of this service before; it’s been offered at Carnegie Mellon for three years. It’s also available at 10 other top colleges in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore (where it was founded in 2019). It isn’t available to the general public, and Carnegie Mellon students will only be matched with other Carnegie Mellon students.

Software engineer Aiden Low, the founder of the Aphrodite Project, said that he started the project because with typical dating apps, “a lot of people hate feeling like they’re putting themselves out there, and they hate the fact that you lose a lot of privacy, and you sink so much time.”

Low said that from the beginning, the Aphrodite Project was meant to be somewhere where people can “come as they are.” He said, “I feel like what tipped me over to start it was because I had a transgender female friend in Singapore who really struggled to feel loved and accepted in Singapore because as a country, it’s not that liberal … When we started college together freshman year, I could see that it was a very isolating and depressing experience.”

Low said that the project began with a much simpler questionnaire, but during the pandemic, the project expanded. With the advice of psychologists Dr. Geoff McDonald (of the University of Toronto) and Julie Cachia (a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford), they created around 150 questions that they cut to around 60 through a double-blind matchmaking experiment.

The Aphrodite Project uses psychological findings to determine compatibility, which mostly comes down to how similar people are. As to the English phrase “opposites attract,” Low told The Tartan, “the opposites make it interesting, and maybe there’s a tinge of excitement. But in the long term, similarities matter. And I think opposites attracting might be more of a North American thing, because research shows that people from the western side of the world are more drawn to its feelings of excitement, while people from Asian societies are more drawn towards feelings of warmth.” After compatibility is determined, the project uses the Gale-Shapley Algorithm (for which David Gale and Lloyd Shapley won the Nobel Prize) to make pairs.

Haley Williams, a third-year physics major, said that last year, they got one match as a first-year but none the next year. They told The Tartan their reaction was: “‘Damn, nobody want me?’ … I don’t know what I put in there that made me get zero matches, but maybe I should broaden my criteria.” They said they use dating apps without much success.

One benefit of Project Aphrodite, Williams said, is that “it might match you up with someone who you otherwise wouldn’t ever meet, right? Because I almost exclusively interact with, like, physics majors and then the people in the clubs that I’m in.” They said that while they think “it would be a good story to be like, ‘Yeah, I’ve met this person through an algorithm, and now we’ve been married for 30 years. The algorithm works, kids!’ … But also I’m not gonna be upset if nothing comes from it again.” They suggested that Project Aphrodite should expand to include people from other colleges in the area.

A third-year creative writing major, who wished to remain anonymous, disagreed. “I think another element is, as CMU students, we’re really busy, so being able to meet someone who goes to the same school makes it easier to have a relationship because you can run into them more often.”

As someone who has used dating apps, he said that he noticed many more Pitt and Duquesne students than Carnegie Mellon students online. Though he identifies as an extrovert, he said he’s struggled to find dates at Carnegie Mellon, where students are more introverted. On Project Aphrodite, he said he risks less rejection.

“Even on an app like Tinder, even if I matched with someone, people I matched with only respond to me like 10 percent of the time.” Project Aphrodite is different in part because it has more female than male participants, which is not the case with more casual dating apps like Tinder.

One third-year math major, who also wished to remain anonymous, said she is using Project Aphrodite for the third time. She’s gotten two romantic matches per year, but none turned into a date.

“I feel like using it in a platonic way would be better than a romantic way because you very likely would be friends with this person because you have a lot of things in common, but you can’t really tell if you’re gonna like someone romantically if you like, never see them,” she told The Tartan. (Low told The Tartan that Project Aphrodite considered using physical filters — particularly height, which they had to discontinue after short men stopped getting any matches).

Emily Bai, a first-year math major, says she signed up for the service mostly because she thought it was funny. “A lot of my friends and I — because the flyers are everywhere — we took pictures of them because it was like, ‘find your soulmate using economics.’ And then … we clicked on the link and then we just decided to take the survey, because why not?”

Bai said that in terms of finding dates in college, “I’m not going to go searching. Mostly because I’m kind of busy. Romantic relationships are really not at the top of my priority list.” On the other hand, Project Aphrodite is convenient for her.

Will Project Aphrodite scale up? Low says that though the project has considered expanding outside of colleges, the safety and accountability that requiring college email addresses provides would be hard to give up. They’re always looking to expand to more colleges, though. Maya BozzoRey, Aphrodite’s communications director and a fourth-year at McMaster University in Canada, said it could be good to launch the project twice per year, adding a fall cycle in addition to the spring one.

Low said he wants to hear all the success stories from his project; Project Aphrodite will send you an anniversary card. So far, he said, the service has generated “six or seven” engagements or marriages. They could also always use more donations — Project Aphrodite is almost entirely funded by Low’s personal salary — and more people to help run the project.