By Nina McCambridge
This Valentine’s Day, finding a date was as difficult as ever for single Carnegie Mellon students, even if they used the Aphrodite Project — a digital algorithm that claims to find students their “ideal date.” The issue wasn’t the matchmaking service itself, but rather the avoidant attitudes of the other students using the service.
A third-year creative writing major, who used the Aphrodite Project for the third time this year, got two matches but not a single conversation. “In fact, one of them, we had one of the highest match ratings in the entire school — and I was left on read, sadly. And then the second one that I got; I have been left on sent.” The Project Aphrodite questionnaire began with an appeal not to ghost your match, but this is still common practice.
This experience is by no means unique to Project Aphrodite. The creative writing student said that on other apps, “even if I matched with someone, I only hear back from them 10 percent of the time. And so I honestly had higher hopes for [the Aphrodite Project] given the more personality-driven aspects of the quiz and my success with it in the past. … It stinks, because you would assume based on the content of the survey, that I have fulfilled this person’s values, right?” He thought that if people were just willing to meet up once, the relationship would have a high probability of working out.
He said that he believes one of the best ways to find a relationship is to be set up on a date by your friends — a “more traditional form of matchmaking” that he has facilitated for his own friends. However, this requires an extroverted matchmaker friend, who can be hard to find. He said that women don’t have the same sort of inflated expectations with regard to men they know personally, but for men, it’s hard to know when it’s considered appropriate and respectful to ask out a woman in person.
William, a first-year engineering major, said that he got two matches on the Aphrodite Project but one left him on read and the other blocked him. He said he’s never had success with dating and thought that he would try the Aphrodite Project because it’s convenient — “Tinder has all this swiping right, swiping left. … This, you just fill out a form” — and also because it’s an environment where it’s socially acceptable to make a romantic advance. “I wouldn’t just ask out a stranger, that’s weird,” he said, but he also wouldn’t want to bring about the possible awkward social situation that could arise if he were to ask out a girl in his friend group, as happened to him previously. He said he wants a long-term relationship but has given up (because he was rejected) and won’t be dating anymore, at least in the near future. Talking about the social environment that’s hostile to romance, he said, “Honestly, I think it’s a CMU problem. People here are such high achievers, they have such high standards,” he said, “with both academics and romance. But then you can’t keep those standards anymore.”
Haley Williams, a third-year physics major who used the Aphrodite Project for the third time this year, said they only got one match, someone that their friends know. Williams has “not reached out to them. But they also have not reached out to me. I followed them on Instagram, and I don’t think they followed me. I don’t even know if they’ve looked at their results like, ‘Hey, my Project Aphrodite match is following me on Instagram.’” It’s hard for Williams to think of what to say even if their match did follow them back. “It’s like, ‘Hey, this algorithm thinks that we’d be really cute together. Now what?’”
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