By Stella Seid PZ ‘26

We’re all familiar with the cringy avoidance of eye contact when one crosses paths with a Tinder match in the dining hall. It’s practically a rite of passage — so common, in fact, that I’m surprised there isn’t a protocol for it in orientation. Maybe that’s a lesson we are bound to learn the hard way: if you dare to swipe right, you’re gonna have to learn to look left. Awkward? Certainly. But manageable, so you’ll keep doing it until you’ve swiped and swerved just about every online single at the 5C’s. 

However, there’s one thing that comes around this time of year that I simply cannot manage. It is the awkward acknowledgement so repulsive to my social ego that I will eat at Frank just to avoid him. Him — my Datamatch best match, 99.82% chance of true love. 

Datamatch is a digital matchmaking service created at Harvard and now used at 47 colleges, including the 5Cs. Every year, Datamatch releases a niche 12-question survey a week before Valentine’s Day. Along with the survey, users are encouraged to include top Spotify artists, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Zodiac, and Rice Purity score. According to a TSL article from 2019, Datamatch partnered with our satirical news source, Golden Antlers, to write their 5C specific questions. 

The light humor and cutesie web design is exactly why Datamatch continues to catch our attention. Dating is meant to be fun. The light pink pixel heart better expresses the way I feel when it comes to dating than the Tinder fire logo, which connotes more of a bated breath hookup than a box of chocolates.

Datamatch—like Valentine’s Day itself—isn’t about sneaky links or long-term love. It’s about celebrating all kinds of connection, fleeting encounters and friendships included. The app elicits the same light-hearted affection expressed in spontaneously asking someone to be your valentine. 

But nothing ever comes of our Datamatch matches. Shyness and small-school realities take over. If we’re being honest, asking someone on a date isn’t necessarily the social norm at the 5C’s, at least not compared to other schools. Schools like BYU, for example, literally have a saying, “ring before spring”; get engaged by the spring semester of your senior year. I can only imagine how that clouds conversation with a desperately flirty air. The 5C’s don’t make the best bachelor pad. There’s no room for trial and error when you and your error have ten mutuals. Datamatch even does the hard part for us, it introduces us to each other, but we seem lost as to what to do from there. Maybe that’s what needs to be included in orientation: How To Date At The 5C’s. 

I don’t want my Cupid to be a tech startup. I refuse to (re)download Tinder or Hinge, but Datamatch only comes around once a year. Besides, maybe there’s something we can learn from its innocent questions and adorable interface. My serial-dater friends all agree that their most cherished relationships started from an in-person meet-cute, not a notification. An algorithmic match can’t replace the intimacy of showing them your pet fish or falling asleep while working on a project together. But maybe Datamatch isn’t trying to. Maybe it’s less about manufacturing romance and more about nudging us toward possibility to get us to take a chance we wouldn’t have taken, to spark a connection that isn’t just another inside-your-friend-group situationship. Maybe it’s just a reminder that, every once in a while, love, in whatever form it comes, can start with something as simple as filling out a silly questionnaire.