Talk:Marriage Pact

Notability, narrow focus, and other issues
This page has several issues that make it seem like it should not exist in its current state. It appears broad in focus and makes broad claims like "The Marriage Pact is an unofficial yearly matching activity that takes place on American college campuses", when these facts might only be true to Stanford and a small handful of universities. The focus on the history of the Stanford Marriage Pact in the body of the article also makes it seem like this event is a recent development, which contradicts the opening of the article, and the title, that make it seem like this event is a widespread tradition at many universities. Factually, however, I don't think either of those perspectives is very accurate; the phenomenon started by the Stanford Marriage Pact is not widespread, but at the same time there exist other similar "matchmaking surveys" at both universities and high schools in the United States, including one called https://datamatch.me/Datamatch that claims to have started at Harvard in the 1990s. Curiously, Datamatch does not have its own article, but probably has received as much media attention, and is also older. I think the most appropriate corrections would be to either merge this article into the articles for Matchmaking or Online dating, to expand the article to talk about more than just the Stanford Marriage Pact and move it to be titled something like "college matchmaking", or to have it deleted.

Similarly, the article has an entirely American perspective. Whether similar phenomena exist in other countries I have no idea.Arecaceæ2011 (talk) 09:10, 28 October 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree that this article could probably be improved, but disagree with your proposed methods. Instead of merging or deleting, it should probably expanded to incorporate more of the ample high quality independent coverage it has. Reposting my note from the AfD you opened here:
 * Keep. Some googling shows that the Marriage Pact is probably notable, and is much bigger than what happens at Stanford University, although it started there. For notability, it more than satisfies the requirements of the General Notability Guideline: it has significant coverage in reliable, third-party sources. Dedicated articles by The New York Times, Vox, CBS, and NPR's Planet Money were among the first articles I could find. Those articles mention 5 universities by name (Tufts, Middlebury, Vanderbilt, GWU, Stanford), but various articles report it being at 51 colleges, 55 colleges, 55 colleges, or 56 colleges, depending on date of publication. The article could probably be expanded with more sources, but the subject is notable and the article is sufficient to be kept as-is. —Shrinkydinks (talk) 22:56, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Seriousness of claims of intent of marriage
The opening of the article claims that the intention of this event is to provide participants "a partner among fellow participants, who they agree will be their backup "safety" spouse in the future in case they are then unmarried." Based on the sources cited (and for full disclosure, my own conversations with Stanford students about this) the premise of the "marriage pact" is almost entirely a kind of inside joke; these kinds of matchmaking services are primarily for fun, and only in some cases would the participants actually use them seriously to find a dating partner, and only in extremely rare cases would marriage be a likely outcome. Again, this is why I take issue with the article's title and perspective, it seems to misunderstand and misrepresent the subject matter in a way that an unfamiliar audience could easily misinterpret. I can only imagine if someone from another country read this, their takeaway might be that American college students commonly partake in a survey to find a spouse in college. Arecaceæ2011 (talk) 09:23, 28 October 2021 (UTC)