This February, love is in the air — or in the case of online matchmaking service Datamatch, it’s in the algorithm. 

Datamatch is a national matchmaking service for college students, providing users with roughly ten matches based on their answers to a short survey. Since 2019, Datamatch has been available to students at Washington University during Valentine’s Day season; this year’s survey opened on Feb. 7 and will close on Feb. 13 at 11:01 p.m. Students are allowed to decide if they would like to receive romantic, platonic, or both types of matches, as well as specify any preferences based on sexual orientation. 

Datamatch President, sophomore Olivia Pierre-Louis, explained that the service is a fun way to connect students on campus who have similar opinions or senses of humor. After receiving their matches, students are presented with the option to ‘match’ with them. If both students express interest in one another, they will be notified that they have mutually matched. 

One selling point for Datamatch in past years was its ability to help students meet new people during pandemic times, which Pierre-Louis believes is still relevant to social interactions on campus today. 

“I think we’re coming off a time period where we were very isolated for a really long time and it was hard to meet people if it wasn’t online,” Pierre-Louis said. “This is still online but it’s a little bit different because these are people who are really nearby, they’re your classmates.”

She continued on to say that many students have set social circles that might prevent them from meeting someone outside of it.

“[Your match] could be somebody who’s been in your class for the past three semesters and you’ve never met them,” she said. “I’m only in my second year, but I’ve already kind of figured out who my friends are and I don’t super make an effort to meet new people all the time. So this is a really good opportunity to widen your social circle, and meet somebody who you probably would not have met going to the events you usually go to.”

Out of WashU’s roughly 8,000 undergraduate students, Pierre-Louis said Datamatch received approximately 1,000 responses last Valentine’s Day. 

For some, the service yielded little results as they already knew their matches or did not contact any of the people they were matched with.

“I knew most of my matches and the other ones I never talked to,” said sophomore Ella Brodey.

Similarly, senior Izzy Yanover tried the service their freshman year but never used it again because the experience was fairly unexciting.

“It went very neutral, I didn’t end up reaching out to a lot of people,” they said. “I guess I’m not particularly interested in reaching out to a bunch of people so I just didn’t want to do it. I’m not against it, I think it’s fun and it’s silly — I just didn’t want to do it.”

However, despite the lack of results last year, Brodey said that she will be participating again this Valentine’s day. 

“Who knows, maybe I’ll find my soulmate,” she joked. 

While some students had uneventful matches, others found potential sparks that led to first dates or, at the very least, a good story to tell.

On the national website, Datamatch offers testimonials from various participating schools, including WashU.

One testimony reads: “Two of my best friends matched on Datamatch and now they’re dating and I third wheel them on zoom!”

Looking at the other side of dating outcomes, a sophomore who wished to remain anonymous described his first date with a match last spring that ended in a bit of a nosedive.

“We went on a little stroll. We were walking down Brookings and she just fell down the stairs,” he said. “I didn’t really know what to do, so I just asked her if she was okay and helped her up. She seemed pretty embarrassed, but then later we came to a fork in the road with stairs and a ramp. And I pointed to the ramp. She sort of laughed but I don’t think she found it as funny as I did.”

After a first date that involved a tumble down the Brookings stairs, the two did not go on a second date. 

Other students have gone their entire college career without ever trying the service; some are considering changing that this Valentine’s Day while others plan to continue without it.

Senior Ethan Liss-Roy explained that while he has been unable to use Datamatch the past three Valentine’s Days, he is open to doing it this year. 

“Freshman year, I guess I was just kind of intimidated,” he said. “I was also a little worried about data security. Sophomore spring, I took the semester off, and junior spring I was abroad, so I wasn’t here.”

While Liss-Roy said that he has not thought much about whether or not he will complete the survey this year, he stated that if he did use the service he would likely choose to receive both romantic and platonic matches. 

Public opinion on Datamatch has carefully toed the line between being a fun activity and a full-on joke.

“I think it’s been pretty common to do it just for fun,” Liss-Roy said.

For freshman Jaida Taveras, who was only recently made aware of the existence of Datamatch, it presents a fun opportunity to do an activity with peers. Taveras said that a lot of her friends in Lien, the dorm she lives in, are planning on taking the survey with one another. 

“We’ll take it seriously in the sense that it could end up being cool,” Taveras said. “We have nothing to lose so why not take it a little seriously and also have fun with it.”

After Datamatch releases its results to participating students, matches will have the ability to message one another and even meet in person through an event called Datamatch Cafe, in the DUC Fun Room on Feb. 16, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. At the event, students can mingle and meet their matches to see if there is as much of a spark as the algorithm predicts.