February 14: the fateful day of hopes, expectations, and sometimes let-downs. 

Last Valentine’s Day, I had seven straight hours of lectures that ended with food truck poutine in Sidney Smith at 8:00 pm. My Wednesdays normally felt interminable, but not that day — my dinner was accompanied by a text conversation with my Aphrodite Project match, which felt like I was talking to someone that I had been looking for my whole life. 

The Aphrodite Project is a match-making service launched in 2019 that matches participants to each other from their own or other post-secondary institutions worldwide. Participants fill out a questionnaire with their privacy guaranteed and their most compatible match — or sometimes two — gets revealed to them on February 14. Participants can then choose to reach out to their matches or not. 

Clicking a few buttons on a questionnaire has turned into a relationship that I am happy to say is nearing its one-year point — a fact often met with surprise. When my boyfriend and I started seeing each other, my friends questioned the longevity of the match, as it seemed an unlikely match. 

Moreover, I know many people who signed up for the project who never reached out to their matches either because they didn’t like their profile photo, or they had no motivation to do so. To me, this seems like a big loss. What’s the worst that can happen? I believe that anyone would benefit from taking a chance by reaching out to their match — even if they aren’t their usual type — and being open to this unique experience.

Origins of the Aphrodite Project

Based on psychological and economic principles, the match-making questionnaire incorporates the five ‘OCEAN’ personality traits, which measure participants in five categories: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The project uses the Gale-Shapley algorithm by matching up each participant’s preferences with each other.

At first, it seemed dystopian to find myself in a relationship predetermined by an algorithm that knew only basic facts about my personality. Love is complicated, but during the first few months of my courtship with my boyfriend Dwhanil, I felt like there was something magical in the way our values and lifestyles lined up. 

There were a number of facts about my boyfriend that would have made me reject him if he had approached me in person — him being four years older than me and a business student being the main offenders. However, this is exactly why I think the Aphrodite Project works. 

In an interview with The Varsity, project founder Aiden Low said that his motivation was ultimately to create a more organic online dating platform. “People just felt disposable on dating apps,” he said, referring to existing matchmaking services. He also described seeing a transgender friend struggle with dating, which pushed him to “Create a place where people could come as they are and meet someone.” 

Dhwanil used dating apps for about a year before we met and he similarly said that they “Always made me feel sort of incomplete even when I was going out on dates with a lot of people… instead of focusing on things which you can pick and choose to make it work, you are left picking and choosing things that are going to be the end of the relationship.” 

However, as the Aphrodite Project’s process focuses on romantic compatibility as shared values and compatibility, there is less room for human prejudice, which is a near-inescapable flaw of the typical dating experience. 

Visual anonymity 

Though the Aphrodite Project’s team is accepting feedback on ways to incorporate appearance into the matching process, I believe that there is no way to do this without compromising the inclusivity that the platform fosters. Low recalled how his team received five hate emails in 2021 when they included height specifications in the questionnaire. 

On the other hand, people sometimes take issue with the project’s disregard for physical attributes when creating matches — a feature that has evidently been difficult to implement in Aphrodite. However, I would argue that visual anonymity is one of its strengths. 

“You don’t see the picture of the person… until you’ve already matched with them. So you’re not necessarily selecting the person based on how they look,” said Dhwanil. In the same way that it allowed me to take a chance on a person who I probably would have never interacted with based on superficial traits I had preconceptions about, sometimes someone’s appearance needs to take a secondary role to other aspects they possess. 

Connecting with others and yourself

Low has participated in the project every year, once in the romantic stream and in the platonic stream all other times. He says, “I think something really uncanny is how well two people can connect. I felt it myself too.” 

Now, when I re-read messages with my boyfriend and me from the first day we matched, I am always struck by the way we connected. Despite having different upbringings and cultures, we related to each other in a profound way. “I could see that eventually, this is going to be the person I can create our own little vocabulary with,” Dhwanil told me while reflecting on our first few days of chatting. 

The Aphrodite Project ended up being extremely worthwhile for me. I met someone who is now an irreplaceable part of my life, but even if I hadn’t, I would have still learned something about myself through the questionnaire. 

Cypress Chernik is a second-year student at Trinity College studying political science and Slavic languages. She is a magazine assistant for The Varsity.