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It’s your brother! It’s your ex! No, it’s your Marriage Pact!

Late October is a beautiful time of year here on campus. Crunchy leaves under your feet, the beginnings of fall in the air and a message in your inbox telling you should marry someone with the same initials as your friend’s new boyfriend.

From start to finish, the Marriage Pact is a bonding experience. It starts with the questions from friends. Have you filled it out yet? Are you planning on it? You might think these questions are innocuous; there can’t be drama started yet, right? Wrong. This beginning stage is the perfect time to start digging into the personal lives of the acquaintances whom you talk to every day but whose last names you somehow still don’t know. Do they have a summer situationship they’re holding onto? An ex they aren’t over? Or on the other hand, is that guy they spend all their time talking about actually just a friend after all?

If this hasn’t already brought you closer with your fellow Domers than you ever expected to be, try filling out the survey with a few loose friends in your dorm. An especially good option for this is your random roommate from freshman year! You know what time they go to bed, you know their music taste, but haven’t you always wondered if they would date someone of a different race? Or perhaps how kinky they are on a scale of one to seven?

Just when you think you’ve had enough time to recover from the drama of all that, the Marriage Pact drops a sneaky little email into the inbox of every non-cuffed person on campus. Immediately, the school somehow gets smaller than you could ever imagine. Your most dramatic friend has gotten the initials of the guy she made out with at a Keenan dorm party during freshman year, your classmate got his ex’s roommate’s and, you don’t know how to tell anyone this, but you fear you could have matched with your sibling.

And then, on some random Sunday night when you’re really just trying to finish your physics homework, the fateful email comes, introducing you to the love of your life. The rest of this story is yours to tell, but here are some of this author’s favorite possibilities (of course, none are based in fact). Hypothetically, maybe you match with a man whom your friend finds the next week on Grindr. Hypothetically, you learn you should be platonic best friends with the girl down the hall who vomited on your carpet and you’ve never forgiven. Hypothetically, you open your new fiance’s Instagram and are hit by a series of reels advocating vehemently against internet porn. Or maybe, (hypothetically of course) you find yourself to be a 99% match with Mr. Ben Dover himself. Lucky you!

These, however, are the outliers. Now don’t get me wrong, matching with someone you actually end up liking would be improbable, too, but most likely you are about to embark on a classic Notre Dame love story. So go, lovebirds, grab yourselves an oddly tense coffee together at Starbucks and, every single day for the rest of your Notre Dame career, do that awkward little thing where you see someone coming in the distance but it’s too early to say hi and then by the time you look up again you’ve missed your chance. My heart is racing just thinking about you guys.

Best of luck Domers, and here’s to never having to marry our Marriage Pacts!