While Valentine’s Day is typically a celebration of love, Cornellians this year became so distraught over a six-hour delay in Perfect Match pairings that they sent threatening messages to the Perfect Match team.
The targeted attacks pushed the Perfect Match team to remove their personal information from the website.
Jamal Hashim ’22 founded Perfect Match in February 2019 to lift spirits and reduce isolation on campus. This Valentine’s Day, over 5,000 Cornell students, alumni and professors created a profile on Perfect Match, Cornell’s Valentine’s Day matchmaking website, to find their algorithmic-determined ideal friend or romantic partner.
The issue arose when Perfect Match released the matches at 6 a.m. instead of midnight as the team previously announced on their website. Varshini Madhavan ’25, a member of the business subteam for Perfect Match explained that the team received threatening messages propelled by the delay resulting in the team deleting their personal information from the website.
“We recognize that many students stayed up waiting for a dramatic release and that, unfortunately, did not happen,” Madhavan said. “I will say, it was a little disheartening to see threatening messages made to the point where we removed the team’s personal information from the website.”
Madhavan explained that the unforeseen surges in interest for Perfect Match caused challenges for the team as it took longer than expected for them to post the matches on the website.
“We knew there was more interest than past years, but there was an insanely unexpected surge on the last day to submit,” Madhavan said. “This meant that though the matches were quickly generated, it took longer than expected to post on the website. With any data set this large, there are bound to be technical difficulties.”
The Perfect Match team released a statement on their Instagram story explaining that they made over 100,000 matches this year, ten times more than the previous year, which meant that the midnight deadline they had set based on previous data would be “physically impossible to reach.”
Gabriel Marshall ’26, a participant in Perfect Match, said that he opted into matching in hopes of meeting someone. He anticipated meeting a potential Valentine’s Day date but was subsequently disappointed by the delayed matching.
“I am not currently in a relationship, so I thought if I matched with someone I could click with, I would enjoy my Valentine’s Day with someone,” Marshall said. “However, since I didn’t hear back until [this] morning, I was demotivated to make plans with anyone.”
But Marshall believes that the student body’s dramatic reaction to Perfect Match’s delay in release was unwarranted.
“I personally think that [sending threatening messages to Perfect Match’s team] is really ungrateful for the Cornell student body,” Marshall said. “This is a small group of people who want to make Cornellians’ lives better. And attacking people who were trying to give you a gift is very ungrateful.”
Maia Mehring ’27 thought that Perfect Match would be a fun way for her to meet new people on campus. While she was confused by the delay, Mehring explained that the delay didn’t have a big impact on her Valentine’s Day plans.
“My roommate and I were getting ready for class this morning and she told me her matches had come out, so I checked for mine,” Mehring said. “It did make me leave my dorm a little later since I had gotten caught up in who my matches were, but other than that I was pretty indifferent.”
This year, angry reactions to the Perfect Match delay may have overshadowed its original purpose to cultivate connection and community.
Madhavan said the platform was created to give students and other participants a chance to connect, from exploring data analytics to meeting new people on campus.
“Valentine’s Day can be an isolating time for people who aren’t in relationships, and we wanted to add some level of joy and excitement around this day to celebrate love,” Madhavan said.
Madhavan also acknowledged the variety of reasons people utilize Perfect Match.
“People definitely fill out the form for different reasons — some do it to meet friends, some do it to go on a date and some just want to see the analytics at the end, specifically, machine learning professors who discuss Perfect Match in their lectures.”
Taerim Eom ’24, the head of algorithm for Perfect Match, explained that the algorithm’s Perfect Match’s process is broken down into two main steps — scoring and matching. Eom explained that Perfect Match uses the Gale–Shapley algorithm, a common algorithm used by dating apps such as Hinge.
The initial score for everyone starts at 1000, and for each compatible response, the score increases. Different questions are weighted differently depending on whether or not students consider them “deal breakers.” According to Eom, last year, on average, every person had a potential matching list of 984 people with their final list including around 19 people.
“If someone says I like these movies and then someone else says I like these movies, it would have something to do with the compatibility,” Eom said. “Each survey question is somehow weighted differently, there is a bit of subjectiveness that goes into there, like how we determine compatibility.”
Despite this year’s discontentment of students with Perfect Match leaders, the website stands as a Cornellian-created project for fellow students’ enjoyment.
“Perfect Match was a passion project created to give Cornell students an outlet and opportunity to meet other people,” Madhavan said.