Matchmaker, Matchmaker

This article is part of the Claritas spring 2025 issue, Connection. Read the full print release here.

By LYDIA HUANG

Completely out of a dare (and not at all out of sheer desperation to find love on this bleak and dreary, heartless campus), I found myself filling out PerfectMatch. For the unfamiliar, the platform touts itself as “Cornell’s very own matchmaking survey that pairs students with potential partners.” [1] It was A.D 2024. February, to be specific. Courses were stressful, and I was bored. The brightly colored graphics promising the possibility of a soulmate at the measly cost of a short survey drew me in like a moth to a light. Armed with the sword of ingenuity and the shield of maturity, I proceeded with gusto. I would never tell my friends this, but secretly, in my heart of hearts, I hoped that my cautious undertaking of these multiple choice questions would pay off in the form of another lonesome soul who had the same music taste. After agonizing over all my responses and checking over my multiple choice questions twice, I said a Hail Mary and hit send.

When Valentine’s Day rolled around, I hovered just a little too much over my inbox.

*Ding! [You Have Been Matched!] Joy! My prince has come!

Since I live most of my life in my head, I was already thinking of the super cute prospective dates we could go on. Yet suddenly, my budding, nascent hope of finding a soulmate crumbled. I was hoping this whip smart AI model would help me find “the one,” or maybe, at least “a one”—a destined, singular soulmate. What stared back at me was a list of names with whom I’d matched. Perhaps it was considerate of them to have an E pluribus unum model, but to the hopeless romantic in me, it felt a little disingenuous. Something about choosing a person as if I were ordering off a menu felt unsettling. I also didn’t want to perpetuate this patronizing “swipe culture” so common to dating apps—a normalization of transiency in relationships that if one doesn’t work out, there’s always another a thumb swipe away.

I closed my email in disappointment, half-heartedly returning to my R programming assignment.

A few days later, I confided in some girlfriends of mine—who also reluctantly confessed they’d filled out PerfectMatch. Then, I started hearing mentions here and there of PerfectMatch while eavesdropping on other people’s conversations in Morrison, and I became convinced that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way. I had a lightbulb moment. Rather than feel sad that my prospects were as bleak as Ithaca weather, it dawned on me that I and everyone else longed for a certain kind of connection. PerfectMatch, was onto something. Intrigued by this realization, I set out to find a panacea for this societal ordeal.

The week after Valentine’s Day, I must have consumed every piece of relationship advice content on the planet. Embarrassingly, “How Do You Know If He’s The One?” was indeed a very real clause in my Google search history. My poor mom was also the recipient of my endless laments of my research dead ends. In my defense, however, I really wondered if any other human had figured out why this desire for connection was so strong. And all the love songs on the radio were absolutely no help—they were simply signs, not answers. Eventually, I hit a dead end. And like many people who have hit a dead end in their search for answers, I turned to God. I was quite surprised by what I found. Scripture told a more complete story than any relationship advice column.

Scripture says as a first principle that God is love—unconditional love, in fact. 1 John 4:8 teaches that “God is love... love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God.” [2] And what does love do? Love pursues—“blindly, unflinchingly, and without end.” [3] The Bible speaks of a God that stopped at nothing to connect with us; He dwelled in the garden with man, taught the Israelites His commandments, connected with mankind in the Tent of Meeting, and spoke through the prophets to His people. [4] God is a jealous God who desires nothing but our wholehearted commitment to Him. He made us, in love, to have an intimate connection with Him. Thus, my heart’s ache for connection goes beyond what PerfectMatch or even what other humans can solve for me. It stems from my fundamental need to be connected to my Creator.

We should note that as people made in God’s image, our desires for connection are a beautiful thing—a gift in fact— from God Himself. The Creation account speaks of a God who saw everything He created as good, but only very good when He made Eve for Adam. [5] God, then, called it good for us to have healthy connections with others.

The way God wants us to love each other, I also found out, is pretty radical. For the Christian faith, God is not a mere spiritual deity out in the ether. The radical claim of Christianity is this: because of Christ’s love for us, He died (and resurrected!) so that we may be in true connection with Him. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever shall believe in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” [6] The way Christ henceforth teaches us to connect others is not some lukewarm give and take, but a self-giving sacrifice. He who died on the cross for us also commands us to “love one another as [He] has loved.” [7]

To truly connect with another is to love, and love requires a certain emptying of oneself as a sacrifice for another person. Admittedly, “sacrifice” doesn’t sound like a day trip to Napa. But like everything else in the world (be it baking or mathematics), there is always an innate order to things, and God made us connect with one another selflessly. Selfishness, transactional relationships, and lack of commitment do not compute in God’s equation for how we are to connect with one another. True lasting love for anything worthwhile most of the time requires denial and always asks for self sacrifice.

After learning all of this, I started implementing a few changes in my life. I talked to Him more (prayer), read His love letters (Scripture), communed with others (fellowship), and tried to partake in all the Goodness, Beauty, and Truth that He has created—such as the Sabbath and nature! As He drew me deeper and deeper into His goodness, the truth of His Character, and the kind of self-sacrificial love we are called to have, I noticed some significant changes in my life. My former feelings of loneliness abated, and I started noticing this indescribable joy and peace that constantly held my heart and produced a greater flourishing in my friendships. With Christ at the center of my life, I also started to change how I connected with others. What brought my friends and me the most joy was God, and the small things we’d do for each other out of our love for Him. When my friend Esther cleans our bathroom with lack of complaint, not asking for anything in return, or when I come home on a Friday night and sing spontaneous worship songs with my best friends at 11 pm—it is in these moments I feel the very exact thing that Christ died for—that a sinner may experience how a Holy God loves: without regard for the self Jesus came so that we may have life, and have it to the fullest.

I’ll go out and say that most of us on this campus yearn for true connection. Human connection sans God, however, always comes up short—no matter how “perfect” the match a Cornell-coded algorithm could provide us. For all of you hopeless romantics who, like me, may have already planned your weddings on Pinterest, I encourage you to pause on the swiping or the scrolling in search of an abiding love. Before trying to get to know someone, do you know The One? I invite you to start flipping, perhaps through a book called the Bible, to find yourself already in the midst of the greatest love story ever told, and to get to know a God who desperately wants you to know Him. The same God who died for you said, “I have called you by name, you are Mine.”[8] He proclaims that “His banner over you is love.” [9] He delights in the fact that “He is yours, and you are His.” [10] I encourage you to make Him your first love.

It’s AD 2025. March, to be precise. My prince has still not yet come. I’m still waiting for him to possibly slide into my Cornell inbox. But I now know that my desire for connection could never be completely satisfied in another person. Earthly connections are to point us to the love of the Father. They cannot be an end in and of themselves. As Saint Augustine writes in his Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” [11] We will forever be longing for something greater than earthly connection. And there’s a great sense of freedom knowing that I have something so much better than a prince—a King. One who leaped from Heaven so that I might be in communion with Him, live a life on earth in the presence of His Holy Spirit, and one day live in Heaven with Him forever.

[1] “Perfect Matches Have Been Released!”. Perfect Match. Accessed March 1, 2025. https://perfectmatch.ai/.

[2] 1 John 4:8 (NIV)

[3] Goff, Bob. Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012)

[4] Book of Exodus (NIV)

[5] Genesis 1:31 (NIV)

[6] John 3:16 (NIV)

[7] John 13:34 (NIV)

[8] John 13:34 (NIV)

[9] Isaiah 43 (NIV)

[10] Song of Solomon 2:4 (NIV)

[11] Song of Solomon 2:16 (NIV)

[12] Augustine. Confessions. Tr. by Henry Chadwick. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)