Why First-Date Nerves Have Nothing on True Love: Aidan and Sophia’s Story

Stanford undergrads Sophia and Aidan* were more than well acquainted when they sat down at a table together in Arrillaga Dining last November. The kicker? They’d never spoken a single word to each other. 

After matching through the Marriage Pact survey before winter break, Aidan and Sophia spent the next six weeks unearthing each other’s deepest hopes, fears, and ambitions—all over text. It took 6 weeks for them to finally meet in person, and after overcoming a brief bout of new-romance jitters, the pair say they’ve never been closer. 

Sophia:

The Marriage Pact was the only reason we actually spoke. I knew his name because we had been on a Zoom call one time together. So when the emails came out, I recognized his name from there, but couldn’t put it to a face. 

Aidan:

I reached out first. I didn’t initially try to find her on social media. My friends at first thought it would be a meme to check who my Marriage Pact match was, because one of my other friends, who was like 5 foot 6 or 7, matched with a super tall basketball player, and we found that really funny. 

Sophia:

He sent me an email right before finals week with his number, so I responded to him with a text. He had asked if I wanted to grab a meal some time. But like, pre-finals week, I was not ready to look presentable and didn’t have the mental capacity to schedule something. So I kinda avoided the question, and we just conversed a bit on and off, but my replies were a little bit terrible. 

Aidan:

I would say we were having a nice conversation, but then I got ghosted for like a week. But you know, I didn’t think much of it because of finals. And then she responded the next week. 

After a series of unforeseen obstacles, Sophia and Aidan had to postpone their first meet-up by over a month. 

Sophia:

Since he’s from New York and I’m from New Jersey, I asked to meet up over winter break once finals were over. But then Omicron got pretty bad in the city, so we had to cancel. And then winter quarter classes got postponed and were online for a couple weeks, so I didn’t end up flying in until week 3 of the quarter. 

Aidan:

I told my friends that it was unlikely anything would happen, since I didn’t think we could keep up a text conversation for five or six weeks over this long break. But we did. 

Sophia:

We just kept talking at increasing levels of frequency from November until finally meeting mid-January. 

As Sophia and Aidan explain it, communicating over text is one thing, but meeting face-to-face is a whole new beast.

Sophia:

Texting Aidan is so easy, everything is so smooth and perfect and there can’t be any awkwardness, but it’s different in person. 

Admittedly, things weren’t so smooth-flowing after taking off the training wheels. Luckily, it was only a matter of time before they found their groove again. 

Aidan:

The first time that we met, we got dinner at Arrillaga on the weekend. 

Sophia:

So, I’m a very clumsy person. So I walk into this dining hall, and Aidan gets there 5 to 10 minutes later. I was expecting him to be super chatty and act like we knew each other, because we’d been texting constantly over this five week period. But he was super quiet at first.

Meanwhile, I'm dropping my scarf three times, trying to figure out where to sit, dropping my purse. And Aidan is just utterly silent throughout this whole thing. I was terrified, like, “Oh my god.”

So then we finally sit down. And we’ve already talked about our interests, what we want to pursue, our friends, our families, our music tastes, what we like to read and watch, blah blah blah. I felt like I knew enough about him to have a normal conversation, but the beginning was kind of scary and awkward. But then we ended up having such a long conversation.

Aidan:

It was like, three or four hours long. 

Sophia:

We stayed pretty much until the dining hall kicked us out.

The pair quickly made plans for a second “date” off-campus. 

Sophia:

As we were leaving, he was like, “We should grab another meal sometime!” so I told him he could swing by my dorm where there was food. But he was like, “Actually, I was thinking we could grab a meal off campus.”

And I was like, “Yeah, sure!” but I didn’t really process what that meant. And I proceeded to have this whole discussion with my friends about it and what he meant. 

Aidan:

I don’t know, I thought it was pretty unambiguous. 

Sophia:

We went to this restaurant, and I was convinced I knew where it was located, because I had perceived it to be on a totally different street. So I was like, “Oh, I can navigate there!” And I intentionally did not take out a map. And we ended up walking in the complete wrong direction. So a bunch of time had passed before we finally found the place. 

After that brief hiccup, they enjoyed a lovely dinner downtown. The elephant in the room, however, was Sophia’s imminent graduation that spring. 

Sophia:

After the dinner, he said, “Can I ask you out?” But I think the pressing thing for both of us was that I was graduating soon. So there’s the question of whether you should give it a shot at that point in time, and also if you consider having to do long distance or if it just isn’t worth it that late. 

So I was a little surprised when he asked that, and I gave him a kind of muddled, unclear answer. But then we kept going out. And eventually with time, both of our intentions came through, and we got over the awkward start. 

Aidan:

Usually, when you ask someone out and they say yes, that’s the day that you start dating. But Sophia likes to regard it as the day we stopped being awkward with each other. 

Sophia:

We used to have arguments as to the first official day. But February 8 is the day I’ve decided on. It was probably a little earlier. Some of my friends assumed that I chose that day because it was right before Valentine’s Day, but really it’s just because 8 is my favorite number. 

When I asked Aidan and Sophia what makes them so compatible, they had no shortage of things to share—their emphasis on family (both present and future), value for kindness and emotional connection, and goals for the future among them. 

Sophia:

We both really value monogamy, loyalty, treating other people with kindness and valuing their feelings. We’re definitely people who aren’t super comfortable with just a hookup. 

Both of us are very close to our families, too. Our families play a huge role in our present-day lives, even as college students, which I don’t think is super common for a lot of my friends. 

Aidan:

We also definitely have similar views on frats, Greek life, partying, all that kind of stuff, which we tend to avoid. And we align on our visions for our lives: we both want to live in a city, raise children, things like that. And even though Sophia is two years above me at Stanford, I’m also graduating earlier than most people, so we actually line up there too. 

Sophia:

Career wise, both of us care a lot about research and are aiming to do that in the future. And we’re both super into chess and had already overlapped there. So were a lot of things like that which the survey didn’t even ask about. 

Even though I think personality wise we’re very different. I’m very talkative outwardly, while he’s more quiet. But a lot of our values overlap—both on what we think is important, and our views on those things. 

Aidan:

Yeah, I’m not that social of a person, and I don’t really go out of my way to meet a bunch of new people. So it’s funny walking around with Sophia because it feels like she literally knows everyone. 

Sophia and Aidan don’t just align on their values, but have been constant sources of support for each other—in good times and in bad. 

Aidan:

Sophia is by far the most thoughtful person I know. On my birthday, she planned a surprise party that started right at midnight with all of my friends. I don’t even know how she got in contact with half of them. It was super, super fun. She wrote me such a thoughtful card, too. 

Sophia:

Aidan takes so many little actions to show that he cares about me. He’ll often do some small gesture for me and not bring it up. And he’s always there for me. There was also one time when there was a wasp that entered my room, and he was the person I went to because I knew he could handle it.

Sophia headed to New York after her graduation, while Aidan plans to stay on the west coast for a couple of years. While they’re unsure exactly where the future will take them, they plan to stick by each other’s side, even while a continent away. 

Sophia:

It's definitely been a shift, from being on campus to being adults out in the real world. The one benefit is that his family is from New York, so it’s not as hard for him to visit. 

And we obviously started out basically long distance, before we were even dating, just talking over text while we were both home. 

Aidan:

But honestly, it’s really nice getting to talk, even over text. 

They’re obviously no stranger to that. Only this time, there won’t be any nerves—seeing each other in person will be even sweeter than the first. 

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*To preserve the anonymity of these participants, we’ve replaced their real names with pseudonyms.