The February Matchmaker Form wrapped up a few days ago: if you have any comments, complaints, etc. please let me (or /u/MambaMatchmaker) know!

Anyways, a big problem with the previous iterations of the form is that it would only be either men or women making their rankings, while the other sex would hope that they'd get picked by someone they themselves would find attractive.

That changes now.

Introducing two-sided matchmaking!!! Now, both sides talk about themselves, and both sides do rankings! In this way, we can guarantee that you'll only get matched with someone you think you may foster a good and holy relationship with. In Phase 1, both men and women fill out the form and talk all about themselves. I then make the responses public in Phase 2, and both men and women will rank people of the opposite sex.

Why didn't I do this before? Because two-sided matchings are tedious to do by hand.

So we'll just make the computer do it for us. I've coded up an algorithm that will do two-sided matchings. Feel free to ask me to look at the code (it's in Python) and test it out yourself. If you find any bugs, please let me know. And I also coded this a bit loosely, with some inefficiently placed if-else statements and loops - I think it could definitely be coded to run faster. I'm not a computer scientist by training, but I know a lot of you have experience there, so any input would be phenomenal!

If you look at the algorithm, you'll notice that it slightly changes depending on sex: namely, one of the sexes is "active", and the other sex is "passive". Without getting into the math that proves this, you benefit from being in the active sex: you have a higher chance of getting matched with people higher in your rankings. You will never get matched with someone whom you don't put in your rankings if you're passive, but you may get matched with someone lower in your preferences than if you're active. That being said, if you go unmatched in one form of the algorithm, it's also mathematically true that you will go unmatched in the other form. So this doesn't change who gets matched, but it can change what the pairings are.

(To those who care about the math: this is the Gale-Shapley algorithm. One sex does the proposing, and the other sex does the accepting/rejecting. You might be able to find a proof online that each member of the sex that does the proposing in the algorithm is always at least as well-off as if they were the sex receiving proposals, but you have a chance of matching with someone you ranked higher by being the proposer. If you can't find a proof and are curious, ask me for it and I'll get back to you. I'm studying this myself so it's good practice. Also, the set of people who go unmatched are the same in either case; we can prove that as well.)

So which sex is "active" and which is "passive"? This will depend on the sex ratios. Namely, if women make up a high enough ratio of respondents, I'll make them the active sex, and otherwise, men will be the active sex.

Anyways, two-sided matchmaking will start with (possibly) the March iteration of the form. So the next form might get released soon.

Please let me know if you have any comments/questions/concerns/suggestions.

God bless, and have a holy Lent!