Katie Brady talks about Trinity Cupids 2025 and the impossible art of matchmaking

It’s 9pm on a random Thursday night, and in 15 different bars across the city love might just be in the air. Or at least, that’s what you hope as a cupid. You hope that you made at least one good match. That, through the hundreds of forms you flicked through, through the many many subpar matches you know you made, just one will beat the odds and find a real connection. 

The problem you face, however, is that the art of matchmaking is inherently incompatible with love. Defining people by random questions they answer on a form, categorising them based on their height, green flags, favourite songs, judging them on the most shallow parts of who they are, makes it truly impossible to know what they are like as people. As a result, you end up making matches based on things like ‘they both study engineering!’, ‘they both like dogs!’, ‘they like similar music!’ or even ‘they both used this one specific adjective on their form and honestly I’m tired so that’s enough for me right now!’. 

That’s not to say that we didn’t try our best when making the matches. We wrote out every single form on a sheet of paper. We read them. We reread them. We peer reviewed our matches. We even Instagram stalked on occasion. Yet, none of that can truly ensure a good match. Knowing the people you were matching made it all the more stressful, as biases, opinions and past experiences all started to become defining features of what they might want in a lover. Add to that the pressure of putting a friend on what might be the worst date of their life, and suddenly decisions become almost impossible to make. 

At the end of the day we were trying to answer the question that has boggled poets, screenwriters and philosophers for years: What makes two people right for each other? 

If this experience has taught me anything, it’s that there truly is no straightforward answer to this question. Most of the time, love is accidental and non-conformative. Some of the matches I would have bet my life on, went down like a lead balloon and others that were thrown together somewhat haphazardly turned out to be the biggest successes of the night. The truth is, there is no way to know if two people will really hit it off, until you sit them opposite each other and see if sparks fly.

Thats why for 3 days prior to the event we had a team of 40 chaperones calling every pub we could think of trying to reserve tables for the night, trying to explain the admittedly insane concept of a charity blind dating event to them. Many thought we were mental and told us they wanted to play no part in it. Some, however, were willing to help us take a chance on love. They pushed tables into corners, reserved stacks of stools and even offered us entire rooms free of charge. They did everything they could to help set the scene and create an environment where romance could blossom. 

After all our prep, all the last minute drop outs and call ups, all the calls to friends to vet no previous connections and hundreds of emails telling people the locations of their mystery dates, the time came for over 250 Trinity students to try and find love. 

Sadly, for many of our matches, they were a fire safety officer’s dream. No sparks, no flames, just a nice, slightly awkward conversation and a quick separation the second they hit the club. Oddly enough, a girl who loves to party and a boy who hates alcohol don’t make a good match. Nor do a post grad looking for ‘something serious’ and a third year whose friend filled out the form for them. All of these facts which were not outlined on the form become starkly apparent when they materialise into pillars of people’s personalities. While the cupids can take partial responsibility for bad matches, some people had no one but themselves to blame for the lack of fireworks. Pro tip: do not tell your date you only signed up to go on a date as a means of getting to the club, do not talk about the private boarding school you went to all night and please, for the love of the eros, aphrodite and all other gods with any stake in the romantic market, do not try and teach your date mixed martial arts in the middle of the bar…

Thankfully, not all matches failed to light. For some, the odds swung in their favor. They prolonged the dates as long as possible. They came to the club because they promised their friends they would but left pretty quickly. Some left alone, with a phone number or an Instagram promising of a future interaction while others left with their date in hand, tipsily trying to fill out an overnight guest form in front of campus security, or giggling in the back seat of a taxi. 

Luckily for me, over my three years here, I have experienced all three sides of a Trinity Cupids event. I have spent hours sitting on the ents office floor, pulling my hair out over the details of matches, I have felt the time physically pass as I sat opposite someone who could not have been more different from me and I have gone on one of the most fun dates of my life.

All these experiences have led me to two main conclusions. First, as I have alluded to throughout this article, love cannot be found in a formula. Saying things like ‘I want them to be tall’, ‘I need a partner with blue eyes’, ‘I will only date someone who drives’ is all well and good, but none of these factors have any real impact on who you will find that magical spark with. Or at least, not in isolation. They might be beneficial, something an employer would describe as ‘advantageous’ on a job advert, but they aren’t defining factors in a love story. There is an inevitable element of magic involved. Some intangible, inexplicable connection between two souls that transcends all the material stuff that we think defines our dream partner. The other thing I have learned from Cupids is that life, if you want it to be, truly can feel like an episode of Sex and The City. Go on the stupid date, kiss the wrong person, set your friend up with someone for the plot. If you are looking for love, then get out there and search! Send the scary text, approach that guy from the Ussher at the Pav, be bold and be brave. Love can’t be found in formulas and algorithms but who knows, maybe it can be found at a table for two in Ciss Maddens…