My wedding day was, of course, a celebration of the love between me and my partner. But I also saw it as something more. It was a rare opportunity to have all the people we love, from all the different parts of our lives, together in one room. I wanted our wedding to be a source of joy and connection for everyone, not just for us. As I was working on the seating chart, a crazy, loving, and somewhat playful idea came to me. What if I could use my wedding to play matchmaker? I decided to create a special "compatibility-based" seating chart, using a love calculator as my secret Cupid’s arrow.
My partner was immediately on board with what we started calling our "secret Cupid plan." The first step was to make a list of all the single guests who would be attending our wedding. We then spent an evening on the sofa with a bottle of wine and our favorite love calculator website. The website’s fast and simple interface was perfect for the task at hand. One by one, we tested every possible pairing of our single friends. We tested our college friends with our work colleagues, our cousins with our childhood neighbors. It was a funny and unexpectedly revealing process.
We kept a spreadsheet of the results, noting down all the "high-score combinations"—any pair that scored above 85%. This list of "potential soulmates" became the foundation for our seating chart. We were like two mad scientists, poring over our data and plotting the romantic future of our unsuspecting friends. "Okay," I’d say, "my friend Sarah and your cousin Tom are a 92%! They have to sit at the same table." My partner would counter, "But your colleague, Ben, and my friend, Emily, are a 95%! We can’t ignore that kind of chemistry."
When we designed the final seating chart, we made sure to strategically place these "potential power couples" near each other. We didn’t put them right next to each other—that would be too obvious. But we made sure they were at the same table, close enough to spark a conversation. We arranged the name cards with a secret, hopeful smile, feeling like two puppet masters of love. It was our own little wedding game, a secret layer of fun that was just for us.
On the day of the wedding, it was exciting to watch our experiment unfold. We would glance over at the tables where we had planted our high-score couples, looking for any signs of a spark. Did we see them laughing together? Were they engaged in a deep conversation? Every shared smile felt like a victory for our secret Cupid plan. It added a whole new layer of excitement and joy to our own celebration.
I don’t know if any lifelong romances were born from our matchmaking scheme. But I do know that our seating chart was a huge success. The tables were buzzing with conversation and laughter. By placing people together based on our fun, albeit silly, compatibility scores, we had created tables with a great, natural energy. Our friends, who might have otherwise stuck to the people they already knew, were mingling and making new connections.
Our secret Cupid plan was one of our favorite parts of the wedding. It was a way for us to share our own happiness, to try and spread a little bit of the love we were feeling to the people we cared about most. It was a enjoyable, imaginative, and sincere project that made our celebration feel even more meaningful. And it all started with a simple, playful tool and a romantic, hopeful idea.