What better way to waste my Friday evening than by going to a dating show? Or so I thought, as I entered Goldwin Smith Hall 132, jammed wall-to-wall with spectators buzzing with excitement. Cornell has its fair share of what I’d like to call ‘matchmaking platforms’ from the Bisexual Pop the Balloon: A Live Queer Dating Show to Big Red Missed Connections and Perfect Match, all comedic attempts to solve the loneliness epidemic on this campus. Now, enter the Kupid Dating Show.
Kupid Dating Show, hosted by Evan Rama, is a live college dating show that tours universities across the country. On Sept. 25, Cornell hosted the first stop of Kupid’s third national tour co-presented with Cornell Khiladi, an all-female South Asian Fusion Dance team. The show is set to visit 40 universities in total.
I entered the show unsure of what to expect. The Kupid Dating Show visited Cornell’s campus last semester, and my friends who attended warned me that the show was pure “degeneracy” and “goonerism.” When I heard that, I seriously doubted them — how bad can a dating show be? I was surely mistaken. This show was a humiliation ritual.
The show has two rounds, each featuring five male contestants and two female contestants, separated by a divider so neither side can see the other. Rama posed a question to each male contestant, and after the question was answered, the two female contestants deliberated and eliminated whichever contestant gave the weakest answer. At the end of the round, the winning male contestant and female contestant stand back-to-back and decide whether they want to go on a paid $100 date or steal the money for themselves.
The first round set the tone for the night: Contestants were asked to do a range of unhinged things like “explain your worst hookup story,” show off their favorite dance move, enact “how you would cold approach a girl” and “talk dirty for 15 seconds.” The crowd's reactions were boisterous and immediate, every contestant’s answer met with either explosive cheers or heavy jeers. Contestants’ answers ranged from safe to outrageous. Jake Quan ’29 admitted he wasn’t “the hookup type” for the first question, an answer the audience found boring. The dance question was a crowd favorite. Jad Alsouss ’29, otherwise known as jad_to_10k, took his shirt off and did the worm, while others grinded, danced Raas or slow-danced. At one point, to answer the “talk dirty” question, a guitar randomly appeared from the crowd, and Aarish Talukdar ’29 serenaded the room with Vance Joy’s “Riptide.”
However, the show took a turn for the worse when the first round ended with a plot twist: The winning male contestant, Talukdar, ‘fainted’ upon seeing the female contestant, Vaishnavi Sakthi ’30, for the first time, but decided to steal the money for himself. “Gotta teach these freshmen to never trust a man,” Talukdar said, after being asked by Rama about why he said no to a date.
What was more striking than the actual rounds were the audience participation activities. Rama hosted brief breaks from the actual show that involved members of the audience, incentivized to participate by DoorDash gift cards, one of which was a ‘pitch yourself’ segment. Audience members could go up, introduce themselves and if anyone in the audience was interested in them, that audience member could come down to the stage to be paired up for a date. One male audience member went down to pitch himself, and a girl from the audience came down to introduce herself. However, when Rama asked the male contestant if he was interested in going on a date with her, the contestant hesitated to answer for what seemed like two minutes. Needless to say, everyone in the audience, including myself, was stunned.
Similarly, there was a sweatshirt segment, in which an audience member had 30 seconds to run around the lecture hall and find a match. The audience member would offer a sweatshirt to anyone that they found attractive. If that person felt the same way, they kept the sweatshirt; if not, they handed it back, and the audience member would find another attractive person. What commenced was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Three audience members participated just to be met with all the people they handed the sweatshirt to hastily flinging the sweatshirt back to the participant like the sweatshirt had cooties. Rama commented that Cornell was the first university where no one had gotten matched in this segment — probably not a coincidence.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the comedic aspects of the show, I left the lecture hall feeling a sense of disappointment at the conduct of attendees. I can understand that nobody was taking the “dating” part of the show seriously — emphasis on the “comedic” blind-dating show — however, what happened to treating other people with respect? Contestants and the audience were quick to shame others participating in the show, even though the whole point of dating shows is to put yourself out there. For a campus so eager to solve loneliness, it was striking how quickly people turned someone’s vulnerability into a punchline.
Kupid Dating Show is, yes, a silly event created to generate some laughs on campus. However, it left a stark impression on me about Cornell’s culture. Cornell prides itself on being a place of intense ambition, where students are used to curating impressions, competing against each other for the best finance internship, clubs or sororities and fraternities. It’s a place where students protect against anything that looks like weakness. Perhaps that culture explains why sincerity felt so out of place in that lecture hall.
If we want an answer to the disconnection that runs through campus, it won’t come from a stage, a sweatshirt or questions like “how would you propose” and “describe your sex life as a fast food chain.” It will start with something far more simple: being kind to others, especially those who are brave enough to put themselves out there.
Sanika Saraf is a member of the Class of 2028 in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She is an assistant lifestyle editor on the 144th Editorial Board and can be reached at sanikas@cornellsun.com.
