Romantic love. We’ve all seen, if not experienced, its influences before. Rom-coms, emo love songs, TV sitcoms, our friends’ relationships.

And then there’s that unavoidable time of year where love seems to show up everywhere and is on everyone’s minds.

It’s the time of year that brings couples closer (or tears them apart), leaves single people pining, and makes all the people not helplessly in love or hopelessly lonely feel slightly sick at the constant bombardment of “love”.

Foothill embraces that pink and fluffy time of year, Valentine’s Day, and even uses it to raise money for the Junior class. To any Foothill student, Matchmakers is a name they have come to both scorn and enjoy.

Matchmakers is, just as the name implies, a match making tool. Students are given a questionnaire to fill out, with simple questions like “What’s your favorite hair color?” or “What’s your curfew?” plus a few that seem incredibly random.

Most students complain about having to take such a silly test, wondering one of two things while pondering their answers: What could this question possibly have to do with anything in factoring a match, or, could the question be any less obvious in its intent?

Once the answers are submitted and processed Matchmakers results are sold. On these omniscient sheets of paper, you will find your “best match”, who your closest friend should or could be, the people most opposite from you and several other matches. For each of the categories, there’s a column for people in your own grade and another column for people in the other grades.

However, this applies only to boy-girl matches even though the company has a questionnaire that makes provisions for other gender match-ups.

The back of these sheets contain your astrology information and tells you who else (famous, or at Foothill) has your birthday and other tidbits of information along those lines.

Matchmakers have the potential to be an interesting, fun and easy way to get you to put yourself out there and meet new people; people that you could theoretically end up liking. Otherwise, you are most likely to be “best matched” with someone so completely random that it can be laughable (which can be enjoyable in itself). 

If these matchmakers really did get people out meeting and talking to one another then it would definitely be worth it but they don’t seem to do that. Mainly, they cause laughter among friends and provide brief entertainment, albeit sometimes at others’ expense.

Because a good amount of people don’t even fill out the test with their real information in the first place, the whole ordeal loses the little bit of credibility and seriousness it had to start with.

As, however, a three-dollar piece of paper made for raising money for prom, it is an entertaining, creative and fun way to raise money while also creating a way for everyone to participate in Valentines Day at school. 

Even though Matchmakers may be a little bit cheesy and just another way to make money from Valentine’s Day, it can be a fun diversion from the sometimes cloying sweetness that has come to surround Valentines Day.

And, it does seem rather fitting that the students at Foothill, the classified “nerd” school of Ventura, take a multiple-choice test to determine their best love matches.

Editor’s Note: Matchmakers is a fundraiser for the Junior class, not prom, and has been changed as of 5:57 p.m. Feb. 10, 2011.