Advanced options
Entirely for fun: the score comes from the classic playground LOVES letter-counting game, so the same two names always give the same result. Real compatibility, happily, is not decided by spelling.
What The Love Calculator Works Out
- Love score: the digital version of the LOVES game played on paper in playgrounds for generations. Both names are written together, each letter of L-O-V-E-S is counted, and neighbouring digits are added together repeatedly until only two digits remain. That number is the percentage.
- Verdict: a playful label for the band the score lands in: under 30% is "just friends", 50% and up is a promising match, 90% and up is written in the stars. Because it is pure letter-counting, the same two names always produce the same score, and adding a nickname or middle name changes everything, which was always half the fun.
- Playground word to count (advanced): different playgrounds used different words. TRUE LOVE gives an eight-digit start and a different answer, LIKES and FRIENDS were the safer versions when the subject was sitting nearby, and MARRIAGE was the high-stakes variant. Pick the one your school used.
- Surnames (advanced): adding surnames lengthens the pool of letters, which usually pushes the counts and the final score around considerably. Spaces, hyphens and accents are ignored; only the letters count.
- Second opinion (advanced): the same names scored with a second word, so you can compare the LOVES verdict with the TRUE LOVE one. When the two disagree wildly, which they often do, that tells you everything about the method.
- Letters in common (advanced): the letters that appear in both names. Shared letters are what drive high LOVES counts, since every L, O, V, E or S in either name adds to the same tally.
- Name numbers (advanced): the Pythagorean numerology "name number" for each person: A to I are 1 to 9, the alphabet repeats, and the total is reduced to a single digit. Numerologists attach a character to each digit; this calculator reports them in the same spirit as the main score, strictly for entertainment.
- Letters counted and the working (advanced): how many of the combined letters actually contributed to the score, plus a step-by-step table of the digit pyramid so you can check the arithmetic against the version you remember. None of this measures real compatibility, which psychologists put down to shared values, communication and how couples handle conflict, none of which is computable from a surname.