Love Calculator

How the Love Calculator Works

This love calculator takes two names and returns a love percentage, a FLAMES result and a full breakdown of the letters behind both. It runs three traditional name games: the TRUE LOVE letter count (the default), the FLAMES elimination game and the LOVES name count. Whichever method you choose for the main answer, the card below it shows a second game, so you always see two results at once.

Every method is a fixed text formula. There are no random numbers, so the same two names always give the same score on any device, and you can repeat each step with pen and paper. Before counting, the calculator removes accents (José becomes JOSE and Zoë becomes ZOE), ignores spaces, punctuation, digits and capital letters, and spells out a few special letters, such as Æ as AE and ß as SS.

Names stay in your browser. The calculation runs in JavaScript on this page, and nothing you type is sent, saved or shared unless you copy the result yourself.

TRUE LOVE Calculator Formula

The TRUE LOVE game is the classic love percentage calculation from school notebooks. Write both names together, count the letters that spell TRUE, count the letters that spell LOVE, and put the two counts side by side.

The letter E belongs to both words, so every E counts twice: once toward TRUE and once toward LOVE. That is part of the traditional game. Because the method only uses the combined letters, Romeo and Juliet give the same 55% as Juliet and Romeo.

When a count reaches 10 or more

Paper versions of the game rarely say what to do with a count above 9, so this calculator uses one documented rule: add the digits of the count until a single digit remains. With the full names Peter Turner and Lauren Rose, the TRUE count is T 2 + R 5 + U 2 + E 5 = 14, which reduces to 1 + 4 = 5. The LOVE count is L 1 + O 1 + V 0 + E 5 = 7, so the score is 57%.

The rule has a side effect on long names. Truett and Everleigh have a TRUE count of exactly 10, which reduces to 1, so they score 16% even though they share many counted letters. The highest possible TRUE LOVE score is 99%, which needs both counts to reduce to 9, and a score of 100% cannot occur with this method.

How to Play FLAMES on Paper

FLAMES is a traditional playground name game. Each letter of the word stands for a relationship: Friends, Lovers, Affection, Marriage, Enemies and Siblings. The calculator follows the most common paper rules.

1. Write both names. Use the same spelling every time, without spaces.
2. Cross out shared letters one for one. If both names contain an A, cross out one A in each. A letter that appears twice in one name and once in the other is crossed out once in each.
3. Count what is left. Add the leftover letters from both names.
4. Count around FLAMES. Starting at F, count the leftover number around the word and strike out the letter you land on.
5. Continue from the next letter. Start each new count on the letter after the one you removed, wrapping back to the start, until one letter remains.

The FLAMES result depends only on the number of leftover letters, so this table covers every pair of names with 1 to 15 leftover letters.

If every letter cancels, which happens when both names use exactly the same letters, there is nothing to count and FLAMES has no result. The calculator says so instead of inventing an outcome.

LOVES Name Count Method

The third method is the number reduction game often played as "NAME loves NAME". Write the first name, the word LOVES and the second name as one line. Count how many times each letter appears, listing the letters in the order they first appear, then add the outer pairs of digits until only two digits remain.

When a line has an odd number of digits, the middle digit carries down unchanged. When a pair adds up to 10 or more, the calculator adds the digits of that sum, so 12 becomes 3 and every position stays a single digit. Because the letter order depends on which name comes first, this is the one method where order matters.

Love Calculator Odds: How Scores Are Distributed

To show what scores look like for real names, the calculator's own code was run on every pair from one fixed list: the 10 most popular boy names and 10 most popular girl names of 2025 published by the U.S. Social Security Administration (Liam, Noah, Oliver, Theodore, Henry, James, Elijah, Mateo, William, Lucas, Olivia, Charlotte, Emma, Amelia, Sophia, Mia, Isabella, Evelyn, Sofia and Eliana). That gives 190 different pairs, or 380 ordered pairs for the LOVES method. The list is small and based on US births, so treat the shares as an illustration of how each formula behaves, not as a fact about all names.

The two methods behave very differently. TRUE LOVE scores stay low for short names because few names contain many of the letters T, R, U, E, L, O and V. The top pair in the list, Theodore and Charlotte, reaches 87% with a TRUE count of 8 and a LOVE count of 7. The LOVES method keeps adding digits until two remain, which pushes many results into the 70s, 80s and 90s.

FLAMES outcomes are not equally likely

Across any 60 consecutive leftover counts, each FLAMES outcome appears exactly 10 times, because the elimination pattern repeats every 60 letters (60 is the least common multiple of 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). Real names do not spread evenly, though. In the 190 pairs above, 151 (79.5%) had between 4 and 9 leftover letters, and leftover counts of 2, 4, 7 and 9 all end on Enemies.

FLAMES is a small case of the Josephus problem, a counting puzzle in which items arranged in a circle are removed at a fixed step until one remains. Seen that way, the game is a neat exercise in counting and patterns rather than a forecast.

Is the Love Calculator Accurate?

No name game can measure compatibility. A spelling has no connection to personality, shared values, communication or how two people treat each other, and switching to a nickname or adding a surname changes the score without changing anything about the people. That is why this page labels every result as entertainment and shows the full arithmetic instead of hiding it.

Different love calculator sites give different scores for the same names because each one uses its own rules. Some count letters, some turn letters into numbers, and some produce a random or hashed number. Here the same rule runs every time, so a result never changes unless the spelling or the method changes.

Good ways to use it

• As a party or classroom game. Compare the three methods and guess which one will score higher before you press Calculate.
• As a love test for couples or friends. The score works as a conversation starter, not a verdict.
• As a counting exercise. Children can check the letter counts and the FLAMES elimination by hand.

When not to use it

Do not use a love score to decide whether to start, continue or end a relationship, or to tease someone about a low number. If a score starts to feel important, talk with the person instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & References

• U.S. Social Security Administration. Popular Baby Names: Top 10 Baby Names of 2025 (the 20 names used for the score distribution). ssa.gov
• MDN Web Docs. String.prototype.normalize() (NFD decomposition used to separate accents from letters). developer.mozilla.org
• Unicode Consortium. UAX #15: Unicode Normalization Forms, revision 58 for Unicode 18.0.0 (canonical decomposition). unicode.org
• Weisstein, E. W. Josephus Problem, Wolfram MathWorld (the circular elimination puzzle that FLAMES follows). mathworld.wolfram.com

TRUE LOVE, FLAMES and the LOVES count are traditional paper games with no single published rulebook. The rules on this page are the ones this calculator uses, and every number above was recomputed with the same code the calculator runs. Methodology reviewed: 2026.

For entertainment only. Scores come from a fixed letter formula and do not measure real compatibility.