Love Calculator

Posted August 22, 1999 at 2:21 am

Have you ever checked out the Love Calculator?  Like the Hamster Dance or the Dancing Baby, it’s one of those annoying little web trends that manages to spread, virus-like, until it has saturated the internet community.

Here’s a description of the Love Calcuator, excerpted from the official Love Calculator website:

We all know that a name can tell a lot about a person.  Names are not randomly chosen: they all have a meaning.  Doctor Love knew this so he made another great invention just for the lonely you!

Sometimes you’d like to know if a relationship with someone could work out.   Therefore Doctor Love himself designed this great machine for you.   With The Love Calculator you can calculate the probability on a successful relationship between two people.  The Love Calculator is an affective[sic] way to get an impression of what the chances are on a relationship between certain people.

I downloaded the Love Calculator and amused myself with it for a while.  It consists of two text boxes and a button.  You simply type in the names of two people and press the button, and a number that purportedly corresponds to the likelihood of a prosperous relationship between the two people is “scientifically computed.”

Not a bad concept, I suppose, but it seems narrow-minded in its application.   Apparently “Dr. Love” holds a rather traditional conception of the idea of  love.  Inspired by the somewhat less traditional manner in which love is portrayed in the Isaac Hayes song “Simultaneous”, I decided to make the Love Calculator more versatile.  I spent a little time deciphering Dr. Love’s secret love formula, and then programmed the new Three-Way Love Calculator.

Now I’m no PhD like Dr. Love, so I can’t claim to have anything approaching his level of expertise in these matters, but it seems to me that this new version of the Love Calculator is a substantial improvement.  Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Doesn’t work?  You may have to install the VB runtime libraries.