Love Tester: Test Your Love by Name (Free Love Meter)

How to Use the Love Tester

The love tester above works like the old arcade machines, minus the coin slot and the sticky handle. Pick a mode with the tabs at the top of the machine, type, and press the big button. The meter takes about two seconds to fill, because a little suspense is half the fun.

Mode 1: Test two names

1. Stay on the Test two names tab.
2. Type your name in the first box and the other person’s name in the second. First names work best, but nicknames are fair game.
3. Press Test our love (or hit Enter) and watch the thermometer climb.
4. Read your love meter percentage, your level, the short reading and the love detector verdict.

Mode 2: Test your love vibe

1. Switch to the Test your love vibe tab. The second box disappears.
2. Type just your own name, or a friend’s.
3. Press Check my love vibe to get your personal love temperature.

This second mode is a nod to the arcade machines that rated a single player. You didn’t need a date to play those. You squeezed the handle and the lights told you whether you were a heartbreaker or a cold fish.

What Each Love Tester Level Means

Every score lands on one of ten levels. Each level covers ten points, and the top level, Soulmates, covers 90 to 100. Here’s what they mean in plain words.

The names are a wink at the vintage machines, whose lights rated players with words like “lovable,” “jealous,” “bashful” and “cold,” according to the Museum of the Game’s entry on the Exhibit Supply Love Tester. Our Shy and Cold Fish levels borrow from that spirit. We kept every level kind, because nobody should walk away from a game feeling bad.

How Our Love Tester Works (the Honest Version)

Plenty of love meters online won’t explain what’s going on under the hood. We’d rather show you. Our love tester is a small piece of math that runs in your browser. Here’s every step.

1. Clean up the names. We trim the ends, switch everything to lowercase, drop accents (so “José” and “Jose” match), and remove spaces and punctuation. “Mary Jane” and “maryjane” become the same input.
2. Sort the two names. In two-name mode, we put the cleaned names in alphabetical order before doing anything else. That’s why “Sam + Alex” and “Alex + Sam” always match.
3. Hash them. We join the names with a plus sign and run them through FNV-1a, a well-known, simple 32-bit string hash. It turns any text into a big whole number. Change one letter and the number changes completely, but the same text always gives the same number.
4. Squeeze it into 0–100. We take the remainder after dividing by 101. That gives a score from 0 to 100.
5. Pick the level. The score’s tens digit picks one of the ten levels, and each level has its own reading and love detector line.

Notice what’s missing. There’s no psychology, no astrology, no secret list of “good” letters, and no randomness. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent to a server, and there’s no tracking in the tool. It’s a fun formula, and that’s all it pretends to be.

One honest difference to flag: our love calculator on the homepage reads the names in the order you type them, so swapping the boxes there can change your percentage. The love tester sorts the names first, so order never matters here. Neither one is more “right.” They’re two different games.

Love Tester vs. Love Calculator vs. FLAMES

TrueLoveCalc has three name games, and each one gives you a different kind of answer. Here’s how they compare.

If you want the classic percentage with a breakdown, try the love calculator by name. If you’d rather get a word than a number, the FLAMES calculator lets you cross out letters the way people did on notebook paper. Curious how percentage tools come up with their numbers? Our guide on how to calculate love percentage by name walks through the common methods, and is a love calculator accurate? covers what the research actually says.

A Short History of the Love Tester Machine

Long before anyone typed names into a website, the love tester was a cabinet in a penny arcade. You dropped in a coin, squeezed a handle, and lights told you whether you were lovable, bashful or cold.

The early cabinets. The Museum of the Game, a large online database of coin-operated machines, lists a Love Tester by Exhibit Supply Co. of the United States, produced from 1929 to 1933. Its description is short and perfect: “Deposit a coin and squeeze the handle. Lights show whether the player is lovable, jealous, bashful, cold, etc.” The same entry notes that the machine “has been remade and reproduced by numerous companies ever since” (Museum of the Game).

The arcade staple. The PinRepair.com arcade archive calls the Exhibit Supply model “probably the most familiar” love tester and “the one most people remember from old arcades.” It says the machines were “the mainstay of 1950s arcades,” were reissued in the 1950s and 1970s, and were copied by Mike Munves in the same decades (PinRepair).

How the machines “measured” love. There was never a real love sensor. Wikipedia’s overview of love tester machines says many measure moisture on the hands through skin conductance, others use skin temperature, and some simply use a random generator. It sums it up plainly: these machines “are for amusement purposes only and do not actually give a real result” (Wikipedia).

Nintendo’s pocket version. In 1969, before it made video games, Nintendo sold a handheld Love Tester designed by Gunpei Yokoi, who later created the Game Boy. Two people each held a metal sensor while holding hands, and a needle gave a score from 1 to 100. It was Nintendo’s first product to use real electronic components, and it was re-released in Japan by Tenyo in July 2010 (Wikipedia; Destructoid).

Still worth studying. Love testers are now a research topic. At the University of Silesia in Poland, Ania Malinowska’s “Technologies of Love” project includes a study of love tester machines “popular in Europe and the USA in 19th and 20th centuries,” looking at their construction, their mechanisms and the “taxonomies of emotions” they used, partly through interviews with collectors of old arcade games (University of Silesia).

Our online love tester keeps the best parts of that tradition, the thermometer, the suspense and the cheeky labels, and drops the sticky handle. Unlike the random-generator machines, it gives the same answer every time you type the same names.

Fun Ways to Use the Love Tester

A love tester online is at its best when other people are around. A few ideas:

• Party round. Go around the room and test everyone’s love vibe. Whoever gets Cold Fish picks the next song. Whoever gets Soulmates has to give a toast.
• Celebrity pairings. Test your friends against their celebrity crushes and argue about the results. It’s harmless, and it’s surprisingly competitive.
• Game night warm-up. Use the love tester as a five-minute opener, then move on to truth or dare questions or a round of never have I ever.
• With your crush. “Want to see what the love meter says about us?” is a low-pressure, playful opener. Whatever the score, laugh about it and keep talking. If you’re still decoding their signals, our guide to the signs someone has a crush on you is a better read than any meter, and these questions to ask your crush will take the chat further than a percentage ever could.
• Group chat bait. Copy a result and drop it in the chat with no context. Wait.

One ground rule: keep it kind. Don’t test someone’s name to tease them in public, and don’t use a low score to make anyone feel small.

What a Low or High Score Really Means

Here’s the truthful answer. A love tester score is a fixed result of the letters you typed, nothing more. It can’t see how you treat each other, whether you laugh at the same things, or how you handle a bad day. So a score says nothing about your real relationship, in either direction.

If you got a low score: Cold Fish or Lukewarm is a fun result, not a warning. Change “Katherine” to “Kate” and you’ll get a completely different reading, which tells you how much weight the number deserves. Plenty of real couples would land low on any name meter, and they’re fine.

If you got a high score: Enjoy it! Screenshot it, send it, frame it. Just don’t treat Burning Love as proof that someone feels the same way you do. Feelings show up in actions, not algorithms.

If you want to understand a real relationship better, look at how you each show care. Our guide to the 5 love languages is a far more useful lens than any thermometer. And if you’re wondering whether names matter at all, we dug into the research in does your name affect your love life?

Love Tester FAQ