Design Your Dream Partner and We'll Expose Your Love Type
Build the perfect partner from scratch and accidentally reveal exactly how your heart operates.
Picture a workshop where you assemble a partner piece by piece: the humor, the texting habits, the way they handle an argument, the way they say goodnight. Sounds like harmless fun. It is not. Every dial you turn says less about your imaginary sweetheart and more about the wiring of your own heart.
Make seven choices and this quiz will hand back your love type — the thing you are actually shopping for when you believe you are just browsing. Bring honesty into the workshop. The workshop keeps receipts.
Read every possible result and what it means →
See what each choice votes for
6,470 of the 16,384 possible answer patterns tie for the most votes. The original tie rule chooses the tied label that first appeared in the selected answers. The labels therefore do not need to be equally common.
1. You get one dial for their sense of humor. Where does it land?
- Deadpan roasting, aimed lovingly and exclusively at me → The Banter Addict
- Silly voices in public with zero embarrassment → The Adventure Chaser
- Gentle jokes that mostly exist to make me relax → The Comfort-Seeker
- Inside jokes only the two of us will ever decode → The Devoted Romantic
2. Now their texting style. Choose wisely.
- Replies fast, double-texts, sends the good-morning paragraph → The Devoted Romantic
- Funny one-liners all day, like a private comedy feed → The Banter Addict
- Slow but substantial — three hours, then a real answer → The Independence-Craver
- Mostly photos from wherever they have wandered off to → The Adventure Chaser
3. Design the first date from scratch.
- A road trip with a full tank and no destination → The Adventure Chaser
- Cooking together at home, music on, nobody performing → The Comfort-Seeker
- Separate museum afternoons, then meeting up to compare notes → The Independence-Craver
- Something small they clearly spent weeks planning → The Devoted Romantic
4. How much of your week do they get?
- All of it, ideally, plus a shared calendar → The Devoted Romantic
- Weekends and one sacred midweek dinner → The Comfort-Seeker
- Whatever fits — we are both busy and both fine → The Independence-Craver
- Depends where the cheap flights are going → The Adventure Chaser
5. Every model ships with one flaw. Pick the tolerable one.
- Cannot let a pun opportunity pass, ever → The Banter Addict
- Loses track of time doing their own thing → The Independence-Craver
- Loves so hard it occasionally gets clingy → The Devoted Romantic
- Owns too many blankets and guards the thermostat → The Comfort-Seeker
6. An argument happens, because arguments do. Their best move?
- Making me laugh mid-sentence so neither of us stays mad → The Banter Addict
- Space first, then a calm walk-and-talk → The Independence-Craver
- Tea, a blanket, and sorting it out on the couch → The Comfort-Seeker
- Booking something fun so we forget why we were fighting → The Adventure Chaser
7. Final touch: how do they say goodnight?
- A recap of their day plus three follow-up questions → The Devoted Romantic
- A joke timed perfectly to ruin my attempt at sleep → The Banter Addict
- 'Night, see you Thursday' — and somehow that is plenty → The Independence-Craver
- One more idea for the trip we keep almost booking → The Adventure Chaser
What happens across every possible answer pattern?
We counted all 16,384 patterns, treating each offered choice as equally likely. This is a synthetic rule check, not visitor research. It does not describe how real people answer.
| Result | Patterns | Share of patterns |
|---|---|---|
| The Devoted Romantic | 3,947 | 24.09% |
| The Independence-Craver | 2,866 | 17.49% |
| The Banter Addict | 2,909 | 17.76% |
| The Comfort-Seeker | 2,715 | 16.57% |
| The Adventure Chaser | 3,947 | 24.09% |
Download the full counts · Download Python script · Download rule inputs
To reproduce locally: python3 measure_legacy.py --input legacy-rule-inputs.json --output counts.json. Uses Python 3 and its standard library.
The specification and the actual choice
Anyone can produce the list. Funny, kind, tall-ish, texts back. The awkward finding is that these lists predict real attraction poorly. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel ran speed-dating events where participants first stated the traits they cared most about, then met a dozen people face to face across an evening. What they had said they wanted barely predicted who they actually liked by the end of the night. A later meta-analysis with colleagues reached much the same conclusion: stated ideals track how we judge people described on paper, and stop carrying weight once someone is in the room being themselves.
That does not make the list worthless. It means it describes your imagination more faithfully than it describes your future.
Three dials and a limited budget
When Garth Fletcher, Jeffrey Simpson and colleagues collected people's descriptions of an ideal partner and sorted them, the sprawling lists collapsed into three broad dimensions: warmth and trustworthiness, vitality and attractiveness, and status and resources. Nearly every trait anyone volunteered belonged somewhere in that trio, and how closely a real partner is felt to match those ideals tends to track how satisfied people say they are.
Norman Li and colleagues added the constraint that makes ideals informative. Handed a generous budget of points to spend on a hypothetical partner, people buy a bit of everything, which reveals nothing at all. Handed a small budget, they spend narrowly on a few traits and leave the rest at the minimum, and those purchases often differ from the wish list the same person would recite unprompted. Necessities only become visible once you cannot afford luxuries, which is precisely what a fixed set of dials does to you.
The similarity trap
Most imaginary partners come out looking suspiciously like their designer, or like a slightly upgraded edition of them. The research here splits neatly. Pooling decades of studies, R. Matthew Montoya and colleagues found that perceived similarity predicts attraction strongly and consistently, whereas measured similarity does useful work only in brief first encounters and close to none in established relationships.
So the sensation of being on the same wavelength carries the weight, and that sensation is partly assembled after the fact. A partner built entirely from your own preferences is a self-portrait with better texting habits. Treat the five types waiting at the end as a mirror rather than a diagnosis, and if your result irritates you, the irritation is the useful bit.
Reading context & limits
For background and a fuller source trail, read How Friendship Actually Works. These references provide context; they do not validate the entertainment result or every historical detail in the archived essay.
- Lindenfors, Wartel & Lind, 'Dunbar's number deconstructed' — Biology Letters
- Dunbar, 'Structure and function in human and primate social networks' — Proceedings of the Royal Society A
Content lead: LISA. Updated October 25, 2026. Send a specific factual correction.