The compatibility chart

Every LOVES score falls into one of five bands. The readings below are the game's traditional party-piece interpretations — written for entertainment, attached to a number that only ever counted letters. Read them in that spirit.

Score	The game's reading
90–99	Top of the chart. The names are vowel-rich and vowel-friendly, and the fold lands high. In party terms: the pair everyone tries first and argues about longest. The letters adore each other; reality remains uninvolved.
70–89	A strong hand. Plenty of L, O, V and E working together. The reading: an easy score to show off, a hard one to beat at the same table. Friends will immediately test themselves against it.
50–69	The promising middle. Where most pairs honestly land. The reading: a quiet nod from the alphabet — respectable, shareable, and the starting point of half the world's great stories, if stories were decided by spelling.
30–49	The slow burn. The counts start low and never quite catch fire. The reading: the letters are playing hard to get, which in every romantic comedy is merely act one.
Under 30	Dramatic letters. Usually the mark of short names light on the five special letters. The reading: the game is being theatrical. A low score says something about spelling and nothing about anyone.

Why bands at all?

A bare number invites the question "is that good?" — so the game has always answered with bands and a bit of theatre. What the bands cannot do is rank real relationships: the score behind them comes from counting five letters in two names, by a method you can check on paper. Two pairs in the same band may have nothing else in common, and the same pair lands in the same band forever — the game is deterministic.

Curious where famous pairs land? Famous couples' scores runs eight of them through the exact same rules.

Questions

Which band is most common?

The middle bands. Most name pairs carry a middling supply of the five letters, so 40–75 is the crowded neighbourhood of the chart.

Can a pair move bands by adding a middle name?

Yes — you change the letters, you change the game. That is a property of spelling games, and one more reason not to take the chart seriously.