What Your Name Secretly Says About Your Love Fate

Bertram Forer and the oldest trick in the trade

In 1948 a psychology lecturer named Bertram Forer gave his students a personality test and handed back what he described as their individual profiles. He asked each of them to rate how accurately the profile captured them. The average rating came back at 4.26 out of 5. Every student had been given exactly the same text, which Forer had assembled out of a newsstand astrology column.

The lines worked because they were built to work. 'You have a great need for other people to like you' and 'at times you are extroverted and sociable, at other times reserved' are true of very nearly everyone while sounding specific enough to feel aimed. Later studies found that acceptance climbs further when a reading is presented as personalised, even where the personalisation is entirely superficial, such as being told it derives from your birth date or the letters of your name.

Names carry real information, just not about romance

This does not make names meaningless. They encode a surprising amount: the decade you were born in, the region you came from, often the class and religion of your family, sometimes an aspiration a parent was holding. That signal is strong enough to change how strangers treat you. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan posted thousands of otherwise identical CVs to American job adverts in 2004, varying nothing but the names at the top, and found that applications carrying stereotypically white names drew substantially more callbacks.

A name has consequences, then. They travel through other people's assumptions, though, not through any thread tying your letters to a future partner. Nothing in the spelling of your name is doing any work on your love life.

Enjoying a reading with your eyes open

A name reading is a small piece of theatre, and theatre is allowed. The pleasure is real and mostly harmless: somebody tells you a story with you at the centre of it, and being the centre of a story is flattering.

The one thing worth guarding against is letting a nice label do your thinking for you. If you are told you are destined for second chances, that is a pleasant sentence, not a reason to go back to anybody. Read it, enjoy it, and then decide whatever you were going to decide anyway.

How this one works: the name you type is turned into a number, and that number picks one of the outcomes below. It is a party trick rather than a reading — the fun is in which one you land on, not in it being true.