It had been three months since the breakup. Three months of ups and downs, good days where I felt strong and free, and long nights where the weight of the memories felt crushing. Even though I knew it was for the best, a part of me was still stuck. There was a knot of unresolved emotion in my chest, a mixture of sadness, anger, and lingering affection that I couldn’t seem to untangle. I felt like I was haunting the ghost of our relationship, unable to fully move on. Late one night, while scrolling through the internet and trying to numb my thoughts, I found myself on a love calculator website. It was a simple, clean page I’d used with friends for laughs before. But tonight, it didn’t feel like a game.

With a sense of trepidation, I typed my name into the first box. My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a long moment before I typed his name into the second. Seeing our names there, side-by-side, sent a familiar pang through my heart. It felt like a small, private act of rebellion, a violation of the "no contact" rule I had tried so hard to maintain. A part of me was screaming not to do it, to close the tab and walk away. But a stronger, more curious part, the part that was desperate for some kind of resolution, needed to see. I held my breath and clicked the button.

A number appeared: 58%. It was a mediocre, unremarkable number. It wasn’t the gut-wrenching 10% that would have felt like a final, definitive rejection, nor was it the heart-stopping 90% that would have sent me spiraling into a fresh wave of "what ifs." It was just… 58%. I stared at it, waiting for the wave of pain or regret that I had braced myself for. But it never came. Instead, I was met with an overwhelming, and entirely unexpected, sense of calm
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In that moment, looking at that bland, middle-of-the-road number, I had a profound realization. How could a single number, a simple percentage, ever possibly encapsulate the beautiful, messy, and complicated reality of our time together? Our relationship wasn’t a 58%. It was the memory of laughing so hard we cried in a downpour. It was the sting of words we could never take back. It was the comfort of falling asleep next to each other and the gut-wrenching pain of sleeping alone again. It was years of inside jokes, shared dreams, and bitter disappointments. It was a rich, complex story with a thousand different data points, and it was the height of absurdity to think that a simple name-matching algorithm could ever distill that down to a two-digit score
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That 58% didn’t represent us. It represented the futility of trying to quantify something as vast and intangible as love and loss. And seeing that futility laid bare on the screen was incredibly liberating. I suddenly saw our relationship not as a failure that needed to be analyzed, but simply as a chapter that had ended. The score wasn’t high or low. It was just a number, and our story was just a story. Good or bad, happy or sad, it was all in the past. The number didn’t invalidate the good times, nor did it amplify the bad. It just… was. And in its neutrality, it gave me a strange sense of peac
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This small, private ritual, this secret act of typing his name one last time, became a form of silent farewell. It wasn’t a dramatic, tear-filled goodbye, but a quiet, personal moment of acceptance. It was as if I was acknowledging the past, holding it up to the light one last time, and then gently letting it go. I wasn’t seeking a sign that we should get back together, or a confirmation that we were never meant to be. I was, I realized, just looking for a way to close the book. And in its own strange, digital way, this simple tool had given me exactly tha
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I closed the browser tab. The knot in my chest, the one that had been there for months, felt noticeably looser. I hadn’t found an answer, but I had found a new perspective. The need to define what we had, to label it as "good" or "bad," had dissolved. It was part of my story, a significant and formative part, but it was no longer my present. That night, for the first time in a long time, I fell asleep without replaying our final conversations in my head. I had found a strange and unexpected form of closure, not in a grand gesture or a deep conversation, but in the quiet, unassuming honesty of a 58% score on a silly websit
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