Zita chews her pencil in frustration. She cannot get the equation to work. Is there anything worse than love homework? At this rate she will never find the ideal partner!

The reason why one person chooses another is hard to pin down. It is said that opposites attract - but researchers in the US¹ have found that this is not the case.

The team studied 133 traitsA person's characteristics or qualities. in almost 80,000 couples.² They also took the results of 199 previous studies. They found that for over 80% of the traits, partners were likely to be similar.

The most common ones were year of birth, political and religious beliefs, intelligence and level of education.

"Our findings demonstrate that birds of a feather are more likely to flock together," says Tanya Horwitz, who led the research.

Journalist Signi Livingstone-Peters is sure that love is a science. Romantic love, she writes,³ divides into physical attraction, personal attraction and attachment. Each relates to hormonesChemicals created inside living creatures. They are used to send messages from one part of the body to another. released from the brain.

"As unromantic as it may sound," she concludes, "there is a formula for love."

Bobby Seagull set out to calculate how many women there were that he might marry. He started by taking the number of women in London and Cambridge, where he spends most of his time.

He narrowed these down to those who were his age, or up to ten years younger, and had been to university.

He reckoned that he found one in 20 attractive - which left him with 29,639 possible girlfriends. But they also had to be single and likely to find him attractive. The final number was 73.

The physics equation (i∂+m) Φ = 0 is sometimes found as a tattoo. It describes an electronA negatively charged subatomic particle. , but is often called "the formula for love." Why? Because it says that if two particles are connected for a time and then separate, what happens to one will still affect the other.

Yes: As Signi Livingstone-Peters says, it all comes down to a biological process - "Beneath the flushed cheeks, there is a series of complex chemical reactions taking place between the brain and the body."

No: Some things cannot be explained by science. Even if you found two people with exactly the same traits, there is no guarantee that they would get on with each other, let alone fall in love.

Or... It is just as well that there is no equation. The search for a perfect match is one of the most exciting things in life, and the more random it is the better: even dating apps detract from it.