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Wouldn’t it be nice if there existed a device that could alert people if they were compatible? You could take it on dates with you, and at the end of the evening, the two of you would read the love detector’s “date compatibility score” on the front of the meter and decide if you should meet again tomorrow or never see each other again.

Good news. We may have a prototype for your startup company. It’s not a device, really. Instead, it just requires that you use a digital recorder to transcribe your interaction and then analyze the words to assess LSM. Oh, and for it to work, you should probably plan on having at least ten dates that are virtually identical in format. Hmmm. Perhaps a bit like speed-dating.

THE DATING DANCE

Indeed, Molly Ireland, several other colleagues, and I have found that the LSM between couples on a brief four-minute date predicts if they want to meet again. As you may know, in a typical speed-dating session, you meet and talk with eight to twelve different “dates” for a few minutes each. At the end of each date, each person rates the other person before moving to the next date. Usually the following day, the daters contact the speed-dating organizers and tell them which of the ten people they would be interested in meeting in a more relaxed setting. Most people report that the conversations range from superficial to passionate to exhausting. Sometimes people meet the loves of their lives; most times they don’t.

Lonely hearts may not always like speed-dating but researchers love it. In a recent project, about eighty daters gave permission for us to record their four-minute conversations so that our research team could analyze their word use. Does LSM in the brief interaction predict whether the couple gets together in the future? Yes, to some degree. Those in speed dates characterized by above-average LSM were almost twice as likely to want future contact as those with below-average LSM.

More interesting, however, is that we could predict which couples would get together afterward better than the individuals themselves. Immediately after each brief date, participants completed a short questionnaire about the desirability of the person they just met. The individual ratings of desirability were, of course, related to their eventually meeting, but LSM was more strongly related. Why? Whether or not two people eventually meet up is dependent on both parties. A guy might find a woman attractive but she might find him repulsive. The two must tango together. And LSM is capturing the dance—whereas the questionnaire is just assessing the dancers separately.

PREDICTING YOUNG LOVE

Let’s assume that a relationship advances beyond the four-minute speed-date and the young couple starts to date seriously. Would style matching between the two of them predict the long-term prospects of their relationship? Preliminary findings suggest yes.

Most people in passionate relationships are highly attentive to their partners. They detect subtle shifts in the other person’s moods and behaviors. Linguistically, their levels of style matching are quite high. After a few weeks or months together, some couples begin to realize that their relationship may have a limited shelf life. As their attention to their partner wanes, their degree of language style matching drops as well.

By tracking the language style matching of young dating couples, it is often possible to predict which couples are most likely to survive. For example, my former graduate student Richard Slatcher and I worked on a project with young dating couples. Rich, who is now on the faculty at Wayne State University, wanted to see how the couples talked with each other using instant messaging, or IM. He recruited eighty-six couples who reported that they IMed with each other on a daily basis and who agreed to let us analyze several days of their messages. We then compared what happened to couples who had high LSM in their instant messages with each other and those who had low LSM.

Of the forty-three couples with the highest LSM