Method
The science of who fits with whom.
We don't believe in matching by the colour of someone's profile. We don't believe in "personality types" that come from a magazine quiz. We use the most validated instruments in academic psychology — the same instruments universities use to study what actually predicts a marriage that lasts forty years.
None of this is invented. Every question in our seventy-item questionnaire is drawn from an instrument that has been peer-reviewed, replicated, and used in studies of tens of thousands of couples over decades.
The five things we measure
1. Big Five Personality (BFI-2-S)
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. The most replicated framework in psychology, validated in fifty-six nations. The single strongest personality-level predictor of marriage longevity is low Neuroticism in both partners — and we measure it carefully.
2. Adult Attachment (ECR-S)
How you love and how you protect yourself when love is on the line. Four styles: Secure, Anxious, Avoidant, Disorganised. Some pairings are stable for life; one specific pairing — Anxious with Avoidant — is the most predictable failure pattern in relationship research. We will not suggest it.
3. Schwartz Values (PVQ-21)
Ten universal human values, validated in eighty cultures: benevolence, self-direction, security, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, power, conformity, tradition, universalism. Two people can have very different personalities and still build a beautiful life together — if they share the values that point them in the same direction.
4. Life design
Children, geography, religion, career intensity, money, the role of family. Not personality questions — practical ones. The most aligned soulmates can drift apart over a disagreement about where to raise the children that neither of them surfaced before the wedding.
5. Emotional fluency
Self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, social skill in conflict. The Gottman Institute's forty years of research at the Love Lab tells us this is what predicts whether the difficult moments — and there will be difficult moments — get repaired or accumulate.
How we combine them
Each dimension contributes a transparent sub-score to a final compatibility score from zero to one hundred. We will only ever introduce two people whose score is sixty-five or above. Below that threshold, we don't suggest anyone — we wait. Scarcity is the product.
Every introduction comes with a paragraph that tells you, in plain language, why we believe there's something there — and where the differences are that you should know about before the coffee. There are always differences. We surface them on purpose.
What we do not do
- We don't use MBTI. Its test-retest reliability is around fifty percent — most people change types when retested. It's popular, not scientific.
- We don't use horoscopes, Enneagram, or any framework without peer-reviewed validation.
- We don't claim to predict destiny. The science predicts longevity at the population level, not at the level of any single couple. We can tell you when there's a strong reason to expect it might work — not that it will.
Cultural humility
The Big Five replicates in eighty to ninety percent of literate global samples — but Openness, in particular, varies more across cultures than the rest. We are aware of WEIRD bias in psychology. Our V1 instruments are validated cross-culturally; future versions will add culturally-adapted item subsets as we expand beyond London.
The questionnaire
Five sessions, about an hour total. You can save and resume. The first session — Who you are when no one is watching — is open as a public demo. It won't actually match you with anyone yet (the London beta is by invitation), but you can feel the texture.
Wanting to go deeper
If you are an academic, a journalist, or just curious about the underlying papers, our methodology knowledge bank cites every primary source: Malouff (2010), Gottman (1992, 1998), Schmitt (2007), Soto and John (2017), Schwartz (1992), and forty more. We will publish it openly when the London beta launches.
— The Ivora team