The Relationship Spectrum

The line orders styles by a weighted average of the five position dials (which move in steps of ten). Every landmark sits at the spot its own profile computes to, with one exception: Friendship anchors the origin by definition, since it's the point where romance and sex are both zero:

raw = 0.28·Romantic + 0.24·Sexual + 0.13·Emotional + 0.22·Autonomy + 0.13·Structure position = 8 + (raw − 4.80) ÷ (89.80 − 4.80) × 92

Your match is the style with the smallest weighted distance to your dials across all nine dimensions. Position carries 75% of the match and flavor the other 25%, so two people with similar position dials can still match different styles:

distance = √( 0.75·Σ wᵢ(youᵢ − styleᵢ)² + Σ fⱼ(youⱼ − styleⱼ)² )    match% = 100 − distance

Tapping a landmark loads its exact profile, which is why it reads 100%.

Why two tiers: flavor dimensions don't run left-to-right along the line. Traditional Monogamy and Kitchen Table Polyamory are both open-book, while Don't Ask, Don't Tell isn't, so ordering the line with them would scramble it. Instead they distinguish styles sitting at the same spot: Kitchen Table and Parallel Polyamory are near-neighbors on the line, separated almost entirely by flavor. Flavor weights: disclosure 0.07, metamour 0.07, exploring 0.05, escalator 0.06.

Position weights. Each of the five weights answers one question: how much does this dimension drive the left-to-right story of the line, from fully closed to fully open?

• Romantic 0.28. The single biggest divider. Whether love itself is exclusive or plural is the main thing separating the monogamy family from the polyamory family, so it gets the largest share.
• Sexual 0.24. Nearly as heavy, because it splits the left half internally: swinging, DADT, and open relationships differ from monogamy almost entirely on this dial while staying romantically closed.
• Autonomy 0.22. The engine of the right half. Solo polyamory and relationship anarchy are defined as much by keeping your life your own as by partner count. Without this weight, solo poly would collapse into egalitarian poly.
• Emotional 0.13. Real, but partly downstream of romantic openness, so weighting it higher would double-count. It mostly separates near neighbors, like FWB from a purely transactional arrangement.
• Structure 0.13. Hierarchy matters enormously inside polyamory (hierarchical versus egalitarian) but says little on the far left, where a clear primary is trivially true of monogamy. A bigger weight would stretch the poly half and squash everything else.

The five sum to exactly 1.00, keeping the raw score on a 0 to 100 scale. The rescale constants 4.80 and 89.80 are simply Traditional Monogamy's and Solo Polyamory's own raw scores; they map to 8 and 100 on the line, leaving the first eight points as the runway to Friendship. Friendship itself is the one hand-placed landmark: its honest profile (independent, unranked, plural) would compute to the middle of the line, but as the point where romantic and sexual connection are both zero, it belongs at the origin, so it is anchored there by definition. Its full profile still drives matching like any other style.

The 75 / 25 split. Flavor dials are excluded from the line because they aren't monotonic along it. Disclosure is maxed at both extremes (Traditional Monogamy and Kitchen Table are both open books) while DADT, sitting in the middle, is the opposite. Feed that into ordering and the line scrambles. But flavor carries real identity, so it gets 25% of the match distance: enough to break ties between same-spot neighbors like Parallel and Kitchen Table, never enough to override a clearly different position profile.

Flavor weights. Disclosure 0.07 and metamour 0.07 lead because two landmarks are essentially defined by them: DADT is disclosure at zero, Parallel is metamour at ten. Escalator 0.06 separates script-followers from script-writers across the whole right half. Exploring 0.05 is lightest because it mostly distinguishes swinging's play-together style, one region of the line.

Why squared distance. The match uses weighted Euclidean distance, so one large gap on a single dial costs more than the same total spread across many dials. That mirrors how compatibility actually feels: one dealbreaker outweighs five small differences. All nine weights inside the square root total 1.00 (0.75 across position, 0.25 across flavor), which caps distance at 100 and lets match% be a clean 100 minus distance.

The grid. Dials, landmark profiles, and quiz values all live on a step-of-ten grid. That guarantees tapping a landmark reproduces its profile exactly at 100%, and keeps the wording ladder (fully, very, mostly, somewhat, leaning) in lockstep with the math. Quiz answers come in pairs per position dial; the two are averaged and snapped back to the grid.