It’s Valentine’s Day, and the future-phobic TV series Black Mirror has a present for you. It’s a new website inspired by the season 4 episode “Hang the DJ,” in which a dating device known as Coach determines the length of a couple’s relationship. The website, coach.dating, asks you to “put your trust in the system,” which presumably also means putting a damper on any romantic thoughts that might cross your mind today.
To use Coach, you share a link with your partner. Then you’ll both be prompted to click Coach’s interface, at which time the device will reveal exactly how many more years, days, or minutes you have left in your current relationship. In theory, if you both click at the exact same time, you’ll have found your “ultimate match,” but in practice, it feels a lot more random. At The Verge, our results ranged from 26 minutes to 17 years, even when we took extra care to sync our clicks. Also, Verge Culture Editor Laura Hudson emailed her partner link to herself, and found out her relationship with herself will end 10 years from now. We’ll miss her in 2028.
The website allows you to download a .jpg of your results, if that’s something you feel like you need to do. If not, you can just close the tab and hold that expiration date in the back of your mind for years to come. Or try again and get a different arbitrary answer.
There’s no day like Valentine’s Day to remind you that your relationship probably won’t last forever!