Love stories

Have you ever wondered what makes us fall in love? Because of something or in spite of it, for a reason or for no reason at all? Remember how Count Cagliostro derived his Formula of Love? Or how Amélie decided that people only need a gentle nudge? And what is even more interesting is how the relationship will unfold afterwards. Can that be predicted?

We were rather amazed ourselves when we found out that the rough outline of a relationship — its skeleton, as it were — has already been described, and that it really does repeat from couple to couple depending on the combination of their characters. We did not believe it, so we went round our friends and relatives to test the theory... only to be amazed even more. The faces and the scenery changed, but the skeleton stayed. Every time. And more astonishing still: the same skeleton showed through in many films, where brilliant casting by people who had never heard of the S-Theory only confirmed it — after all, nearly every character on screen has a prototype, and those prototypes are real people.

So we very much wanted to share these finds and discoveries with you, and that is how the Love Stories project was born. We are perfectly aware that we are, thank heavens, no Count Cagliostro. We do not create what is not there. For this project we interviewed and wrote down the stories of how they met and how their relationships developed for forty-eight couples. And along the way we recalled which famous love stories from world cinema unfolded in exactly the same way.