Recently, an online tool called "Illusion Calculator" went viral on social media, with which you can assess how realistic your requirements for an ideal partner are.
Recently, an online tool called "Illusion Calculator" went viral on social media, with which you can assess how realistic your requirements for an ideal partner are.
To check, the "Illusion Calculator" offers to set the criteria for the ideal pair:
age and gender — the desired range for the search;
finances — expected level of income (for example, salary up to 1 million UAH);
material and social status - having your own home, car or children;
Lifestyle - attitude towards smoking and alcohol.
After processing the data, the system outputs a final percentage. This figure shows what proportion of the country's population falls within your criteria.
If the result is, for example, 0.05%, the service ironically hints that you are looking for a “rare unicorn” or a mythical creature that almost does not exist in nature, and your requests are too high.
If the percentage is higher (for example, 15-20%), the chances of meeting such a person on the street or on dating apps are quite real.
Many people test the calculator "in reverse": they enter their own characteristics to check their own uniqueness in the dating market.
"Illusion Calculator" is a project by Ukrainian psychologist and relationship coach Iryna Savchuk. The website states that the data for the calculations is taken from the State Statistics Service.
The platform quickly went viral among Instagram, Threads, and X users as an entertainment tool.
However, many have noted that this "calculator" significantly underestimates the real number of potential partners.
“I saw this ‘illusion calculator’ in the threads. I entered the data of a potential boyfriend, without any complicated criteria. The result is 0.05%. I entered my current characteristics into that calculator. The result is 0.001%. It’s kind of funny,” the user wrote in Threads.
"I checked my request on the Illusion Calculator yesterday. I entered an age ±6 years from mine, everything else (education, salary, bad habits, height) is the same as mine. That is, there was no request for a two-meter Apollo with a salary of a billion euros a week. And what did they tell me in the comments? That's right! That my expectations are unrealistic and why would such a man need me. Well, I don't know. At the very least, in order to build a relationship with an adult woman who is looking for a partner, not a daddy," another Threads user shared.
"Of course, if you're just trying to make jokes, it's a fun site, but it has no direct relation to reality and greatly underestimates the numbers," says user X.
"If you run the same thing through AI, based on the same statistics, it will give you the same numbers ±," they also noted on X.
The service itself says: "The data is for informational purposes only. Statistics are not a verdict."
Whatever the case, the calculator has definitely caused quite a stir on the Ukrainian internet. Some are outraged by the understated numbers, some are delighted with their "exclusivity," and some are checking up on their exes.
