How do I love thee, let me measure the ways

The little machine on Elias’s wrist hummed softly, its screen displaying a placid 891.2 Hn. He glanced at Lena’s wrist as she slept, her own screen glowing with an identical number. A perfect resonance. The number was their pride, the bedrock of their seven-year Covenant. In a world where love was a measured quantity, a stable Hartmann score was the ultimate symbol of success.

The Hartmann Resonance Calibrator had been the greatest social invention of the century. It had ended the messy guesswork of relationships by quantifying the bio-sympathetic, quantum-entangled field generated between two people—what previous generations had nebulously called “love.” First dates were now first calibrations. Breakups were clean, contractual dissolutions triggered by a sustained drop below the 400 Hn “amicability threshold.”

And marriage? Marriage was a Covenant, a legal and social contract predicated on maintaining a resonance above 750 Hn, subject to an annual, state-mandated audit.

Their audit was next week.

“Morning, my 891,” Lena murmured, her eyes fluttering open. She didn’t kiss him first; she synced their Calibrators, a morning ritual as ingrained as coffee. The central server registered their shared score for the day. “A point-two fluctuation overnight. Optimal.”

Elias forced a smile. “Optimal.”

Lately, the number felt less like a comfort and more like a cage. He remembered proposing to Lena. He hadn't been watching a number; he’d been watching the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed at his terrible joke in the pouring rain, their car broken down on the side of the highway. Their score that day, he later learned, had spiked to 986 Hn, a legendary high they’d never reached again. He missed the rain. He missed not knowing the number.

The email arrived on a Tuesday. COVENANT AUDIT RESULTS: ELIAS & LENA REID.

Lena opened it with the nervous energy of a student checking their final grades. Her face fell. The silence in their minimalist apartment was a vacuum.

“What is it?” Elias asked, though he already knew.

“Seven-twelve,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “712.3 Hn.”

The number hung in the air, a failing grade. It wasn’t low enough to void the Covenant, but it was a catastrophic drop. It was a warning. A notice of emotional decay.

“It’s a glitch,” Elias said, unconvincingly. “A solar flare, maybe.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Eli,” she snapped, her fear lashing out. “The calibrations are shielded. This is us. We’ve dropped 179 points in a year.”

And so began the Plan.

Couple’s therapy was now “Resonance Optimization.” Their therapist, a technician in a white coat, prescribed a regimen. Scheduled intimacy, three times a week. Mandatory “spontaneous” compliments. A shared media diet algorithmically designed to foster common interests. They were given a list of conversation topics known to boost Hartmann levels.

It was torture.

“Eli, the regimen says we need to discuss shared future aspirations for at least fifteen minutes,” Lena said one evening, her voice tight. They sat across from each other at a dinner of nutrient paste, the meal itself optimized for hormonal balance.

Elias looked at her, truly looked at her. He saw the tension in her jaw, the way her eyes kept flicking to her Calibrator, as if she could will the number up through sheer force of will. He didn't see Lena. He saw a project manager staring at a failing metric.

“Do you remember that day on the highway?” he asked, ignoring the prescribed topic.

Lena blinked. “What? Eli, we need to focus. Our weekly average is only up to 719.”

“It was raining,” he pressed on, his voice soft. “And you had that awful leak in your boot. You sang that stupid song from the cereal commercial, just to make me laugh.”

A flicker of something—not data, but memory—crossed her face. “The ‘Crunchy Puffs’ song? My god, that was terrible.”

“It was the best thing I’d ever heard,” Elias said. “I wasn’t measuring anything. I was just… happy. Happy to be stuck in the rain with you.”

“We should try to recreate it,” Lena said, her mind immediately shifting back to optimization. “We could simulate the setting, find the song…”

“No!” The word was sharper than he intended. “You can’t schedule that, Lena. You can’t put a number on it. The moment you try, it dies.”

The night of the final recalibration before their grace period ended, Lena had arranged everything perfectly. Soft lighting, bio-tuned music, pheromonal emitters. It was a desperate, clinical attempt to force the number back over the line. She stood in the middle of the room, her hands clasped, a parody of romance.

“Okay,” she said, her voice trembling. “Let’s… sync.”

Elias walked over to her. He looked at her wrist, at the cold, blue glow of 723.4 Hn. It was a testament to their week of hard, joyless work. He looked into her terrified eyes.

And he finally understood. The machine didn’t measure love. It measured coherence. It measured similarity, sympathy, alignment. But love, true love, was not about perfect alignment. It was about choosing to hold on during the noisy, chaotic, unaligned moments. The machine measured the signal, but it couldn't measure the choice to listen through the static.

Slowly, deliberately, he reached for her wrist. But instead of syncing their devices, his fingers went to the clasp of her Calibrator.

Lena flinched. “Eli, what are you doing?”

“I’m turning off the meter,” he said. He unclasped it. The screen went dark. He then unclasped his own, the sudden absence of its weight on his wrist a dizzying shock. He placed both devices on the table, side-by-side, like two discarded shackles.

“We’ll be fined,” she whispered. “We could lose our Covenant.”

“Then we’ll make a new one,” he said, taking her bare hands in his. Her skin was warm. Real. “One that isn’t measured. One that’s messy and uncertain and has room for terrible songs in the rain.”

She stared at their hands, then at the dark, silent machines on the table. For the first time in seven years, they had no idea what their number was. The silence was no longer a vacuum. It was a space. A possibility. A choice.

A single tear traced a path down Lena’s cheek, but her lips curved into a fragile, genuine smile.

They didn’t have a number. They had a story. And for the first time in a very long time, that felt like more than enough.