What 24 couples actually put on a love map

Each figure comes from reading the finished artwork, not from order forms or survey answers. Every labelled stop on every map was recorded and normalised to a shared vocabulary, so that “Where we met, Bondi Beach” and “How it started, online” both count once as where we met.

The sample is small and we are not pretending otherwise. 24 maps is enough to see which milestones are near-universal and which are unusual. It is not a survey of couples, and it is drawn from people who chose to commission a map, which is not a neutral population. Read the percentages as “common” and “rare” rather than as population estimates.

24 maps, 191 milestones, delivered across 2025 and 2026. The raw table is at the bottom of this page, and the data is free to reuse with attribution.

17 of 24 maps carry a stop that had not happened yet. A wedding still months away. A baby due the following year. An anniversary the map was being made for. A mountain the couple intended to climb.

We expected these to be summaries of a relationship so far. Most of them are not. They are stories with the next chapter already written in, which is presumably why every map ends with a “to be continued” arrow and why nobody has ever asked for that arrow to be removed.

The practical version: if you are choosing stops, save one for something ahead of you.

The near-universal milestones are the ones you would guess: the wedding, where they met, the proposal. They are also the least distinguishing, because almost every map has them.

What separates one map from another is the stop nobody else would think to include. Across this set that meant hosting our first Thanksgiving, pizza nights at one particular takeaway in Dundee, winter log deliveries in a lorry wearing a Christmas hat, a cat called Neil, lockdown FaceTimes with ice cream cakes, and a proposal in the same coffee shop as the first date.

Only two maps in 24 included an everyday ritual, and two included the couple’s own business. Those are the rarest categories in the data and, in our experience of what people write back about, the ones that land hardest.

The median map carries 8 stops, and the distribution clusters tightly there. Five is the practical floor: fewer than that and the road has nowhere to go. Eight is the ceiling of the current format, and it is what most people use in full.

A handful of the earliest maps in this set carry more, because they were made before the format settled at five to eight. Reading them back, the denser ones are not better. The strongest map in the group covers a single year in eight stops with nothing on it as filler.

The heading is the buyer’s choice, and across 24 maps it produced 6 different titles: Our Love Map, Our First Year, The Story of Us, Map of Us, Our Love Story, Unsere Liebeskarte.

Our First Year is the interesting one. It appeared on a map covering exactly the twelve months from a wedding to a first anniversary, and it is a better description of that map than “love map” would have been.