Should I break up with my partner?

What the statements ask about

The 16 statements cover six parts of a relationship. Most of them come from long studies that followed couples to see which ones stayed together. A review of 137 studies of unmarried couples found that the strongest signs a couple would last were commitment, love, feeling that your partner is part of who you are, and needing each other.¹ A project that pooled 43 couples studies found that the best guides to how happy and committed people felt were how committed they thought their partner was, how much they appreciated their partner, their sex life, how happy they thought their partner was, and how much they fought.²

The statements about fights draw on a study that followed married couples for 14 years. Couples whose arguments were full of bad feeling tended to divorce in the early years. Couples who split up later had shown little warmth from the start, both when they argued and when they simply talked about their day.³ The Gottman Institute, set up by one of that study’s authors, calls contempt the single greatest predictor of divorce. By contempt it means mockery, sarcasm, name-calling and acting as if you’re better than your partner.⁴ The part about a shared future doesn’t come from one study. We added it because some differences, like whether to have children, rarely leave a middle way.

We wrote the statements ourselves and haven’t tried them out on a large group of people. So there’s no score, no comparison with anyone else, and no total that says stay or go. Your result shows how you answered in each part, and you set a dial for each part yourself.

Why it won’t tell you to stay or go

Feeling torn is common. In a set of studies of people who were thinking about ending a relationship, about half had reasons to stay and reasons to go at the same time. The most common reasons to stay were closeness, what they had already put into the relationship and a sense of duty. The most common reasons to go were problems with the partner’s personality, broken trust and a partner who had pulled away.^{5, 6}

Prediction has its limits too. In the pooled project of 43 studies, almost nothing people said about themselves could predict whose relationship would get better or worse over time.² Your answers can show where things stand today. Where they go from here depends on what both of you do.

If you’re afraid of your partner

Two statements ask whether you can disagree without being scared, and whether you can see people and use your own phone and money without being checked on. If either answer was less than “Mostly true”, your result says so first. Being scared of how your partner will react, or having them track where you go, cut you off from friends and family or control your money, isn’t a rough patch that better talking will fix. In England and Wales, a pattern like that can be a crime called controlling or coercive behaviour, and the official guidance lists these same examples.⁷ The rest of this test is written for two people who both feel safe. Your safety comes first.

What to do with your result

Find the part where you set your dial lowest. Has it been like that for years, or since something you can name, like a new baby, a move, an illness or a job loss? A strain with a cause and a slow slide over years call for different things, and how to tell a rough patch from a relationship that’s ending goes through both. If the arguments are what wear you down, read why the same fight keeps coming back.

Then think about telling your partner which part worries you most, unless that part is feeling safe. Your answers only show your side of the relationship, and your partner’s might look quite different.