Today’s Wall Street Journal Personal Journal section leads with an article by Elizabeth Bernstein posing the question “How Happy Is Your Marriage?” That question troubles me. There is something right about it. Happiness does generally indicate that your life is going well. At the same time, by rating “the marriage,” you can end up feeling stuck, resentful and hopeless instead of feeling optimistic that you can learn how to stop arguing, or avoiding each other, and start enjoying each other.
The risk from the way the question was framed—how happy is your marriage? – is that the answer to the question will be “not very happy at all.” What then?
If the quiz tells you there’s lots of problems in your marriage, and lots that your spouse does that you don’t like, hopefully you’ll be motivated to seek professional help. The danger is that instead of seeking help you will just feel trapped, become at risk for making the relationship even worse with criticizing and complaining, or give up altogether on the partnership.
A potentially more helpful question might be How Good Are You as a Partner or Spouse? That question would give you data about factors that you can control. If you are not as good as you might be at the role of partner/spouse, then you can decide to learn the requisite skills, just as if you were hired for a job and were not yet succeeding, you hopefully would find a place to learn the additional skills you need for job success.
Phrasing the question as how good you are as a partner or spouse has an additional benefit. It would be less likely to inadvertently set you up to try to change your partner, a doomed strategy which would probably make your relationship even less happy. Your job is to focus on what you can do better, not to fix your partner.
Having raised this concern, however, I do agree with the core premise of Bernstein’s Wall Street Journal article. Her point is that relationship quizzes can be helpful. A rating scale that helps you to identify strengths and weaknesses, skills and skill deficits, areas of positive functioning and areas for improvement could give you a big advantage toward the goal of making your relationship or marriage all the happier.
But beware. Not all relationship quizzes are created equal. Most pop quizzes in magazines or on the internet have zero scientific backup. Some seemed designed to send business to divorce lawyers. Others are bridges to nowhere. Still others foster blame-my-partner perspectives.
On the cheerier side, a well-informed quiz truly can help you to see more clearly how you are doing in your role as a long-term partner.
In addition, the feedback you receive after you have taken the quiz hopefully will specify actions you could take that would raise even higher the level both of your performance as a partner and thereby how happy you feel in your marriage.
Below is a review of a variety of free internet relationship quizzes.
All of these quizzes are applicable to either long-term partners or married couples. There's no need to be scared off by the word “marriage” if you have not yet sealed the deal.
A 15-item set of factors that you rate ona scale of 1 – 10. This quiz is formatted nicely and the content is excellent. As the introduction says, “… this isn’t a test, but rather a map for you to use for further discussion.” Bravo to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops for this quiz, and for the website it’s on that also includes many excellent resources. My only concern with the site is that although it gives a lovely explanation of why learning conflict resolution skills is important, it doesn’t teach them or refer readers to a site that does.
2.PowerOfTwoMarriage Marriage Skills
Scroll way down to the bottom of this home-page for a free quiz that on five areas of essential skills for relationship success. This quiz quickly identifies where your relationship skills are fine and where some polishing up would help. (Disclosure: this quiz is based on my marriage skills book The Power of Two).
3. Wall Street Journal Rate Your Marriage:
This test has you rate your marriage with 40 questions. It's nicely constructed and should give you helpful data.
This quiz clarifies the extent to which your marriage is ideal or less than ideal. On the other hand, it has you rate essentially how much you like your partner. There’s not much you can do about that if you are already married. And if you are not married, this quiz could lead you to decide that the relationship's problems are because your partner just is not a good person or a good match for you, when in fact you both have been contributing to the difficulties and you both have potential to learn how to be better as partners.
5. Healthy Marriage and Relationship Quiz at SurrenderedWife.com
This quiz gets the strongest thumbs down from me. It purports to ask “How good are you at having an intimate relationship?” The first six questions are okay in that regard; the remaining 14 however mostly all focus on dimensions that you don’t like about your spouse. Bad.
6. Dr. Phil’s Marriage Inventory Quiz
This quiz focuses on what you may have disagreements about rather than on how you generally interact. While it does convey that controlling and abusive behaviors invite divorce, and also that ignoring “your spouse’s intimacy and sexual needs” can lead to trouble, overall it’s superficial and unlikely to lead you into directions for productive growth.
7. Ladies Home Journal Quiz I Your Marriage in Trouble?
This quiz is short and written with peppy verve. The ten questions that each offer three options get scored as you go. At the end out pops a relatively lengthy “assessment” of what you may need to be paying attention to in the relationship. The final assessments can be rather long-winded but could give you some food for thought.
8. How Strong Is Your Relationship? Quiz
This quiz does what it claims to do. It gives you relatively good feedback at how strong your relationship seems to be. Takes about 5 minutes to complete and probably is useful if the question it asks is what you want to know.
9. How Does Your Marriage Rate?
This test is a quickee and with surprisingly good questions and quite helpful feedback from your score.
In sum, kudos to Elizabeth Bernstein for her article encouraging folks to give themselves a free relationship check-up. At the same time, becoming aware of how various quizzes are likely to impact you will hopefully make your experience most helpful.
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Denver clinical psychologist and marriage therapist Susan Heitler, PhD is author of The Power of Two,a book, a workbook and an interactive website.