Is your relationship
still alive?
Most relationships don't end in a dramatic fight. They quietly fade — into logistics, parallel lives, and the assumption that things will get better on their own.
Take the free 20-question quiz and find out exactly where yours stands.
Takes 4 minutes. No email required. Your score is private.
20-Question Diagnostic
Four categories: communication, intimacy, shared goals, and conflict patterns. Based on validated relationship research.
Score Over Time
Create a free account to track how your relationship health changes. See the trend. Know if things are improving.
Guided Exercises
10 research-backed revival exercises — from the 6-second kiss to Gottman's repair attempts. Real instructions, not platitudes.
What your score means
Five bands from critical to thriving. Wherever you land, there's a path forward.
Revival exercises
See all 10 →The 6-Second Kiss
A daily ritual that rewires connection
The Weekly Relationship Check-In
A structured 30-minute conversation that prevents drift
The 36 Questions That Lead to Love
Arthur Aron's intimacy protocol — for couples too
When self-help isn't enough
Sometimes the best thing you can do for your relationship is talk to a professional. Find a licensed therapist through your insurer's directory or Psychology Today.
What Stale Love is for
The public conversation about long-term relationships tends to default to one of two unhelpful extremes. The first is greeting-card optimism — the message that love is enough, that all you need is to communicate more, that everything will work out if both partners just try. The second is therapy-language pessimism — the message that most relationships are pathological, that everyone is attachment-disordered, that the only honest path forward is years of clinical work.
The vast middle — the relationships that are mostly working but going through hard stretches, the ones that have drifted into ruts that can be addressed, the ones that need attention but are not in crisis — gets less honest coverage than it deserves. Stale Love is aimed at that middle. The diagnostic quiz produces a structured snapshot of where things sit right now. The exercises offer concrete, research-backed practices to deploy at home. The article library translates the underlying research into language that does not require a clinical background to understand. The reading list links to the foundational books that the editorial voice is built on.
None of this is a substitute for professional couples therapy when professional couples therapy is what the situation calls for. We say this directly throughout the site. If your relationship is in genuine crisis — if there is physical violence, ongoing emotional abuse, untreated addiction, or contempt that has been the dominant pattern for years — the right resource is a licensed clinician, not a quiz. The Psychology Today therapist directory is the fastest way to find one in the United States; Open Path Collective is a nonprofit network offering substantially reduced fees for couples without insurance coverage.
For everyone else — the much larger middle — the resources on this site are designed to produce real change with sustained use. The mechanism is not magic. It is the deliberate, structured cultivation of the small daily behaviors that the relationship research literature has identified as predictive of long-term outcomes. The quiz is a useful starting point. The exercises and the articles are the substance. The work, after that, is yours.
How the diagnostic actually works
The 20-question quiz produces a score from 0 to 100 across four sub-categories: communication, intimacy, shared goals, and conflict patterns. Each sub-category reflects a distinct dimension that the relationship-research literature has identified as predictive of long-term outcomes. The items themselves are drawn from John Gottman's lab work on the Four Horsemen and repair attempts, the Hendrick Relationship Assessment Scale, Sue Johnson's research on adult attachment, and Stan Tatkin's clinical synthesis of attachment in romantic partnerships.
The score maps to one of five bands: Critical, Struggling, Fair, Healthy, or Thriving. The bands are orientation, not verdict. A Critical band does not mean your relationship is doomed; it means the patterns the quiz measures are operating at levels the research associates with substantial difficulty, and that direct structured intervention is the appropriate next step. A Thriving band does not mean you can stop attending to the relationship; it means the patterns are currently healthy and that maintenance is the appropriate work. Most long relationships occupy all five bands across decades. The trajectory matters more than any single reading.
We recommend taking the quiz every several months. The single most useful piece of information is not your current score but your trend line. A score that drifted from 72 to 58 over six months is more diagnostic than a single 65 in isolation. The drift, examined honestly with your partner, is often the entry point to the conversation that actually changes something. The static score is data; the change in the score, over time, is information.
None of this is clinically validated as a diagnostic instrument. It is a structured self-assessment built on the same evidence base that clinicians working in evidence-based couples therapy modalities draw from. For most users in the middle ranges, the quiz and the exercises and the reading list are sufficient. For users in the Critical or Struggling bands, the right next step is almost always a licensed couples therapist, ideally working in an evidence-based modality like Emotionally Focused Therapy or the Gottman Method. The cost of professional support is meaningful; the cost of years of accumulated relational deterioration without it is meaningfully larger.