About the quiz

Stale Love is a free relationship-health diagnostic built around a 20-question quiz drawn from published relationship science: John Gottman's research on stable and unstable marriages, the Relationship Assessment Scale developed by Hendrick, Sue Johnson's emotion-focused work on adult attachment, and Esther Perel's writing on long-term desire. The items are designed to surface patterns that the relationship literature has consistently identified as predictive of long-term satisfaction.

We are not a coaching service. We are not a therapist marketplace. We do not sell your data. The quiz takes about four minutes, you receive a score with category sub-scores, and we recommend a small set of exercises matched to the patterns your answers suggest. You can come back any time to retake the quiz and watch the trend.

What the quiz can and cannot do

The quiz can produce a useful first-pass diagnostic — a structured external view of patterns in your relationship that you may have absorbed without naming. Couples sometimes describe taking it together and finding that the score finally gives them a shared vocabulary for something they had both been sensing but not articulating. That vocabulary, in itself, is often the first step toward addressing what the patterns surface.

The quiz cannot produce a clinical diagnosis. It is not validated as a clinical instrument. It is also not a substitute for a couples therapist's assessment, which involves dimensions the quiz does not measure: family-of-origin patterns, individual mental-health considerations, specific behavioral histories, the actual texture of your interactions as a third party would observe them. The quiz is a useful starting point. Most couples whose scores indicate substantial trouble would benefit from working with a licensed professional in addition to whatever the quiz suggests.

How the score bands work

Five bands map to scoring ranges from 0 to 100. Critical, Struggling, Fair, Healthy, Thriving. Each band corresponds to a particular relationship texture and to a particular set of recommended next steps. A Critical band is not the same as a doomed relationship. It is a signal that the patterns the quiz measures are operating at levels that the research literature associates with substantial difficulty and that direct, structured intervention is the appropriate next step.

Conversely, a Thriving band is not the same as a perfect relationship. It indicates that the patterns the quiz measures are healthy at this moment. Long-term relationships have stretches of all five bands; the trajectory and the recovery pattern matter more than any single reading. We recommend taking the quiz every few months, watching the trend, and treating sustained drift in either direction as more informative than any single result.

What we recommend if your score is in a lower band

If you score in Critical or Struggling, the right next step is usually a licensed couples therapist. Not another app. The exercises and reading on this site are useful adjuncts to professional work; they are not, on their own, sufficient to address patterns that have settled into the ranges these bands measure.

Several practical points. Couples therapy is generally most effective when both partners are willing to attend and engage in good faith. If your partner refuses, individual therapy is often a useful starting point — both for clarifying what you actually want from the relationship and for processing the patterns even if your partner is not currently part of the work. Insurance coverage for couples therapy varies; Open Path Collective and community mental-health centers offer reduced-fee options for couples without insurance coverage.

If you score in Fair, the recommended next step is more open. Many relationships at this band benefit from a combination of self-guided work — the exercises, the reading list — and a brief consultation with a therapist to clarify whether anything requires more focused attention. Couples in this band who do not seek professional support often improve through deliberate work; the deliberate work is the operative phrase. Passive hope rarely moves a Fair-band relationship into the Healthy range.

How the quiz was developed

The items were developed by editorial staff drawing on the published relationship-science literature. We chose items that are reasonably robust across cultures and contexts, that touch on the four pattern categories we measure, and that can be answered honestly without extensive interpretation. The item set has been refined over multiple iterations based on patterns we have observed in the responses; we are not running formal psychometric validation studies, and we do not present the instrument as a clinically validated measure.

The four sub-score categories — communication, intimacy, shared goals, conflict — reflect the major dimensions the literature treats as predictive of long-term outcomes. Communication scores reflect items about how well partners listen to and hear each other. Intimacy scores reflect items about emotional and physical closeness. Shared-goals scores reflect items about alignment on the future and direction. Conflict scores reflect items about how the couple manages disagreement and repair after rupture.

Anonymous versus authenticated use

Anonymous attempts are attached to your browser session. They are not shared with anyone, not used for research, not retained beyond their useful lifespan in the session. If you sign up later, your attempts move to your authenticated account.

Authenticated accounts give you access to score history over time, dashboard visualizations, and couples mode. None of this is required to use the quiz itself. We provide the authenticated features for users who want to track their patterns; we do not require them to access the core diagnostic.

What we do with the data, plainly

We use aggregate data — counts of users in each score band, popularity of various exercises, traffic patterns — to improve the site. We do not share individual data with advertisers, partners, or third parties. We use Google AdSense on content pages, which uses cookies for ad personalization and is gated behind explicit cookie consent. If you decline cookies, the site continues to work; ads served to you are non-personalized.

If you have specific data questions, the privacy policy linked from the footer covers the details. If something is missing or unclear, the contact email is real and we will answer.

A final note on what this site is for

We built Stale Love because the public conversation about long-term relationships often defaults to one of two unhelpful extremes: greeting-card optimism or therapy-language pessimism. 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.

The diagnostic, the exercises, and the reading list are aimed at that middle. We do not promise that the site will save your relationship. We do think that having a clearer view of what is actually happening, backed by some of the most carefully researched patterns in the field, is a useful first step. The next steps are yours.