How Well Do You Know Your Partner? 15-Question Quiz

The term is John Gottman's. A love map is the mental model you hold of your partner's inner world — what is worrying them this month, who is annoying them at work, what they are quietly hoping for, what they would change if they could change one thing. It is not affection and it is not history. It is current information.

Gottman's argument, drawn from decades of watching couples in a lab, is that this is one of the more reliable markers of how a relationship is doing. Couples who keep the map current handle conflict better, partly because knowing what someone is actually carrying makes their reactions legible instead of baffling.

The part worth knowing is that it decays silently. Nobody notices the map going out of date, because nothing announces it. You keep answering from a model you built three years ago and it keeps mostly working, right up until it does not.

Fifteen questions about your partner, and for each one you say how well you could actually answer it right now — specifically today, roughly, guessing, or not at all.

The scoring rewards specificity rather than confidence. "Roughly, but it might be out of date" scores as a partial answer on purpose, because being approximately right about someone you live with is the state most long-term couples are actually in, and it is the state that produces the wrong answer at the wrong moment.

No score here is a verdict on the relationship. A very new couple should score badly, and a couple in a brutal year with small children usually does.

Do not take this to your partner as evidence. The impulse after a poor score is to present it, which turns a piece of information about you into an accusation about the relationship, and the conversation goes exactly where you would expect.

The repair is boring and it works: ask, then listen without turning it into a project. Not an interview, not a scheduled check-in with an agenda. One real question at a time, and no follow-up plan.

If you want the questions ready-made, the 150 questions to ask your partner has them sorted by how much they ask of the person answering. If you would rather look at whether you two fit on the structural things instead, that is the compatibility test.

Whether your partner knows you. That is a separate quiz and only they can take it, and a large gap in either direction is itself worth noticing.

It also cannot tell you whether the relationship is in trouble. Not knowing is usually a maintenance failure rather than a caring failure — people who are exhausted stop asking long before they stop caring. This is a self-assessment and not a clinical instrument, and if what you actually suspect is that the two of you have stopped reaching each other, a couples therapist is a better use of an hour than a score.