Love Addiction Test: Free 12-Question Self-Check

This test scores three, and the reason to separate them is practical rather than academic.

Preoccupation is how much room the person takes. Not affection, room — the rereading, the checking, the conversations replayed for what they might have meant, the work task that takes twice as long because half of you is somewhere else.

Withdrawal is what happens in the gap. A slow reply that lands in the body before you have interpreted it. A day without contact that goes flat. The urge to do something, anything, that ends the silence, which is where most of the messages people regret come from.

Cost is what the pattern is charging you elsewhere: sleep, friendships you have stopped maintaining, work that has slipped, money, and limits you once described out loud and have since let go quietly.

They come apart, which is why a single number hides things. Someone can be deeply preoccupied and pay almost nothing for it, especially early on. Someone else can be calm about the relationship day to day and still fall apart in a two-day silence. The most misleading version is low preoccupation with high cost: not thinking about them constantly, but having reorganised a life around staying available. Look at where your highest answers clustered before you read anything into the total.

The counterintuitive part is that the most consuming relationships are frequently the least stable ones. Steady, reliable affection does not produce this pattern nearly as often as hot and cold contact does. Reward that arrives unpredictably is harder to let go of than reward that arrives on schedule, and a person who is warm on Tuesday and unreachable on Thursday supplies exactly that.

This matters for two reasons. First, it means intensity is not evidence. The feeling that this is the most powerful connection you have had may be a reading of the inconsistency rather than of the bond. Second, it means part of your score can belong to the situation rather than to your character. If contact has been erratic, some of what you scored is a description of what you are responding to.

There is also the relief mechanism underneath it. The message that finally arrives does not just feel good, it ends an unpleasant state, and anything that reliably ends an unpleasant state gets learned quickly. That is why resolutions to stop checking rarely survive the actual feeling, and why changing the environment works better than deciding to want it less.

These two get used interchangeably and they are not the same pattern. Codependency is organised around role: being needed, managing the other person, keeping the peace, earning your place by being useful, and gradually losing track of what you would want if nobody needed anything from you. The pull this test measures is organised around absorption: how much of you one person occupies and what the gap does to you.

You can have either without the other. Someone can be entirely absorbed by a partner who needs nothing from them, and someone can spend years caretaking without a trace of the preoccupation described here. The work is different too, which is the practical reason to know which one you are in. If the role description sounds more like you, the codependency quiz covers it, and the abandonment issues quiz covers the older fear that often sits underneath both.

Environment before willpower. Every reduction in how many times a day you have to decide not to check does more than a resolution, because resolutions are made in a calm state and spent in an agitated one. The phone in another room, notifications off, the app off the home screen, a set time to look.

Then learn what the gap actually does. When silence hits, wait an hour and do nothing. The feeling rises and then falls on its own. Most people at the higher end of this scale have never once let that happen, so they have no evidence against the belief that it will keep climbing unless they act. Collecting that evidence is worth more than any insight about why you are like this.

Then put back one thing the pattern has taken. Not all of it, one thing: a standing plan with a friend, a bedtime, an evening where you are not on call. Cost is the most reversible of the three parts, and a life with more than one thing in it makes silence smaller by itself.

If you need a stretch of reduced contact to do any of that, the no contact plan is a structured way to set one up rather than deciding it at two in the morning.

Secrecy is the best single sign that this has outgrown self-management. If there is checking you would not describe out loud, or a real gap between the version of the relationship you tell people and the one you are living, that is the point to tell one person the accurate account. A therapist is a reasonable step at the high end, not an extreme one.

And one thing this test does not measure. If any part of what is happening involves fear of the other person, being controlled, being cut off from people who care about you, or agreeing to things because of what happens when you do not, that is a different situation and it needs a different kind of help than a scale like this can point you toward.