Happily Ever After or Single Again: Does My Relationship Have a Future?
This is a paid post because it moves from insight into practice.
Inside, I go deeper with concrete examples, scripts, tools, and step-by-step strategies you can use to navigate dating and relationships more effectively.
Your choice of relationship partner is the one decision that impacts every other area of your life.
When you make important commitments, like who you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, you don’t want to screw it up. Your relationship’s quality has implications for your health (Umberson & Karas Montez, 2010), your reactions to stress (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2003), and even how you look at the world (Boothby et al., 2017).
Relationships are important. Time is short. Get this right.
But perhaps most of all, you don’t want to waste time with the wrong person.
Maybe your relationship is at a crossroads. Perhaps you feel your partner pulling away, or you’re realizing your partnership isn’t what you expected. You may wonder if you’re truly in love and meant to be, or merely staying out of obligation. (Plus there’s the potential guild you may feel for even wondering any of this.)
Thinking about whether you should stay or go, is a fair question. What you need is clarity about the future. With greater certainty you’d know whether you should invest in fixing things, or if you need to work on finding the strength to leave.
There are few guarantees for what the future holds. That doesn’t change the fact that not knowing your relationship’s fate is unsettling.
In the rest of this piece, I walk through:
All 15 research-backed questions that predict relationship success, each grounded in published studies on what makes long-term love work
How to score and interpret your results: what your ‘no’ answers reveal, which areas you can improve, and when too many red flags mean it’s time to go
The science behind each question (from attachment styles to conflict patterns to sexual compatibility) with specific citations you can explore
A decision framework that combines your gut instincts with hard data, so you stop second-guessing and start seeing your relationship clearly
Two Ways to Make a Decision
We make decisions using two general strategies: gut feelings or with a thorough researched data-based process. But is one better than the other?