What Kind of Partner Are You?
The five things couples actually do to stay together
In 1991 two researchers took more than eighty things people said they did to keep a relationship going and ran the numbers to see how they grouped. Five came out, and they have held up ever since: being pleasant to be around, talking openly about the relationship itself, saying out loud that you are staying, sharing each other's people, and doing your half of the work. Almost nobody is strong in all five. The interesting part of your result is the lowest bar, not the highest.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your current relationship, or about the way you usually are in one. There is no good or bad profile here - just a shape, and one thing you are probably not doing.
What it measures
The five maintenance behaviours that came out of the original factor analysis: positivity, openness, assurances, social networks and sharing tasks. Together they predict satisfaction, commitment and whether couples stay together - and they are behaviours rather than feelings, which is why they can be changed on purpose.
Based on: Relational maintenance strategies (Stafford & Canary, 1991)
Possible results
Positivity
Being good company, on the ordinary days.
Openness
Talking about the relationship itself, not just inside it.
Assurances
Saying out loud that you are staying.
Shared people
Letting your worlds overlap.
Doing your half
The unglamorous, load-bearing one.
Common questions
Which of the five matters most?
Positivity and assurances tend to show the strongest links to satisfaction and commitment across studies, and sharing tasks matters more than its dull name suggests. But the honest answer is that the useful one is your lowest, not the strongest on average. These behaviours are not interchangeable - being very good at four of them does not cover the fifth, because the fifth is doing a job none of the others do.
Is it fake if I have to do these on purpose?
No, and this is the most useful thing in the whole framework. These were identified as behaviours precisely because they can be performed deliberately, by people who are tired and not feeling especially loving. Waiting to feel like saying something warm before you say it means it gets said least in the weeks it is needed most. The feeling follows the behaviour more reliably than the other way round.
What if my partner and I are low on different ones?
That is the common case and it is more workable than being low on the same one. Two people low on the same behaviour have a hole neither of them is covering. Two people low on different ones usually have a translation problem: each is maintaining the relationship in the currency that makes sense to them and reading the other's absence as indifference. Taking this separately and comparing the shapes is a better use of it than either score alone.
Sources
- Stafford, L., & Canary, D. J. (1991). Maintenance strategies and romantic relationship type, gender and relational characteristics. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
- Stafford, L. (2011). Measuring relational maintenance behaviors: Critique and development of the revised relational maintenance behavior scale. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
- Ogolsky, B. G., Monk, J. K., Rice, T. M., & Oswald, R. F. (2023). A systematic review of relationship maintenance: Reflecting back and looking to the future. Personal Relationships.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of a research framework, not the original measure. Two honest limits. First, almost all of this evidence is correlational and comes from people reporting on themselves: couples who do more of these things are more satisfied, but doing more of them and being more satisfied feed each other, and no study here can tell you which came first. Second, the five categories emerged from surveys of mostly Western, mostly young couples in the early nineties, and later work has argued about the boundaries between them - the author of the original scale revised it herself twenty years on. Read the bars as a description of your habits rather than as a report card, and remember that the other person's view of the same five would not necessarily match yours.