Deep Dive
Relate's assessment draws from eight clinical frameworks to create a comprehensive picture of how you date, who you are, how you connect, and how you handle conflict.
Foundations
Developed by Drs. John and Julie Gottman over 40 years of research, this framework identifies the "Four Horsemen" that predict relationship failure: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Module 4 screens for these patterns and their intensity.
Created by Dr. Sue Johnson, EFT maps the pursue-withdraw cycle that drives most relationship distress. Module 4 identifies your conflict approach and emotional drivers, revealing the underlying needs behind your conflict behavior.
Rooted in the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, attachment theory explains how early bonding experiences shape adult relationship patterns. Module 3 measures how you seek and offer emotional connection, reflecting your attachment style in action.
Dr. Richard Schwartz's IFS model recognizes that we all carry multiple "parts" with different needs and fears. Module 4's emotional driver assessment identifies which parts are activated during conflict: the abandoned child, the engulfed protector, the inadequate self, or the justice seeker.
The Assessment
The assessment takes approximately 80 minutes across five modules. Each module measures a distinct aspect of your relationship profile, and results build progressively as you complete each one.
134 questions, approximately 25 minutes
This module maps your partner preferences across four dimensions. Each dimension has two poles, and your responses reveal which pole you lean toward and how strongly.
Physical
What draws you in physically. Are you attracted to fitness and appearance, or to how someone carries themselves with maturity and presence?
Social
How you want a partner to show up socially. Do you prefer magnetic leadership and initiative, or quiet warmth and emotional availability?
Lifestyle
The energy you want in your life together. Are you drawn to adventure and spontaneity, or to stability and consistency?
Values
Your worldview alignment. Do you lean toward clearly defined roles and traditions, or toward shared responsibility and equality?
Three question types are used: direct preference statements (Likert scale), behavioral scenarios based on past choices, and forced-choice tradeoffs. The combination reduces social desirability bias and captures both conscious and unconscious preferences.
Output: A 4-letter preference code (e.g., ACEG) with strength percentages for each dimension, plus identification of your key driver, the single dimension that matters most to you.
137 questions, approximately 25 minutes
Module 2 measures how you actually present yourself across the same four dimensions. Instead of asking what you want, it asks who you are. Your answers are scored against gender-specific poles, and the resulting 4-letter code maps to one of 16 personas.
The system also calculates your self-perception gap: the distance between how you see yourself (Module 2) and what you want in a partner (Module 1). A large gap can signal blind spots in self-awareness or misalignment between your expectations and what you offer.
Output: Your persona assignment (one of 32 total, 16 per gender), complete with dating behavior patterns, relationship tendencies, strengths, growth areas, and shadow traits.
28 questions, approximately 10 minutes
This module measures your intimacy access patterns through the lens of context switching: whether you show different sides of yourself in different situations, and whether you seek that same range from a partner.
Want Score (0-100)
How much differentiated access you seek from a partner. High scorers want someone who can be playful, serious, vulnerable, and commanding depending on context.
Offer Score (0-100)
How much differentiated access you provide. High scorers naturally adapt their energy and behavior to different situations and relationships.
The gap between your Want and Offer scores reveals important patterns. A large positive gap means you want more from a partner than you provide. A large negative gap means you give more range than you expect to receive.
Output: Context switching type classification, want/offer scores, gap analysis, and attentiveness pattern.
68 questions, approximately 15 minutes
The final module maps your complete conflict signature. This is where the clinical frameworks come together most directly, measuring five distinct components of how you handle relational stress.
Conflict Approach
Whether you pursue (move toward conflict seeking resolution) or withdraw (pull away to process). Neither is better; what matters is how your approach interacts with your partner's.
Emotional Drivers
The core fear activated during conflict. There are four drivers: abandonment (fear of being left), engulfment (fear of losing yourself), inadequacy (fear of not being enough), and injustice (fear of unfairness). Your primary driver shapes your instinctive reaction when things escalate.
Repair Speed and Mode
How quickly you can re-engage after conflict (fast or slow) and whether you repair through verbal processing (talking it through) or physical connection (touch, acts of service). Mismatched repair styles are one of the most common sources of ongoing friction.
Emotional Capacity
Your ability to remain present and regulated during intense emotional moments. Higher capacity means you can absorb more stress before becoming flooded and shutting down.
Gottman Four Horsemen
A screener for the four communication patterns that predict relationship failure with over 90% accuracy. Each horseman is scored individually with a risk assessment.
Conflict Patterns
Dr. John Gottman identified four communication patterns so destructive that he could predict divorce with over 90% accuracy by observing just 15 minutes of a couple's conversation. Module 4 screens for each pattern and its intensity.
Attacking your partner's character rather than addressing specific behavior. The antidote is to use "I" statements and focus on what happened, not who they are.
Expressing disgust, superiority, or mockery toward your partner. Research shows this is the single strongest predictor of divorce. The antidote is building a culture of fondness and admiration.
Refusing to take responsibility by counter-attacking or playing the victim. The antidote is accepting your part in the conflict, even a small part, before explaining your perspective.
Shutting down emotionally and withdrawing from the conversation entirely. The antidote is learning to self-soothe, take breaks when flooded, and commit to returning to the conversation.
Identity
Your Module 2 results map to one of 32 relationship personas (16 per gender). Each persona is defined by a 4-letter code representing your position on the Physical, Social, Lifestyle, and Values dimensions.
Each persona comes with a detailed profile: dating behavior patterns, relationship tendencies, what makes them most and least attractive to potential partners, and their shadow side. Personas are not fixed labels. They represent your current behavioral center of gravity and can evolve as you grow.
Matching
After completing all five modules, the system ranks all 16 opposite-gender personas by compatibility. Your score with each persona is calculated from four weighted components.
Tier Assignment
Based on your persona's pre-assigned compatibility with each target persona across the four dimensions. Personas that share your values dimension receive higher base scores.
Dimension Alignment
How closely your dimensional profile aligns with each target persona's typical traits.
Connection Compatibility
How well your Module 3 want/offer scores match the target persona's typical connection patterns. The system checks whether what you want aligns with what they typically offer, and vice versa.
Conflict Compatibility
How your Module 4 conflict profile interacts with the target persona's typical conflict patterns. Complementary approach styles (one pursuer, one withdrawer) score higher, and matched repair styles reduce friction.
Strong natural compatibility. Values and behavioral patterns align across most dimensions.
High potential for connection. Key dimensions complement each other with manageable tensions.
Promising match that requires conscious effort in specific areas to thrive.
Significant differences that would need sustained work and mutual commitment to bridge.
Core value conflicts present. Proceed with clear expectations and professional support.
Fundamental misalignment in values and behavioral patterns across most dimensions.
Module 4 Deep Dive
When conflict escalates, one of four core fears typically gets activated. Your primary driver shapes your instinctive reaction and determines what you need most from your partner in difficult moments.
"You are leaving me"
Internal experience: Panic, desperation, emptiness, terror of being alone
External behavior: Pursues and clings, demands reassurance, monitors partner's availability, catastrophizes small signals
Healthy expression: "I need reassurance that we are okay. Can you help me feel secure?"
"You are controlling me, I am losing myself"
Internal experience: Feeling trapped, invaded, loss of identity, suffocation
External behavior: Withdraws, creates distance, resists closeness, asserts independence
Healthy expression: "I need some space to process. I will come back to this."
"I am failing you, I am not enough"
Internal experience: Shame, worthlessness, paralysis, self-doubt
External behavior: Over-apologizes, freezes, self-deprecates, avoids trying
Healthy expression: "I am feeling like I have let you down. Can we talk about what happened?"
"You are being unfair, I am not being heard"
Internal experience: Righteous anger, invalidation, moral outrage
External behavior: Digs in, argues, builds case with evidence, refuses to concede
Healthy expression: "I need you to understand my perspective before we move on."
Abandonment + Engulfment: The classic pursue-withdraw spiral. One partner chases while the other retreats, escalating both fears.
Same Driver Pairs: Partners who share a driver can understand each other deeply, but they can also trigger each other in predictable ways.
Inadequacy + Injustice: Creates a power imbalance risk where one partner internalizes blame while the other externalizes it.
Transparency
Every score in the assessment is deterministic and reproducible. There is no randomness and no AI interpretation in the scoring itself.
Each dimension uses 32 questions across three formats: 12 direct preference statements on a Likert scale, 8 behavioral scenarios, and 12 forced-choice comparisons. Pole A and Pole B scores are calculated independently and normalized to a 0-100 scale. The stronger pole becomes your assigned direction, and the margin determines your strength percentage.
Want and Offer scores are each calculated from 12 questions, normalized to 0-100. The gap between them is the primary insight. Context switching types are assigned based on whether your Want and Offer fall above or below the midpoint threshold.
Conflict approach is scored from 12 questions (6 pursue, 6 withdraw), normalized to a 0-100 scale where 100 is pure pursue and 0 is pure withdraw. Emotional drivers use 16 questions (4 per driver), each normalized independently. Repair speed and mode use 6 questions each. The Gottman screener uses 16 questions (4 per horseman), with risk thresholds calibrated to published clinical guidelines.
A cross-module measure combining Module 3 Offer score, Module 3 Want score, Gottman contempt and criticism levels, and self-perception gap from Module 2. The composite determines whether you are strongly other-focused, balanced, moderately self-focused, or self-absorbed.
Demographics
After completing the assessment, Relate estimates how many people in your area realistically match what you are looking for. This is a demographic funnel: we start with the full population and narrow it step by step using your preferences, publicly available population data, and standard demographic modeling techniques.
The funnel applies your preferences as sequential filters against the population of your metro area (CBSA). Each step reduces the pool by the percentage of people who do not meet that criterion. The process follows the same elimination logic used in actuarial science, market sizing, and persona-based audience segmentation, standard approaches for estimating the size of a target population from known distributions.
Universal Exclusions
Remove adults over 65 and the homeless population, who are outside the standard dating pool. This establishes the base adult population (18-64).
Gender
Filter to the gender you are seeking, using local CBSA gender distribution rather than assuming a 50/50 split. Metro areas vary meaningfully. Some skew 52% female, others 48%.
Sexual Orientation
Apply the proportion of the target gender who identify with a compatible orientation. Rates are drawn from national survey data and adjusted by metro-level estimates where available.
Criminal Record Exclusion
Remove individuals with felony convictions. Incarceration and felony rates differ significantly by gender, ethnicity, and education level, so the model uses a weighted average based on the CBSA's ethnic composition rather than a single national rate.
Substance Issues
Exclude individuals with active substance abuse issues using the same ethnicity-weighted approach. Rates are drawn from national health survey data.
Relationship Status
Filter to singles using local CBSA relationship status data. This produces the Local Singles pool, the total number of available, eligible singles of the right gender and orientation in your area.
Your Preferences
Apply your specific requirements: age range, minimum income, lifestyle preferences (smoking, drinking, children, religion, pets, diet), and physical preferences (height range, body type, fitness level). Each filter uses CBSA-level data where available or national distributions as a fallback.
The result is your Ideal Match Pool: the estimated number of people who meet every criterion you specified. This number is then multiplied by your match probability (derived from your Relate Score) to produce your final match count, the number of people in your pool who would likely be a mutual fit.
Raw pool numbers are hard to interpret on their own. Is 2,000 people a lot or a little? It depends on the size of the population you are drawing from and how many filters you have applied. To provide context, the results page shows your ideal pool as a percentage of three progressively narrower base populations:
% of target gender: Your ideal pool divided by all adults (18-64) of the gender you are seeking in the area. This is the broadest view. Of every person of that gender you could encounter, what fraction fits all of your preferences.
% of eligible: Your ideal pool divided by the subset that shares the right orientation, has no criminal record, and falls within your preferred age range. This removes people who were never realistic candidates, isolating the effect of your lifestyle, income, and physical preferences.
% of ethnicity match: The eligible pool narrowed further to people of your own ethnic background. Because felon rates, income distributions, education levels, and lifestyle patterns vary by ethnicity, this provides the most directly comparable view of how selective your preferences are within a demographically similar group.
All three percentages are computed independently for your metro area, your state, and the nation, so you can see how your selectivity plays out at different geographic scales.
The Relate Score (0-100) measures how well your profile aligns with the demographic realities of your metro area. It incorporates factors like gender ratio favorability, local single rates, income distributions, and lifestyle compatibility with the local population. A higher score means you are fishing in a pond that is well-stocked for someone like you. The match probability is a direct function of this score: it represents the likelihood that any given person in your ideal pool would also consider you a match based on the same demographic factors. Scores above 70 convert at higher rates; scores below 40 face significantly steeper odds.
All demographic data used in the funnel is sourced from publicly available datasets. No proprietary or paywalled data is used. The primary sources are:
Where CBSA-level data is available, it is used directly. Where only state or national data exists, it is applied as a proportional estimate. All rates are static snapshots, not real-time data, and are updated periodically as new survey releases become available.
These are estimates, not counts of real individuals. The model assumes statistical independence between filters (for example, that income and fitness level are uncorrelated), which is a simplification. The model is designed to give you a realistic order-of-magnitude sense of your dating market, not a precise headcount.
Market Competition
The market competition curve measures how competitive you are in your local dating market. It uses publicly available CBSA demographic data and behavioral research to score each trait twice: once against research-calibrated preference curves that reflect how people actually choose partners, and once against the real distribution of single adults in your metro area. The result tells you not just how desirable a trait makes you in general, but how scarce or common your profile is relative to the people you are competing against locally.
The desirability curve draws from four foundational studies. The first is Bruch and Newman's 2018 analysis published in Science Advances, "Aspirational Pursuit of Mates in Online Dating Markets," which examined messaging behavior across four major U.S. cities using data from a large free dating platform. That study is the source for the operational definition of desirability as a function of behavioral outcome rather than stated preference, the finding that education functions as a vertical preference for men but peaks at the bachelor's level for women, and the core methodology of treating desirability as a hierarchy derived from who pursues whom and who responds. The second is Hortaçsu and Ariely's "What Makes You Click? Mate Preferences and Matching," a University of Chicago working paper analyzing actual messaging data from a major dating site across Boston and San Diego, which produced the most behaviorally grounded estimates of optimal BMI by gender, the quantified height penalty curves for men, and the income preference gradients that distinguish men as targets from women as targets. The third is Buss's 2019 Annual Review of Psychology piece, "Mate Preferences and Their Behavioral Manifestations," a meta-synthesis of decades of evolutionary and behavioral research that grounds the gender asymmetries in income sensitivity, physical attractiveness weighting, and age preference. That study is the source for the finding that women are roughly one thousand times more sensitive to salary information than men when rating partners across cultures. The fourth is the OKCupid behavioral dataset published by Christian Rudder and analyzed across the 2009 to 2014 period, covering more than 25 million user interactions, which provides the most granular cross-tabulated evidence on racial preference hierarchies by gender and the homophilous structure of smoking and political preferences. That dataset also produced the notable finding that stated racial attitudes became less biased over time while behavioral patterns remained stable across the same period.
The raw score translates a specific trait value, whether an age, an income bracket, or a BMI category, into a score from 0 to 100 using curves whose shape was determined by the behavioral literature. Curves are not assumed to be linear or uniform across traits or genders. Some traits produce monotonically increasing scores where more is always better, such as income for men as targets. Others produce peaked curves where both extremes are penalized and a mid-range value is optimal, such as age for both genders or education for women. Others produce threshold or step-function scores, such as smoking status and existing children, where the effect is not gradual but behaves more like an eligibility filter that sharply reduces the effective dating pool.
The market score answers a different question. Given the distribution of a particular trait among same-gender single adults in a specific CBSA, where does this individual rank relative to the local competition? This is calculated by identifying the individual's trait value or bracket, summing the cumulative share of the local single adult population of the same gender at or below that value using the CBSA's bracket distributions, and expressing that result as a percentile from 0 to 100. A woman who is 28 years old in a CBSA where the single female population is concentrated in the 38 to 50 age range will carry a high market score on age even if her raw score is only moderate by national standards. The same woman in a metro where single women cluster in the 22 to 30 range will receive a lower market score because she faces a younger competitive pool. The logic holds across every trait: scarcity relative to local competition elevates a market score independent of the absolute value of the trait itself.
For most traits, the final trait score is a fixed 50/50 blend of raw score and market score. Two traits are exceptions. Political alignment is scored entirely from the market signal because the raw score is itself a function of how well the individual's politics match the local population distribution, making a separate market percentile redundant. Wanting children uses its own compatibility function that measures alignment between the individual's fertility preference and the CBSA's want-kids distribution rather than producing a traditional raw or market score. The final composite is a weighted average of all trait scores, with weights reflecting the relative magnitude of each trait's effect on behavioral outcomes in the literature.
Cost of living is not scored as a standalone trait. It functions as an amplifier applied to the most gender-salient trait's market score, using Regional Price Parity to steepen local competition. For men as targets, it amplifies the income market score: a man earning $100,000 in San Jose, where RPP is roughly 130, faces stiffer income competition than the same earner in Birmingham, where RPP is roughly 86, because his purchasing power is lower relative to local expectations. For women as targets, it amplifies the body composition market score, reflecting the empirical correlation between higher-cost metros and lower obesity rates, better fitness infrastructure, and higher appearance competition. The amplifier is applied after the trait's own score is calculated and carries its own weight in the final composite.
The behavioral literature consistently shows that men and women are not evaluated on the same traits, and where the same trait appears in both scoring models, it rarely carries the same weight. When women evaluate men, income is the single strongest signal, consistent with Buss's cross-cultural finding that women weight financial prospects far more heavily than men do when assessing partners. But no single trait dominates the evaluation of men. Women assess men across a broad portfolio: income, height, ethnicity, body composition, age, education, political alignment, parental status, and fertility preference all carry meaningful weight, and the spread between the most and least important traits is relatively narrow. A man with a weak income score can partially offset it with strength in height, fitness, or age. The system reflects this by distributing weight more evenly across traits when scoring men as targets.
When men evaluate women, the picture is sharply different. Body composition and age together account for the largest share of the evaluation, reflecting the consistent finding across Bruch and Newman, Hortaçsu and Ariely, and the OKCupid behavioral data that men's revealed preferences concentrate heavily on physical attractiveness and youth. Income carries relatively little weight when men evaluate women, and height is not scored at all because women do not report it. The result is a scoring model for women as targets that is more top-heavy: a smaller number of traits carry outsized influence, and underperformance on age or body composition is harder to offset with strength in other areas.
Because these asymmetries are fundamental to how the scoring system operates, all desirability scoring is computed separately for men seeking women and women seeking men. Results should never be aggregated across target genders without flagging this asymmetry, as doing so would obscure the most consequential finding the research produces: that the traits driving desirability are not the same across genders, and in several cases they point in opposite directions entirely.
Attachment Style
The Attachment Style assessment extends RELATE into four psychological layers that a persona code alone cannot capture. Where the core assessment measures what you do in relationships, the Attachment Style assessment examines why you do it: the history, emotions, decision patterns, and identity structures underneath your results. It is a 30-minute guided assessment that produces a 3,000-word individualized report.
This quadrant draws from Mary Main's Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) framework, which demonstrated that the way adults narrate their early attachment experiences predicts their current attachment behavior more reliably than the experiences themselves. The assessment does not replicate the AAI, but it borrows its core insight: what matters is not what happened to you, but whether you have integrated what happened. The concept of earned security, where individuals with difficult attachment histories develop secure functioning through reflection and corrective experience, is central to how this quadrant is scored and interpreted.
This quadrant identifies the specific emotion driving your attachment behavior under stress. It builds on Silvan Tomkins' affect theory, which established that discrete emotions organize perception and action in fundamentally different ways. The assessment draws on Kaufman's compass of shame model, Brené Brown's research on vulnerability and shame resilience, and Gottman's finding that contempt, a specific emotional stance, is the single strongest predictor of relationship dissolution. Two people with the same attachment style but different trigger emotions will behave in meaningfully different ways under pressure. This quadrant captures that distinction.
This quadrant maps what happens in the gap between feeling an emotion and acting on it. It draws on Gottman's research on flooding, the physiological state where heart rate exceeds 100 BPM and rational processing degrades, as well as Shaver and Mikulincer's model of hyperactivating and deactivating strategies in the attachment system. Hyperactivating strategies amplify distress signals to pull a partner closer. Deactivating strategies suppress distress to maintain independence. The assessment identifies which strategy you default to, how quickly you escalate, and what your partners actually experience as a result.
This quadrant examines how your RELATE persona operates in real relationship contexts. It draws on Jeffrey Young's schema therapy framework, which identifies early maladaptive schemas that shape how people interpret and respond to relational events. It also incorporates concepts from Internal Family Systems (IFS), particularly the distinction between authentic self-expression and protective parts that have taken over. The clinical concept of ego syntonic versus ego dystonic behavior is central: ego syntonic patterns feel natural and identity-consistent even when they are damaging, while ego dystonic patterns feel foreign and distressing. This quadrant identifies where your persona is genuine expression and where it has become an automatic protection system that you may not recognize as such.
The assessment produces a 3,000-word report organized section by section across the four quadrants. The report is written in second person, addressing you directly rather than describing a type. Each section synthesizes your assessment responses into a narrative that explains your specific patterns, not the patterns typical of people who scored similarly. The report is generated against a quality rubric that ensures clinical accuracy, emotional nuance, actionable specificity, and internal consistency across all four quadrants.
Each Attachment Style report includes a personalized growth plan derived from the four quadrants. The plan identifies specific areas where change would have the highest impact on your relationship outcomes. It includes targeted journaling prompts designed to deepen self-awareness in each quadrant, as well as a gamified development track that breaks long-term growth into concrete, measurable steps. The development track is designed to maintain engagement over time, turning insight into sustained behavioral change rather than a one-time reading experience.
The Attachment Style assessment is a psychoeducational framework built on established clinical constructs. It is not a diagnostic instrument and does not replace licensed therapy or clinical assessment.
The assessment is free, saves your progress, and takes about 80 minutes across 5 modules. Your persona is waiting.