Is My Marriage Over? Quiz: Score Four Areas and See What a Real Next Step Looks Like

There are 24 statements, six in each of the four areas. You rate how true each one has been lately, from not at all (0) to very true (4), so each area totals 0 to 24 and the whole quiz totals 0 to 96. The four bands are 0 to 24, 25 to 48, 49 to 72, and 73 to 96: even quarters of the range, chosen as educational guides rather than published cutoffs, since the items are our own writing. The four areas are our grouping as well, informed by marriage research rather than reproduced from a validated instrument.

Read the four area scores before the total. A marriage at 40 with the strain concentrated in conflict and repair is a very different situation from a marriage at 40 where connection and willingness are both gone and the arguing stopped years ago. The first is the classic case for couples therapy, which works on how two people fight. The second is often the case for discernment counseling or for individual work first, because the question there is not how to argue better but whether both people still want to be married.

One statement, about feeling afraid of your spouse when they are angry, is treated as a safety item. Answering somewhat or higher raises your result to the highest band and points you to Emotional Abuse Test regardless of the total, because fear of a spouse is not a marital-satisfaction problem and the usual advice about communication does not apply to it. Nothing is sold on that result.

Gottman and Levenson followed married couples for 14 years and reported being able to predict which marriages ended, and roughly when, from how the couples behaved during a conversation about a disagreement. Their earlier work identified the behaviors that carry most of that signal: criticism aimed at the person rather than the problem, contempt expressed through mockery or eye-rolling, defensiveness, and stonewalling, which is shutting down and going silent mid-argument. Contempt was the single most corrosive one. Just as important was what happened after a flare-up: couples who stayed together made attempts to repair, through humor, a hand on a shoulder, a change of subject, and crucially those attempts were accepted.

What that research cannot do is tell an individual what will happen to their marriage. It was built on group-level prediction from observed behavior in a lab, not from a questionnaire, and it says nothing about what a particular couple can change if they decide to. Plenty of couples with all four of those behaviors in their arguments have learned different ones. A quiz is further removed again: it records your current view of your own marriage on one day, from one side of it, which is useful information and not a forecast.

The honest summary is that the behaviors on this page are associated with marriages ending, in populations, and are also among the most changeable things in a marriage when both people want to change them. That is why the result is framed as a next step rather than a probability. For defensiveness and shutting down in particular, a printable feelings iceberg helps each partner name the hurt or fear underneath before the next conversation.

Most people think the choice is couples therapy or a lawyer. There is a third option, built for the situation where one spouse is leaning out of the marriage and the other wants to save it, which William Doherty and colleagues call a mixed-agenda couple. Ordinary couples therapy tends to go badly for them, because it asks two people to work on a marriage that only one of them has decided to keep. Discernment counseling is a short, structured process, usually one to five sessions, with a different goal: not to fix the marriage, but to reach clarity and confidence about which direction to take.

It works with three paths openly on the table: staying as things are, moving toward divorce, or committing to a defined period of couples therapy with divorce off the table while it runs. Each spouse also spends part of each session alone with the counselor, since the leaning-out spouse and the leaning-in spouse have different work to do. In Doherty and colleagues' published analysis of 100 consecutive cases, about half the couples chose to begin couples therapy to reconcile, and most of the rest moved toward divorce, which is the outcome the process is designed to make clearer rather than to prevent.

If your result shows strain concentrated in your own willingness, or you and your spouse plainly want different things, this is the option worth asking about by name. If both of you are still in it and the problem is how you fight, ordinary couples therapy is the better fit, and Four Horsemen Worksheet (Gottman) is a reasonable place to start between now and a first appointment.

Three pages here cover neighboring questions, and picking the right one saves time. This page is about the state of a marriage: what the four areas look like right now and what kind of help matches them. Divorce Test: Should I Stay or Go? is about the decision itself, mapping what is pulling you each way when you are actively weighing whether to end a marriage. Should We Break Up Quiz asks the same decision question for any relationship, married or not, and is the better fit if you are not married.

Two more sit alongside. Relationship Satisfaction Test measures how satisfied you are without the ending framing, which is a useful second reading if your result here surprised you. And Relationship Check-In Worksheet is a structured conversation you can have with your spouse, which is often a better first move than any further self-assessment, because a quiz can only ever hear one side of a marriage.

A note on taking this alone: you can, and most people do. But a marriage has two readings, and yours is the only one this page has. If your spouse would be willing to answer the same 24 statements separately, comparing the four area scores, without arguing about individual items, tends to be more revealing than either result on its own.