Soulmate Test: See Whether You Hold Destiny or Growth Beliefs About Love

You rate twenty-four statements about how relationships work, twelve written toward destiny beliefs and twelve toward growth beliefs, on a five-point agreement scale. The engine scores each belief as a percentage of its maximum and shows both as bars. The belief with the higher bar is named as your leading belief and its reading appears below; the reading is written to cover the case where the other bar is also high and the case where it is low, so read it with both bars in view. If the two bars are exactly equal, the page shows a combination reading instead, and if you disagreed with everything, it says so rather than inventing a result.

Because destiny and growth are independent in the research, four patterns are possible. Strong destiny with weak growth is the classic soulmate believer: the right person fits, and trouble means the wrong person. Strong growth with weak destiny is the builder: love is made, and problems are material to work with. Both strong is more common than people expect and is often the most comfortable mix: a belief that fit matters, alongside the conviction that fit is also something you cultivate. Both weak usually means relationships are not something you have theorized much about, or that you are between views after a relationship that broke an old one.

The percentages are educational. There are no published cutoffs for what counts as a high or low belief on this page, because the items are original and this is not the validated Implicit Theories of Relationships Scale. Read a bar above the middle as a belief you clearly hold, a bar below it as one you mostly do not, and a near-tie as a genuine mix.

In 1998, psychologist C. Raymond Knee proposed that people hold implicit theories about romantic relationships in the same way they hold implicit theories about intelligence or personality. A destiny belief holds that potential partners are either compatible or they are not, so the task in love is to find the right person and to recognize a wrong one early. A growth belief holds that successful relationships are cultivated and developed, so the task is to work through problems and build compatibility over time. Knee's key finding was that these are not two ends of one scale: they are separate beliefs, essentially uncorrelated, and a person can hold both strongly, neither, or one.

The theory was developed further by Knee, Patrick and Lonsbary (2003), who described destiny beliefs as an evaluation orientation, a tendency to ask whether this relationship is the right one, and growth beliefs as a cultivation orientation, a tendency to ask how this relationship can be made better. Franiuk, Cohen and Pomerantz (2002) studied a closely related pair they called soulmate and work-it-out theories and found the beliefs were highly stable over time, which suggests they are real dispositions rather than moods.

This page uses original statements written for Psychology.com and informed by that research. It does not reproduce Knee's scale, and the research findings described here come from studies of that scale, not of this one. Treat your result as a reflection on your own beliefs, in a framework that research has found useful, rather than as a validated score.

In Knee's original longitudinal study, people high in destiny beliefs showed a stronger link between how satisfied they felt at the start of a relationship and whether it lasted: a good beginning predicted survival, and a shaky beginning predicted an exit. Destiny believers were also more likely to use avoidance coping when the relationship hit trouble, and after a breakup they took more responsibility for ending it. Growth believers, by contrast, took a longer-term approach to dating, used relationship-maintaining coping strategies when stressed, and were less likely to say, afterwards, that a failed relationship had seemed wrong from the beginning.

Later work filled in the picture. Franiuk and colleagues found that for soulmate theorists, feeling that the specific partner was ideal predicted satisfaction and longevity far more strongly than it did for work-it-out theorists; when the partner stopped seeming ideal, satisfaction fell. Knee, Patrick, Vietor and Neighbors (2004) found that destiny beliefs changed how conflict affected commitment, with disagreement more threatening to people who expected a right match to run smoothly. And in an experiment by Lee and Schwarz (2014), simply framing love as unity (two halves made for each other) rather than as a shared road traveled together made people less satisfied with their relationship after recalling a conflict, while the road-traveled frame protected them.

None of this makes one belief correct. Destiny beliefs can help people leave relationships that are genuinely wrong instead of grinding on; growth beliefs can keep people investing in a partnership that will not improve. What the research consistently shows is that the beliefs shape what conflict means. To a strong destiny believer, a fight is evidence; to a strong growth believer, it is a task. Knowing which one you carry lets you notice when the belief, rather than the relationship, is doing the talking.

If destiny leads, the useful practice is to separate fit from friction. Ask, during the next disagreement, whether the problem is one that effort could solve, before asking whether it means you chose wrong. Our Compatibility Test looks at fit with a specific partner across the areas that actually predict stability, which is a better basis for the fit question than the feeling of the first weeks. If growth leads, the useful practice is the mirror image: ask whether the work you are doing is being matched, and whether the things you are working on have moved in a year. Growth beliefs are an asset in a relationship that is responsive and a liability in one that is not.

If both beliefs are strong, you have the most flexible position, and the task is to notice which one is active when things get hard. If both are weak, it may be worth reflecting on where your working model of relationships comes from. Attachment Style Quiz covers the deeper bonding pattern that often sits underneath relationship beliefs, and Love Styles Test describes the approach to romance you bring, which is a different thing from what you believe about it.

Two more companions. If you are not currently in a relationship and the soulmate question is really about whether you are ready for one, Am I Ready for a Relationship? Quiz asks that directly. And if you have become fixated on one particular person as the one, in a way that is intrusive and hard to put down, Limerence Test describes that pattern, which destiny beliefs can intensify.