What's My Type? Quiz: Your Top Two Partner Standards and the Type They Describe

The quiz has 30 statements, each beginning with how important it is to you that a partner has a certain quality. You rate each one from not important to essential, scored 0 to 4. Five statements belong to each of six standards, so each standard scores out of 20 and is shown as a percentage. Your leading standard is the highest bar and gets the full interpretation; your second bar completes the pair, and your leading interpretation describes the two most common pairings for that standard, with all fifteen pairings listed below. If two standards tie exactly, the result says so and shows both.

Three of the standards, warmth and trustworthiness, vitality and attractiveness, and status and resources, are the three dimensions identified in Garth Fletcher and colleagues' Ideal Standards Model, which has been replicated across many samples since 1999. The other three, similarity, excitement, and steadiness, are our own additions, chosen because they show up repeatedly in research on who people choose and in what people say when they describe a type. All 30 statements are original and the groupings are educational, not validated subscales. The quiz measures what you say you want, which is the point of the third section below.

A note on reading the bars: most people rate warmth highly, because almost everyone wants a kind and trustworthy partner. That makes the second bar unusually informative. Warmth plus steadiness and warmth plus excitement are both common and describe very different types.

The fifteen pairings, in short. Warmth with steadiness is the safe harbor type, warmth with excitement the warm adventurer, warmth with similarity someone who feels like home, warmth with vitality someone kind and fun, warmth with status someone kind and accomplished. Vitality with excitement is the spark type, vitality with status the catch, who tends to be competed for and to hold high standards in turn, vitality with steadiness someone energetic but grounded, vitality with similarity someone attractive from your own world. Status with warmth is accomplished and kind, status with steadiness the provider type, status with similarity someone from your own social world, which can be comfort or a ceiling, status with excitement someone accomplished who keeps moving. Similarity with steadiness is a matched, settled partnership, and similarity with excitement is shared values with a different temperament. Excitement with steadiness looks like a contradiction and is really a signal that you want both: in practice that means a steady person with an adventurous streak rather than an unpredictable one who occasionally settles. Whichever pair you land on, the second bar is doing most of the describing.

In 1999, Garth Fletcher, Jeffry Simpson, Geoff Thomas, and Louise Giles asked people to rate how important a long list of qualities were in an ideal partner, then looked at how the ratings clustered. Three dimensions emerged and have held up since: warmth and trustworthiness (kind, supportive, understanding, honest), vitality and attractiveness (attractive, energetic, fun, healthy), and status and resources (successful, ambitious, financially secure, good standing). People differ in how much weight they put on each, and the model's central claim is that these ideals act as standards: we compare a partner or potential partner against them, and the size of the gap predicts how satisfied we feel and how long the relationship lasts.

The same research group showed that early in a relationship, people's ideals and their perceptions of a new partner tend to converge, partly because perceptions shift to fit ideals and partly because people choose partners who already fit. Ideals are also flexible in a way most type quizzes ignore: people with a strong hand, in the sense of being highly desirable themselves, tend to hold higher standards across all three dimensions, and people adjust their standards to what the dating market around them offers. None of this is cynical; it is how most people quietly manage the gap between what they would want in a perfect world and whom they could actually be happy with.

The three standards we added are not part of the model but come from adjacent research. Similarity, in values and background, is one of the most reliable predictors of who ends up together. Excitement and steadiness describe a tension that shows up in almost every account of attraction: the pull toward someone who is novel and intense against the pull toward someone who is predictable and safe. Scoring them separately lets the result show which pull is stronger for you, which is often the most self-revealing part of the page.

Here is the finding that should sit next to every what's my type quiz ever published. In 2008, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel ran speed-dating studies in which participants first reported how much they valued attractiveness, earning prospects, and personality in a partner, and then met a series of real people for a few minutes each. The stated preferences did not predict who participants were actually attracted to. People who said looks mattered most were no more drawn to attractive dates than anyone else, and the same was true for earning prospects. Stated ideals predicted how people evaluated hypothetical partners on paper; they stopped predicting once a real person was in the room.

A 2014 meta-analysis by Eastwick, Luchies, Finkel, and Hunt found the same pattern across the literature: ideal partner preferences predict attraction to described partners but have weak predictive validity for attraction to partners people have actually met. In 2017, Samantha Joel, Eastwick, and Finkel fed machine-learning models more than a hundred self-reported traits and preferences from speed-daters and found the models could predict how much a person liked people in general, and how much a person was liked in general, but essentially could not predict which specific pairs would click. Attraction between two particular people was, in their words, not predictable from what either had said beforehand.

What does hold up is less glamorous and more useful. Warmth and trustworthiness predict relationship satisfaction once a relationship exists, not just attraction. Similarity in values predicts who stays together. And the ideals you hold shape how you evaluate a partner after the fact, which is where the Ideal Standards Model earns its name. So the honest reading of your result is: this is the lens you bring, and it will color how you judge the people you date; it is not a reliable forecast of who will make your pulse jump. If your type keeps leading you somewhere you do not want to be, our Why Am I Single? Quiz and Attachment Style Quiz test look at the patterns underneath the preferences.

Treat the top two bars as a description of the lens you carry into dating, and then check the lens against your history. Write down your last three serious attractions and rate them, honestly, on the six standards. If the people you actually chose score high on your stated top two, your type is doing its job and you can trust it. If they score high on something else, say excitement when you rated steadiness as essential, you have found the gap the research describes, and that gap is worth more than any label. It usually points to a pattern that a test like Attachment Style Quiz or Love Styles Test can name more precisely.

Then use the result to widen rather than narrow. The standards that predict a good relationship, warmth, trustworthiness, and shared values, are the ones people are least likely to rate as a type and the ones most likely to be filtered out by a profile photo. If your top two are vitality and status, the research is not telling you that you are shallow; it is telling you that those standards work on paper and dissolve in person, so give someone who lacks them on paper a second date. If your top two are warmth and steadiness, the risk runs the other way: you may be screening out people who would have been exciting as well as safe.

Finally, if you are deciding whether a specific person fits, our Compatibility Test looks at that question directly, and if you are not sure you are ready to be choosing at all, Am I Ready for a Relationship? Quiz is the better first stop. A type is a preference. It is not a plan, and it is not a judgment of anyone who does not match it.