What Kind of Partner Are You?
Romance gets the poetry, but relationships are actually built out of Tuesdays: who makes the coffee, who says the calming sentence, who turns a dull errand into an escapade. The particular way you love someone has a name and an archetype, and today it gets announced with appropriate ceremony.
Ahead lie seven scenes from an ordinary relationship, no rehearsal allowed. Play your part in each one honestly. When the curtain falls, you will receive your official partner type — the rock, the hype crew, the fixer, or the free spirit — plus a caption worthy of the occasion.
See every possible result for this quiz and what each one means →
The case for being visibly imperfect
In 1966 Elliot Aronson, Ben Willerman and Joanne Floyd played students a recording of somebody auditioning for a college quiz team. One group heard a near-flawless performance. Another heard the same performance followed by the sound of the candidate tipping a cup of coffee down his suit. The clumsy version of the impressive candidate was rated as more likeable than the immaculate one. When the identical accident befell a candidate who had answered poorly, it made him less likeable still.
The result is known as the pratfall effect, and later work sanded its edges: its size depends on who is watching, and observers of middling self-regard seem most charmed by the spillage. The core has held up, though, and it remains one of the kinder findings in social psychology. Ability that shows a seam is easier to warm to than ability with no seam at all.
That is worth holding up against whatever archetype a quiz assigns you. The steady one who never wobbles, the fixer with a solution ready before the sentence has finished, the reliable source of enthusiasm at eight in the morning: all genuinely valuable, and all capable of making it difficult for the other person to be the one who needs something. Letting a partner watch you drop the coffee is not a lapse in the role. It is frequently the thing that makes the role liveable.
What a partner type is worth
Archetypes function roughly the way nicknames do. They compress something true into a shape light enough to carry about, and discard most of the person in the process. You are not the same partner at twenty-two as at forty, or ten years in as a fortnight in, and the type you score during a calm month is not the one you score during a grim one.
There is also the difficulty every self-report questionnaire runs into. It collects your account of your conduct, not the conduct. People narrate themselves patchily and usually generously, and the gap tends to widen on precisely the qualities we would most like to possess.
So the interesting move is to hand the four descriptions to somebody who has actually shared a life with you and ask which they would have chosen. Where their pick diverges from yours is more informative than the result was, and the conversation that follows is the part that repays the two minutes.
