12 questions to assess the health of your relationship
Susan Krauss Whitbourne is a professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes the Fulfilment at Any Age blog for Psychology Today.
If you’re lucky enough to make it into midlife with your closest relationship intact, you know that over the course of the decades, that relationship has changed. The factors that spelled success in your earlier years no longer seem to apply once you’ve made it through your 40s, 50s, and beyond. Acknowledging that the rules for relationship success in midlife and beyond are not the same as those of youth, University of Miami family psychologist Blaine Fowers and colleagues (2016) developed a measure of relationship health especially designed for mature couples. With their measure of relationship “flourishing,” or the Relationship Flourishing Scale (RFS), the Fowers team hope to capture the key qualities, in a good long-term partnership, of being able to grow and change as a couple as well as individuals.
The University of Miami researchers propose that a positive relationship science needs to become established in which it’s recognised that over time, couples experience fulfillment in ways that may not appear synonymous with “satisfaction” or “happiness.” Instead, they propose that consistent with the Aristotlean notion of “eudaimonia,” the quality of long-term relationships should be measured in terms of such qualities as meaning and purpose, personal growth, goal sharing, and relational giving (prioritising the partner more than oneself). It doesn’t necessarily take decades, but it’s more likely that long-term couples will develop a shared identity in which they find it impossible to imagine themselves without their partner, regard their partner as essential to their daily existence, and regard their goals as mutually compatible. They also share a history and, just as our memory is a part of our identity, that shared history becomes part of their identity as a couple. Imagine returning to your favorited family vacation spot without your partner. It just wouldn’t seem the same.
Relationships that are floundering, by contrast, don’t have that quality of mutual growth and connectedness. They feel stale, empty, and confining. You and your partner share hardly anything of importance to each other anymore, and you could be just as happy alone as you are when you’re together, if not happier.
The RFS provides 12 simple behaviorally-based items that will allow you to judge your own relationship’s health with this new, made-for-midlife, measure. Rate each item from 1 (never or strongly disagree) to 5 (always or strongly agree):
1. I have more success in my important goals because of my partner’s help.
2. We look for activities that help us to grow as a couple.
3. My partner has helped me to grow in ways that I could not have done on my own.
4. It is worth it to share my most personal thoughts with my partner.
5. When making important decisions, I think about whether it will be good for our relationship.
6. It is natural and easy for me to do things that keep our relationship strong.
7. Talking with my partner helps me to see things in new ways.
8. I make it a point to celebrate my partner’s successes.
9. I really work to improve our relationship.
10. My partner shows interest in things that are important to me.
11. We do things that are deeply meaningful to us as a couple.
12. I make time when my partner needs to talk.
This scale pretty much scores itself, as you can see, but it does divide up into these 4 areas of relationship flourishing, as determined by the statistical analyses of the over 400 married individuals in the Fowers et al. sample:
Goal sharing= 1, 6, 10
Personal growth= 2, 3, 7
Meaning= 5, 9, 11
Relational giving= 4, 8, 12
Once you’ve given yourself this scale, try this next step in the process. Ask your partner to complete it as well but on his or her own time (i.e. not with you present). If you want to add a layer of complexity to the process, see if you can guess how he or she would respond. Then sit down and compare notes. You may find that despite what you perceive of as celebrating your partner’s success is seen, instead, as apathy —or worse, as jealousy or competitiveness. If you and your partner can go through the items of greatest discrepancy in a constructive and non-confrontational manner, you should be able to identify two or three key areas in which both of you could work harder to achieve greater alignment.
Midlife can be a time of relationship stress, given the many pressures operating on all of us to keep up with our obligations, routines, and demands. However, by taking advantage of your shared lives, identities, and histories, it can also be a time of your greatest relationship fulfillment, a fulfillment that will continue to flourish.