Sometime in the 1950’s, women’s magazines started publishing relationship quizzes in their pages with a complex scoring system that arrived at a number. This number was then plotted on a scale and the reader could determine, based upon that number, whether their relationship was “good” or not. It seems silly, and compared with the complex testing done today for relationships, it is silly. But it started a phenomenon still going strong. Back then the popular psychological testing technique that was being used in spy films and TV dramas was the Rorschach test. You looked at the squiggly designs and if you interpreted them as female body parts or death figures the red flags went up. Psychology has improved a bit since then and so has the relationship quiz.
Even though they still use the format of answering questions, scoring the answers and then plotting your final number on a graph, the questions have gotten deeper and more meaningful and the research behind the quizzes has gotten to be more thorough. Today’s quizzes, often called “Relationship Diagnostic Questionnaires”, are based on solid couples research and hopefully point out specific areas of weakness in the relationship with the goal towards improving it.
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