Before marrying

The five headings behind this are Gottman's and the headings are the public part — money, life plans, communication and conflict, core values, and expectations and commitment are the subject of a blog post anyone can read. Nothing else of theirs is here. The Gottman questionnaires and card decks are copyrighted, are sold and distributed under licence, and none of them has been reproduced, paraphrased or reconstructed; every question above was written for this app. Three of the five headings are also missing on purpose. Money is asked properly in Managing money, children and everything downstream of them in The family plan, belief in Faith, and how you argue in Conflict style — asking them again here would have produced fifteen questions, most of which this app already answers better elsewhere. What is left is the part nothing else in the catalogue covers: what you each take the word married to mean, how much of your week stays yours, and where two careers will let you live. One thing is missing that you might expect. This does not ask whether violence would end a marriage. Asking it would mean asking you to predict your own behaviour in a crisis you have not had, which is the one thing these instruments never do, and it would print an answer onto a sheet that could later be held against the person who wrote it. If that question is live for you, it is not a question for a web page. If you have taken none of these yet, take Conversations first. It records which of these subjects the two of you have never actually raised, which is a cheaper and more useful thing to find out, and it changes what you do with this one. Then this, then Managing money and The family plan, which go deep on the two subjects deliberately cut from here. As for whether any of it works: the two largest randomised trials of relationship education, Building Strong Families and Supporting Healthy Marriage, found no effect on whether couples stayed together, and the best-conducted meta-analysis of premarital education finds the effect on relationship quality does not survive counting the unpublished studies in. This instrument has never been tested and claims nothing. It records what you said, how much it weighs, and why.

Further reading

• The Gottman Institute (2025). The 5 Most Important Talks to Have Before Marriage (opens in a new tab). The Gottman Institute blogpopular book
• Fawcett, E. B., Hawkins, A. J., Blanchard, V. L., & Carroll, J. S. (2010). Do Premarital Education Programs Really Work? A Meta-analytic Study (opens in a new tab). Family Relations, 59(3), 232–239review
• Wood, R. G., Moore, Q., Clarkwest, A., & Killewald, A. (2014). The Long-Term Effects of Building Strong Families: A Program for Unmarried Parents (opens in a new tab). Journal of Marriage and Family, 76(2), 446–463critique
• Lundquist, E., Hsueh, J., Lowenstein, A., Faucetta, K., Gubits, D., Michalopoulos, C., & Knox, V. (2014). A Family-Strengthening Program for Low-Income Families: Final Impacts from the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation (opens in a new tab). Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (MDRC)critique

Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.