Growth & Change
People change at different speeds, and a relationship absorbs that easily right up until it does not.
One of you takes on something new — a course, a job, a different set of friends, a shift in what you want your life to look like — and the other is either brought along or left to notice afterwards. Neither outcome is anyone's fault, but the second one accumulates. Two years of small unshared changes is how couples end up describing each other in terms that expired a while ago.
These questions are about ambition and change: whether you have plans you have not mentioned, whether you think your partner has become more or less like the person you met, whether you are each supported in the thing you are currently trying to do, and whether either of you feels held back.
This is the most forward-looking category on the site, and the one most worth answering twice a year rather than once. The value is not the score. It is finding out whether the version of you your partner is planning around is the current one.
8 questions about growth & change
A sample from the 44 in this category.
- Try something you are likely to be bad at?
- Encourage your partner to take a risk?
- Learn something new together?
- Talk about what you want to be better at?
- Handle a sudden change of plan well?
- How important is it that you both keep changing?
- How comfortable are you with uncertainty?
- What would you do with a completely free year?
What does it mean if we say we have grown apart?
Less than the phrase implies. It usually means a set of specific changes were never discussed rather than that anything is over, and the comparison tends to make those specifics visible.
Is it bad if one of us has changed much more?
No, and it is nearly always true of somebody. What matters is whether the other one knows, and whether the change was experienced as shared or as something that happened to them.
How is this different from the future questions?
Future is about decisions and timelines — children, marriage, where you live. This is about the people making them, and whether you each still recognise the other's direction.
Two phones, no account. Nothing is shown until you have both finished, and only the answers you both gave are revealed.