Communication styles
Twenty-five questions, asked twice. The first pass is about you. The second asks the same twenty-five about how you see your partner.
Your answers land on ten dimensions: Energy and Recharge, Emotional Expression, Reassurance, Emotional Intimacy, Communicating Needs, Bids for Connection, Listening, Conflict Style, Repairing and Feedback. Each runs between two ends on a five-point scale, and neither end is the better one.
Why it matters: this is the exercise that tells you where the misreads come from. A wide gap is not a warning, it is the place where each of you has been assuming the other means what you would mean. The second pass adds something most couples have never had, which is a comparison between how you see yourself and how your partner sees you.
Expectations
Twenty responsibilities across five areas, plus twelve life questions. Household is the largest at seven. Then Financial, Career and Work, Emotional Labor and Extended Family. The life questions cover children, faith, where you live, money and risk, and involvement with each other's families.
Why it matters: this is the ordinary machinery of a shared life, which is exactly the part couples assume is settled and have usually never said out loud. Most of what it surfaces is not disagreement. It is two people who each assumed the other saw it the same way and had no reason to check.
One thing worth knowing
These questions are asked in the first person, so the comparison is mirrored before anything is scored. Two people who both answer “primarily mine” have each claimed the same job, which is a disagreement. Two who answer opposite ways have agreed.
Relationship reflection
Fourteen questions across five areas: Getting Started, Milestones, How We're Doing, Looking Forward and What Matters. Rather than mapping how you each operate, it asks how the relationship itself feels right now and where you each hope it is going.
Why it matters: the other exercises describe patterns. This one captures a moment. It is the exercise that is most worth repeating, because the comparison between two rounds a year apart says something neither round can say on its own.
Physical intimacy expectations
Sixteen questions across six aspects: Frequency, Initiating, Comfort and Safety, Communication, Adventurousness, and What It Is For.
Why it matters: this is the subject couples are least likely to have mapped and most likely to have assumed. Every question carries a prefer-not-to-say, and declining is treated as its own answer rather than as agreement, because choosing not to answer should not become a signal of its own.
Conflict patterns
Twelve questions, and the only exercise in Attune that is not a comparison. You rate four patterns in yourself on a four-point frequency scale, and the result is yours. It is never sent to your partner's device.
Why it matters: the four patterns it asks about are the ones most consistently associated with difficulty, and noticing one in yourself is a different kind of information from noticing it in somebody else.
Unhealthy conflict is characterized by the presence of criticism, defensiveness and a lack of understanding.
The Gottman Institute
Why that one is private
An honest self-assessment is only possible if it is genuinely private. A version of this exercise that your partner could read would produce a more flattering set of answers and a less useful result.
Together rather than separately
Each exercise answers something the others cannot, and the results read differently when more than one is present. How you communicate explains a lot about why a particular expectation went unspoken. What you each need after conflict explains why a resolved disagreement did not feel resolved.
“Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”
Alain de Botton, The Course of Love