What happens when you answer together
One person says something. The other adjusts, slightly, often without noticing. What comes out is a negotiated version that neither of you would have written alone.
It is a nice conversation and it is not information. The whole value of comparing two answers depends on the two answers having been formed independently.
Rather than trying to change how you think of or feel about your counterpart, our work suggests that you should focus on changing your own behavior.
Julia Minson, Greater Good Magazine
Honesty needs privacy
Some of these questions are easier to answer truthfully when nobody is watching you answer them. That is not a character flaw, it is how people work, and designing around it is more honest than pretending otherwise.
“In insecure relationships, we disguise our vulnerabilities so our partner never really sees us.”
Dr. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight
Answering alone also removes the social cost of a particular answer. You are not declining to do something in front of your partner. You are describing what is true, and the conversation about it happens afterwards, with both readings already on the table.
The more honest we are, the more we can discover that our partner really loves us for who we are, and not the idealized version of us that shows up when we first begin to date.
John Gottman and others, Eight Dates
What this makes possible
Independent answers are what let us say something specific rather than something general. Two readings of the same question can be compared, and the distance between them means something, which is the whole basis of your results.
It is also what makes the partner-view half of the Communication exercise work. Asking how you see your partner only tells you something if your partner has separately said how they see themselves.
And it is not all-or-nothing
Where two answers sit one step apart, your results say so, rather than calling it a disagreement. An item neither of you answered is left out of the average rather than counted as a difference, because a question nobody answered is not an argument.
The part that is not a questionnaire
Collecting two sets of answers is the easy half. What happens next is a set of rules about what a difference means, applied the same way every time: which answers have to be mirrored before they can be compared, how far apart two answers have to be before it is worth saying anything, and what is worth saying when they are.
Those rules are written down and published. Our methodology page is generated from the code that does the scoring rather than written alongside it, so it cannot describe something the product does not do.
What we do not do with your answers
Your Conflict Patterns answers are never sent to your partner's device. Neither are your Physical Intimacy answers in raw form. Those two are the most personal things we ask, and the results are built so that what reaches your partner is the comparison rather than your words.
Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing.
Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication