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- A company called DataRobot has created a quiz, based on a study, that tries to predict how good your chances are to stay with your partner.
- The quiz asks about your ages, education level, your relationship status, how long you've been together, how many young children live with you, and how many relatives you see per month.
- The company's director made clear it's not perfect math, but the questions are based on science so they can give you a good idea of where you stand.
Being in a relationship is a lot like taking a bet. You slowly put more and more chips down — spending time together, moving in together, marriage — and the relationship either pans out and you have a big payout, or you have to cash in and start over.
Well, one tech company is trying to help make your bet a little safer using science and data to determine just how good your odds are of staying together. With just six questions, DataRobot claims to give you an analysis of how likely it is that you and your partner will last.
The questions are based off of a Stanford study called "How Couples Meet and Stay Together" and the company took traits found in that study and saw how they correlated to long-lasting relationships, according to Greg Michaelson, DataRobot Labs' director.
"We were interested in identifying the characteristics of couples that tend to be predictive of long-lasting relationships; predicting how likely a given couple is to stay together; and most importantly, building a simple quiz application that any couple could use to determine how long their own relationship might last," he wrote in a blog post.
Most of the questions are pretty standard for anyone who was (or is) obsessed with taking relationship quizzes in teen magazines — with a few surprising twists.
The first question, an expected one, asks about your relationship status. According to the study, married couples are "dramatically" more likely to stay together. I checked the "living with partner" box which apparently greatly decreased our odds since it shows we can't commit. Don't rush me, robot!
The next question was also pretty standard: how long have you and your partner been dating? This also notably allows you to add decimals, so I put in "2.5" because I need all of the help I can get. This greatly decreased our odds because it's not really all that long. Good thing I added the decimal!
Next, you input yours and your partners' ages. Apparently couples with a bigger age gap are more likely to break up than couples with similar ages, according to the study. I'm 24 and my boyfriend is just about a week shy of 24 so this slightly helped our chances.
Up next was your education level — completing either high school or college was a good indicator that you're built to last. We met in, and both completed, college so I marked that down. That helped our odds so really, it makes all those student loans worth it.
This next question was pretty surprising: how many children between the ages of two and five live with you. It seemed surprising until the obvious was stated: living with pre-school aged kids can make life pretty stressful and cause tension in your relationship. Thankfully, we only have a misbehaving cat and a well-behaved roommate so I put zero. This helped our chances.
The most surprising question of all was the last one: how many relatives do you see on average each month? Apparently, couples that interact with more relatives tend to stay together longer, according to the study. We both live several states away from our families but see them fairly often both in person and on FaceTime so I said one as an average. This hurt us but only a little.
All said, we have about an 84.3% chance of staying together for two more years and I will take those odds; especially since I have no idea what kind of person I'll be in two months let alone two years.
But, if you and your partner get a low score on the quiz, never fear: Michaelson made it clear in a blog post that while the quiz is based on hard evidence, it is mostly for fun and is not the end-all be-all of your relationship.
"We're not relationship experts and we're not trying to give you advice about yours," he wrote. "The factors that we considered may or may not be causal. We're just using the correlation to make a prediction"
If you want, you can take the quiz for yourself here.
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