Is A Marriage Compatibility Test Reliable?

Updated March 13, 2024by Regain Editorial Team

With the rise of online quizzes and personality assessments, you’ve likely come across—or perhaps even taken—relationship or marriage compatibility tests. These tests are designed to help you gain perspective on your compatibility with your partner. But how accurate are they, really? Which insights should you be using from them, and which ones should you leave behind? Continue reading to find out.

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What are marriage compatibility tests?

Marriage compatibility tests are short tests or quizzes, usually taken online, that claim to be able to tell you how compatible you are with your spouse or fiancé. By helping you identify your and your partner’s similarities and differences, they may be able to give you perspective on your values, goals, and certain aspects of your personality that may be relevant to the future of your marriage. 

Although they may be a useful tool for reflecting on your relationship, marriage compatibility tests are not foolproof, and they often do not provide comprehensive information. With this in mind, let’s dive into what these quizzes can tell you about your relationship—as well as what they can’t. 

What marriage compatibility tests can tell you

Marriage compatibility tests are useful for gaining general insight into your relationship with a spouse or future spouse. They can be good sources of information about:

Your general values: Marriage compatibility tests can help you get in touch with what’s important to you: your ethics, morals, and priorities in your life and relationships. This can give you a sense of what you’re looking for in an ideal partner—such as spontaneity, humor, physical affection, or predictability—as well as traits and actions that you would consider “deal-breakers” in a relationship. 

Your partner’s general values: Similarly, compatibility tests can also provide insight into what’s important to your partner. By answering questions about their habits, preferences, and behaviors, you can often get a sense of what they value and look for in a relationship, as well as what their boundaries may be. Keep in mind that these insights are not foolproof, and communicating directly with your partner is often the best way to understand what’s important to them. 

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Potential areas of concern: Depending on the test, compatibility tests may be able to provide insight into where your and your partner’s values clash. This can be a useful way of pinpointing potential sources of conflict and reflecting on what areas of your relationship you want to prioritize in order to avoid challenges down the line. 

What marriage compatibility tests cannot tell you

For all the information a relationship compatibility test can provide, it's important to remember that it is still just that: a test. Marriage compatibility tests have a range of limitations, and they cannot tell you everything there is to know about your dynamic with your partner, including:

The future of your relationship: A compatibility test can give you a general view of your and your partner’s similarities and differences, but it cannot definitively tell you how your relationship will evolve or make predictions about whether it will last. 

Whether you should get (or stay) married to someone: Despite their name, marriage compatibility tests should not serve as the deciding factor for marrying or staying married to someone. This is a topic best explored with your partner, support network, and, potentially, a relationship counselor.

How to address challenges: Although a marriage compatibility test may be able to provide insight into potential areas of conflict, it generally cannot provide advice for navigating present or future relationship challenges. Therefore, it should not be seen as a resource for managing marriage issues. 

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Gaining relationship insight through therapy

As you can see, although compatibility tests can provide a general view of your and your partner’s priorities and preferences, they cannot give you definitive answers about whether to proceed with a relationship or how to address challenges in your marriage. However, other resources are available if you would like to explore your compatibility with your partner in more detail. One of these resources is marriage counseling, which can be a useful way to improve communication, get in alignment about goals and priorities, and develop strategies for navigating conflict and disagreement. Couples exploring marriage may also benefit from pre-marital counseling: a particular form of relationship counseling focused on preparing partners for merging their lives and making sure they are on the same page about what they want out of married life. 

That said, marriage counseling is not always easily accessible. For couples with conflicting schedules, work obligations, or other outside priorities, it can be difficult to coordinate a time to meet up with a therapist in person. That’s why many couples are turning to online therapy through platforms like Regain. With the ability to receive counseling from wherever is most convenient, and to send messages to a therapist at any time, online therapy can provide an element of flexibility that couples with busy schedules may find appealing. 

Furthermore, online couples counseling has been shown to be just as effective as traditional, in-person therapy. A study from 2022 found that couples who received counseling via teleconferencing saw similar improvements in relationship satisfaction to couples who received face-to-face therapy. The couples who received online therapy also saw similar improvements in symptoms of depression, stress, and anxiety. Meanwhile, a study from 2020 also found that online couples therapy resulted in a stronger alliance between couples and their therapists

Takeaway

Marriage compatibility tests are quizzes designed to give you insight into your relationship and compatibility with your spouse or fiancé. By asking questions about your and your partner’s habits, preferences, and behaviors, they aim to help you reflect on your values and potential areas of conflict. These tests can be useful for gaining perspective on what’s important to you and your partner. However, they cannot tell you how your relationship will play out in the future, whether or not you should marry—or stay married to—your partner, or how you should manage relationship issues. 

Couples therapy, whether in person or online, can be a useful resource for couples looking to explore their compatibility in more detail, either before or after marriage. If you are interested in starting your marriage counseling journey, you can get matched with a licensed therapist through a platform like Regain

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