5 Ways to Test Your Relationship Compatibility ...

Relationships can be very different things to different people, and it’s important that you know what the basic rules of your relationship are going to be. For example, it may sound obvious but if you want a monogamous relationship, you want to be sure that he or she does too. You should also ask what your partner or potential partner would consider to be cheating; you don’t want to find out months down the line that the love of your life has been kissing other people because they only class sex as cheating, for example.

If it’s somebody that you’re really serious about, then you shouldn’t be put off asking them if they want to get married and have children one day. You don’t have to pointedly ask if they want to do that with you, just if it’s something that they’ve always aspired to. If you’ve always wanted marriage and a family, ten years down the line you don’t want to find yourself still with someone not interested in children and happy always being just a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Many things that may not seem that important can be great indicators of how compatible two people would be in a relationship. For example, having an idea of how many times a day your partner thinks it is ok to call you will tell you straight away if they’re going to be way too clingy for you, or if there’s a risk that they will find you clingy and obsessive.

Also, asking whether they think it’s acceptable in a relationship to use the toilet with the door open will tell you straight away if you’re aiming to have the same level of comfort with each other. And asking if they always apologize if they’re in the wrong, and whether they would ever apologize even if they felt they weren’t, will tell you how stubborn they are.

The importance of this is really dependent on the importance of friends in your life, as some people’s friends play a bigger role than others. Either way, it’s worth introducing him or her to your group of friends. That’s not to say that even if they don’t approve, you shouldn’t go ahead with the relationship, but you need to work out if it will be a problem for you if your friends don’t like your partner or vice versa. Equally, you should meet your partner’s friends, because if they spend a lot of time together but you can’t stand them, it could become a huge problem in your relationship.

This may sound like a rather strange thing to do, but there’s no escaping the fact that problems will arise in every relationship, and both of you will at some point, separately and together, face stress and issues on your lives. There’s no way of avoiding a lot of these problems because bad things happen to everyone in life, but what you can be is prepared, by knowing that you’ve got someone by your side who you can work it out with even when you’re not getting along.

You obviously can’t simulate real-life problems that may arise in months or years to come, but you can induce pressure and stress very easily that will measure how you interact together in stressful situations. Good ways are to play a board game or do something that will make you competitive with each other, go on a long (and boring) car journey, or assemble a piece of flat-pack furniture together. You’re not looking for someone who will be perfect and a sea of tranquillity in these situations, but if things get heated, how quickly it calms down is a good measure of what fights will be like for the two of you. If you wake up the next morning on the sofa, you’re probably not very compatible.

All relationships are built on some sort of common ground, and you need to know how much you really have in common with a potential partner. If it’s not very much, then you could soon find that conversation dries up very quickly and that you don’t really enjoy chatting and spending time together anymore. Communication is the key in any relationship, and if you never have anything to talk about, it will be game over.

You could both sit down and make a list of the things you like (and the things you don’t like, too) and see how similar your lists are. It will help even more if you can out in the sort of things that you like and dislike within a relationship because then you’ll know if he or she has any habits or tendencies that will really wind you up, or if anything that you do is going to annoy them.

All of these tests of relationship compatibility require you being open and honest with each other, and that is exactly what you need to do to see how compatible you are. Don’t be afraid to tell a truth they may not like to hear, or your relationship will only go wrong further down the line. If you’re both open about what you want and expect, you’ll know if you could make a good match.