Our method
“Should I stay in this relationship?” deserves better than a points quiz or a coaching funnel. Here is exactly how this site works, and where every claim comes from.
The four rules
1. Safety comes first, always. Before anything is read or scored, we ask about physical violence, coercive control, sexual coercion, untreated addiction, and personal crisis. Any of those routes to real resources — hotlines, crisis lines, specialist help — not to a quiz result. A relationship read is meaningless when the urgent thing is safety.
2. Every claim is footnoted to its source. Each guide and letter carries a Sources section. If we say contempt predicts dissolution, you can see whose research says so and check it yourself. When the literature is genuinely uncertain, we say "research suggests" — and when we're giving judgment rather than evidence, we try to make that visible too.
3. Patterns are read, never summed into a score. Most online quizzes add points and average your relationship into a number. That model fails this domain: a relationship with warm communication and chronic contempt should not average to "work on it." Certain findings outweigh everything else. The quiz and the guides read shapes — fondness vs contempt, whether repair still works, alignment on load-bearing values — and never hand down a stay-or-leave verdict, because that decision is not ours to make.
4. Next steps point to real help, not an upsell. There is nothing to buy here. Recommended next steps are couples therapy (EFT, Gottman Method), discernment counseling, individual work, or honest holding steady — with links to directories we don't own and don't profit from.
What this site is not
- Not therapy, and not a substitute for it.
- Not a diagnostic instrument — it's a structured way to see what you may already half-know.
- Not a data business: no accounts, no email list, no ads, nothing stored on a server. Quiz answers never leave your browser.
The sources
The frameworks behind the guides, the situations column, and the 29-question quiz:
- John Gottman & Julie Schwartz Gottman — longitudinal research on couples: the Four Horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling), contempt as the strongest single predictor of dissolution, repair attempts, bids for connection, trust and betrayal. Why Marriages Succeed or Fail (1994); The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (1999); What Makes Love Last? (2012).
- Sue Johnson — Emotionally Focused Therapy: accessibility, responsiveness, engagement (A.R.E.); pursue-withdraw cycles; attachment injuries and their repair. Hold Me Tight (2008).
- Mira Kirshenbaum — pattern-based diagnosis of the stay-or-leave question: the "permission to leave" relief-vs-grief reading, long deliberation as data, "was it ever really good?". Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay (1996).
- William J. Doherty — discernment counseling for mixed-agenda couples: a short, structured process for deciding (status quo, separation, or an all-in repair effort), not for fixing.
- Attachment research — John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's foundations; Cindy Hazan & Phillip Shaver, "Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process" (1987); Mario Mikulincer & Phillip R. Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood (2007) — anxious protest, avoidant deactivation, and how attachment patterns disguise themselves as verdicts.
- Shirley Glass — infidelity research: the walls-and-windows model of intimacy and secrecy. Not "Just Friends" (2003).
- Esther Perel — desire and distance in long relationships. Mating in Captivity (2006).
- Terrence Real — contempt and shame stances, one-up/one-down dynamics, male depression. The New Rules of Marriage (2007).
- Robin Stern — the mechanics of gaslighting and reality-rewriting. The Gaslight Effect (2007).
- Evan Stark — coercive control as a pattern distinct from physical violence. Coercive Control (2007).
- Decision research — Thomas Gilovich & Victoria Medvec on action vs inaction regret; Hal Arkes & Catherine Blumer, "The Psychology of Sunk Cost" (1985); Stephanie Spielmann et al., "Settling for Less Out of Fear of Being Single" (2013).
- Eli Finkel — how modern marriages carry more expectations on less time. The All-or-Nothing Marriage (2017).
Corrections
If you find a claim that misstates its source — or a source that doesn't support its claim — write to feedback@stayorgo.now. Corrections are made in place and dated.