Relationships
Is Your Love Growing or on a Dead-End Path?
Use this 10-point relationship check-in to assess the health of your connection.
Posted August 6, 2025 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Relationships are living entities. They move backwards and forwards in time. They evolve and decay, and they can die and be reborn. They can become locked in by their limitations or transformed beyond them.
You can evaluate your relationship regularly using the following ten most important dimensions. They can tell you whether your partnership is healthy or on a failure trajectory, and give you the chance to change what may be lacking to get your relationship back on track.
Read through them with your partner and share your responses with each other. Talk about where you agree and where you see things differently.
1. Scarring and Expanding
All relationships scar. No matter how much you care for each other, you are bound to make mistakes and cause distress in your relationship. Physical or emotional scar tissue can no longer take in nourishment or give up its toxicity. But relationships can grow beyond their scarring, surrounding those dead places with new growth.
There are four combinations of how much the relationship is scarring and how much it is able to grow. High scarring and low growing. Low scarring and low growing. High scarring and high growing. Low scarring and high growing. Of the four combinations, the last combination predicts the best relationship outcome.
2. Deepening
Relationships will deepen or become superficial. Maintaining sincere curiosity in your partner’s thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, frustrations, and new desires is crucial. When you think you know each other so well that you don’t have to keep exploring each other anymore, your relationship is moving towards parallel roommates rather than intimate lovers. Don’t be fooled by easy compatibility.
3. Can Your Relationship Use Past Mistakes to Create a Better Future?
Focusing on past errors by continuously rehashing is bad news for any possibility of a different future. The past should only be used to debrief, never to rehash. What did we do that was not good for us? How can we do it better next time? Are we accepting accountability or just blaming the other? Are we seeking options rather than accepting our limitations? The past will define the future for you if you do not use it to plan a different way of being together.
4. Is It Resilient?
How is your bounce-back capability? Do you get stuck in the same relationship-destructive negativity for long periods of time, or can you come back more quickly to rectify and start over? Resilience in an individual, as well as in relationships, is a positive quality. Holding on to grudges or disappointments, no matter how legitimate, will keep you stuck.
5. Is It Flexible?
Relationships that are limited to one-way responses and repeated reactions cannot evolve. Like any living entity, relationships that are rigid can’t move beyond what they have always been. Unexpected conflicts will always arise. Losses cannot be predicted. Can you bend with challenges and jettison old patterns when you need to open up to new ways of being?
6. Does It Welcome Challenge?
No relationship path is smooth. Unexpected losses or temptations to quit are options for you at any time. A great team is not only ready for altering perceptions and learning new skills, but welcomes them. You realize that the need for security can often be a saboteur of growth when you most need to take the risks that will strengthen your capabilities as a team. When new challenges come, can you use them to deepen and strengthen your bond?
7. Does It Maintain Its Intrigue?
Same-old, same-old is a harbinger of boredom and a warning bell. If you feel that excitement, passion, or interest in each other is waning, you will be more susceptible to seeking that elsewhere. Every person needs to be challenged and curious. If you continue to be a predictable, known entity, your partner will stop being interested in you. Your connections become less frequent and last for shorter times. You or your partner may begin to think: “I know what you’re thinking, so I don’t need to ask or delve further.”
8. Is It Open to Restructuring?
Relationships that go on and on in the same way, dealing with life’s distractions and challenges as they always have, become dead-ends for the possibilities of transformation and new directions. Even if things seem to be okay, you must commit to continued growth and transformation, both personally and in your relationships. Are you continually challenging each other to be the best people you can be? If you are a more interesting and alive person outside the relationship, you may be headed in the wrong direction.
9. How Well Can It Withstand Storms and Grow from Them?
Life can sometimes be overwhelming and difficult. People get sick. Families change in their availability. Friends move away. Jobs are lost. Depression and anxiety can overuse resources. Abuse of drugs or alcohol destroy intimacy. Successful relationships know how to use their resources when they’re in trouble and how to delegate fairly. If you aren’t learning from your stormy times and don't love each other through them, you may find yourselves defeated by them the next time they arise.
10. Is It Worth it?
Relationships are investments of time, energy, money, availability, and love. Like any investment, if they cost more over time than they can return, they will likely become less important to one or both of you. Do you feel like your relationship is still paying off more often than not? Are your expectations in line with probabilities? Can you focus more attention on the positives of the relationship to change the way you experience it?
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All of these dimensions are open to challenge and change. Many times, the partners in committed relationships have just not paid attention to reevaluation and restructuring and, once faced with awareness, can readily get things working again.
