From Stella, your emotional wellness AI
Seven questions. Your reasons to stay and to go, side by side.
If you're afraid of your partner, a quiz isn't the place to start. In the US you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788, any time.
Question 1 of 7 A few minutes, both sides in your words
Your answers come back here as a card. No score, no verdict.
This should I break up quiz won't tell you to stay or to leave, because no quiz can know that. It asks seven questions: why you're asking now, your strongest reason to stay, your strongest reason to go, how long it's felt this way, who you'd be staying for and what scares you. Then it reads your answers back as one card, with staying and going next to each other in your own words.
Tap a quick pick or write your own. They read the same whether it's a boyfriend of six months, a girlfriend or a partner of ten years, and you can skip any of them.
Two questions ask for your strongest reason to stay and your strongest reason to go. Most people have one of each, and the card keeps them on neighbouring lines.
Your answers come back as one card to copy or print. Nothing on it tells you what to do. What happens next is yours to decide.
Nobody real wrote these. The three cards were written for this page to show what you get back, including one with a skipped question.
Example written for this page
Why now: A big fight. The third one about moving in together.
Reason to stay: I love them. That part has never been the question.
Reason to go: Same fights. We want different things from the next five years.
How long it's felt this way: Months.
If you stay, it's for: Both of us, I think.
What scares you about leaving: Regretting it.
The sentence that keeps coming back: “I want to try.”
Example written for this page
Why now: A feeling. Nothing happened, which is what makes it hard to explain.
Reason to stay: He's kind, and everyone tells me how lucky I am.
Reason to go: I'm not happy, and I've stopped pretending to myself.
How long it's felt this way: Over a year.
If you stay, it's for: Them. I don't want to be the one who hurts him.
What scares you about leaving: Hurting them.
The sentence that keeps coming back: “I'm not happy.”
Example written for this page
Why now: A slow drift. We used to call every night.
Reason to stay: Our history. Six years, two cities.
Reason to go: I feel alone even when we're on the phone.
If you stay, it's for: Me. I'm not ready to give up on it.
What scares you about leaving: Starting over at thirty-four.
The sentence that keeps coming back: “I still care.”
You skipped how long. Sometimes the skipped one is the hard one.
These seven questions don't add up to an answer. They're the ones worth asking before a decision this size: why now, what holds you, what pushes you, how long, who the staying is for, what you're afraid of and the sentence you keep hearing. Here's why each one helps. You can do them on paper as well.
A quiz has never met your boyfriend, your girlfriend or your partner, and it can't feel what you feel on a Sunday night. A result worked out from a set of multiple-choice answers is a guess about a relationship it has never seen.
What a quiz can do is slow the question down. In research with people who were thinking about ending a relationship, many wanted to stay and wanted to leave at the same time. Feeling both doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It's what this decision tends to feel like, and it's why the card shows both reasons instead of choosing one.
Source: journal article on reasons for wanting to stay in or leave a relationship, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2018.
A rough patch has a cause you can point to, and it tends to ease when the cause does. A pattern keeps coming back whatever else changes. These five questions can help you tell which one you're describing.
Not wanting to hurt someone you care about is a decent reason, and a common one. In two studies that followed people for a couple of months, the more a person believed their partner depended on the relationship, the less likely they were to end it, even after accounting for how satisfied they were themselves.
That's why one question here asks who the staying is mostly for. It has no right answer. Staying for both of you, staying for them and staying because leaving is frightening are three different situations, and they're easier to think about once you can see which one you wrote down.
Source: journal article on staying in a relationship for the partner's sake, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018.
Most of this page doesn't apply if you're afraid of your partner. If they threaten you, control where you go, who you see or what you spend, go through your phone or have hurt you, the question isn't whether to try harder, and none of it is your fault.
Leaving an unsafe relationship is safest with a plan and with support, so you don't have to work it out alone or all at once. A domestic violence support line in your country can help you think through the steps at your own pace, and so can someone you trust. If you're in danger right now, call your local emergency number.
Source: page on what a healthy relationship looks like, National Domestic Violence Hotline.
A card can hold both sides. It can't stay in the back-and-forth with you, or ask what changed between the day you were sure and the day you weren't.
Stella is your emotional wellness AI. Tell her what happened, by voice or text, and she tells you straight but kindly without picking a side for you. When you're ready, she helps you find the words for the conversation, whichever conversation it turns out to be.
There's rarely one sign. It helps to look at a few plain things together: how long it's felt this way, whether you've said it to them directly, whether anything changes when you do, and who you'd be staying for. This quiz asks those and reads your answers back, so you can see them in one place.
No, and this one doesn't try. A quiz has never met your boyfriend, girlfriend or partner, so any result it gave would be a guess. What it can do is ask good questions and put your reason to stay and your reason to go on one card, in your words, for you to read.
A rough patch usually has a cause you can name, like a move, a loss or money stress, and it eases as that does. If the same problem keeps returning whatever else changes, and raising it changes nothing, that's different. How long it's lasted and whether you're both still trying are the first two things to look at.
Both can be true, and for a lot of people deciding this they are. Loving someone is a reason to stay, and being unhappy for a long time is a reason to go. Neither cancels the other. The card puts them side by side, so you can stop arguing one down every time the other comes up.
Being nervous about a hard conversation is normal. Being afraid of what your partner might do is a different thing. If you fear for your safety, this isn't a conversation to plan from a quiz. Talk to someone you trust or a domestic violence support line where you live, and make a plan with support before you say anything.
