Each Valentine’s Day, the University of Rhode Island’s Human Development and Family Science Department creates a couples assessment to test their compatibility.
The compatibility test is run through their all-year-long couples clinic, Gina MacLure, the clinic’s coordinator, said. The clinic serves to help anyone who needs family therapy.
“We have a specialization in relationship counseling,” MacLure said. “You could be going through a divorce or your children could not get along.”
The couple’s counselors themselves are graduate students getting their degrees in couples and family therapy, MacLure said. They are matched with a licensed couple and family therapist faculty member from the program and are overseen by the faculty member when they are counseling.
They also have what they call “Team Night” where multiple graduate students watch the counseling session and then reflect on their thoughts or ideas about the case.
“It’s really nice if the case is feeling stuck, it can help to have multiple people come in and look at it from different angles,” MacLure said.
For the past few years, the clinic has introduced relationship checkups, which are free sessions for student couples to reflect on all aspects of their relationship.
“This is a pre-counseling type of service where you don’t need to be having problems to want to come in,” MacLure said.
While graduate students and professional opinions are available, they use a scientific metric to assess the couple’s compatibility, MacLure said. “Prepare/Enrich” is an internationally recognized tool used to assess premarital relationships. The test is evidence and research based and asks an array of questions to pin-point differences in compatibility.
The couples fill out a questionnaire separately, and then the results are compared, MacLure said. The different dimensions such as forms of communication, leisure time or sexual desire are then analyzed for how well they match.
“This doesn’t mean that if you aren’t compatible in certain areas your relationship is doomed,” MacLure said. “You’re not going to be compatible 100% with anybody.”
The assessment is designed to find areas where communication should be opened up, MacLure said. They try to find areas where the couple is highly incompatible and work with them to see how this dimension plays a part in their relationship.
“That’s what the relationship check-up does,” MacLure said. “It helps people to have the conversations that they need to have.”
The test also highlights the couple’s strengths and areas in which they are highly compatible, MacLure said. They want to figure out what led them to this compatibility whether it be communication or compromise and how they can implement that into other aspects of their relationship.
After the initial checkup, the clinic may offer the couple further resources for bettering their relationship if they need it.
With a limit on how many couples can be assessed each year, the clinic wants to fill up all of their spots, MacLure said. So far, they have eight out of 12 spots taken up and are looking to find more couples who want to be assessed.
Any couple looking to take the test should go to the HDFS website for more information: https://web.uri.edu/human-development/.