8 questions. No wrong answers. Just the truth about the cycle you’re in.
Question 1 of 8
When tension rises between you and your partner, what is your first instinct?
Question 2 of 8
When your partner pulls away emotionally, you typically…
Question 3 of 8
Your partner says you “always” do something that bothers them. Your reaction?
Question 4 of 8
Which sentence sounds most like something you’d actually say or think?
Question 5 of 8
How do arguments usually end in your relationship?
Question 6 of 8
When you feel disconnected from your partner, the loneliness feels like…
Question 7 of 8
Friends would say your relationship style is…
Question 8 of 8
What do you most want your partner to understand about you?
Your pattern
Pursuer / Withdrawer
The cycle of reach and retreat — where love and distance keep trading places.
The pursuer
Reaches harder
Moves toward conflict, needs resolution, reads silence as rejection. The louder the pursuit, the more urgent the need underneath it.
The withdrawer
Retreats further
Moves away from intensity, needs space to regulate, reads pursuit as an attack. The quieter the retreat, the more overwhelmed the nervous system.
Neither of you is the problem. You are both responding to the other’s move in a way that made sense at some point — and now it’s a trap you didn’t design and can’t seem to exit. The pursuer reaches because they’re afraid of abandonment. The withdrawer retreats because they’re afraid of engulfment. These fears run the relationship. Until they’re named, they will keep running it.
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Your pattern
Controller / Avoidant
The cycle of command and disappearance — where control and escape keep trading places.
The controller
Manages everything
Runs the narrative, sets the terms, organizes the outcome. Not cruelty — it’s fear dressed as competence. The need to control is the need to feel safe.
The avoidant
Escapes inward
Goes invisible rather than fight. Withdraws from demands, decisions, and intimacy. Not laziness — it’s a nervous system that learned early that presence equals danger.
The controller takes charge because somewhere they learned that if they didn’t, things would fall apart. The avoidant disappears because somewhere they learned that staying meant losing. These are not personality flaws. They are survival strategies that outlived their original context and moved into your relationship — where they are now creating the very thing each of you fears most.
Get your full pattern report
Enter your email and I’ll send you a deeper breakdown of the Controller/Avoidant cycle — what drives it, what keeps it locked, and the first move that begins to change it.
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Your pattern
You carry more than one pattern
That’s not unusual — most of us do. Context shifts the role we play.
Your answers reflect elements of multiple cycles — which often means you shift roles depending on what your partner does, what the topic is, or how activated your nervous system is. You might pursue in one area and withdraw in another. You might control to avoid feeling avoidant. This layering is exactly what makes couples pattern work so powerful: when you can see all the moves, you can finally choose a different one.
Let’s go deeper
Enter your email and I’ll send you a fuller exploration of layered couple patterns — and what it means when the cycle shifts depending on who’s leading.
