Relationship Terms Glossary

Dyad Quotient Report Terms

Vocabulary specific to your Dyad Quotient report — the labels and framing we use to describe your results.

Core Relationship Instinct: The underlying pattern your attachment system defaults to under stress. It is not a flaw — it is the strategy your nervous system learned to keep you safe in close relationships. Every archetype's instinct has a genuine strength built in, even when it also creates friction.
Relational Blueprint: The systemic role you tend to play in a relationship — how you handle closeness, distance, conflict, and emotional bids. Your blueprint is derived from your attachment pattern and personality structure together, not from either one alone.
Archetype: The relational pattern you were assigned based on your answers. There are six: The Frequency, The Vault, The Spillover, The Fortress, The Constellation, and The Regulator. Each one describes a structural pattern, not a diagnosis or a fixed identity.
The Frequency: An archetype marked by high attachment anxiety. You feel deeply and crave closeness, but the same sensitivity that makes you attuned also makes you hypervigilant to signs of rejection. Your core instinct is a real capacity for connection.
The Vault: An archetype marked by fearful-avoidant attachment. You want connection but your system pulls back from it under stress. Your core instinct is self-protection — a mechanism that works well in some contexts and gets in the way in others.
The Spillover: An archetype where outside stress dominates the relationship pattern. External pressure bleeds into how you connect with your partner. Your core instinct is high environmental sensitivity — you notice everything, which is both a strength and a vulnerability.
The Fortress: An archetype marked by dismissing attachment. You value self-reliance and autonomy, and emotional closeness can feel uncomfortable. Your core instinct is strong independence — a real asset that can become isolating if it blocks repair.
The Constellation: An archetype where you distribute your emotional needs across a wider network rather than concentrating them in one relationship. Your core instinct is a resilient, distributed social architecture — you do not put all the weight on one bond.
The Regulator: An archetype marked by secure attachment. You are comfortable with closeness and with autonomy, and you can help your partner calm down when things get hard. Your core instinct is co-regulation — you are a secure base.
Signal: A pattern your report flags because it sits outside the healthy range on a specific dimension. A signal is not a verdict — it is a pointer to where attention or effort could change the pattern.
Priority Label: The sorting label on each report group: High / Start Here (the most impactful pattern to work on first), High / Next Steps (important but secondary), or Medium / Notice & Monitor (worth keeping an eye on, not urgent).
Action Steps: Specific, behavioral things you can do to shift a pattern. Each step is written as a trigger-action pair: "When [situation happens], do [specific thing]." Not abstract advice — concrete moves.
Dyad / Dyad Matrix: A dyad is a two-person unit — in this case, you and your partner. The Dyad Matrix is the combined report generated when both partners have taken the assessment, showing how your two patterns interact.
Applies To: A tag on each report item showing whether it came from the algorithmic individual report, the AI-generated dyad report, or both. This makes the source of each insight transparent.

Relationship Patterns

The dimensions your report measures. These are the underlying patterns that predict how a relationship functions — the things your report groups and labels as signals.

Attachment Anxiety: The degree to which you fear being abandoned or not valued enough by your partner. High attachment anxiety shows up as reassurance-seeking, hypervigilance to signs of distance, and a tendency to feel rejected even when nothing was intended. It is a dimension, not a type — everyone sits somewhere on it.
Attachment Avoidance: The degree to which closeness and emotional dependency feel uncomfortable. High avoidance shows up as pulling away under stress, preferring self-reliance, and feeling flooded when a partner needs more closeness than you can give. Like anxiety, it is a dimension, not a fixed label.
Demand-Withdraw Cycle: The most common conflict pattern in relationships. One partner pursues, raises the issue, or pushes for resolution (demand). The other disengages, shuts down, or leaves the conversation (withdraw). The more the pursuer pushes, the more the withdrawer retreats — and the cycle escalates. Neither person is the problem; the cycle is.
Capitalization: How you respond when your partner shares good news. Most people think support matters most during hard times, but research shows that celebrating your partner's wins well — with enthusiasm, questions, and attention — predicts relationship satisfaction even more than conflict behavior. The opposite of capitalization is ignoring, minimizing, or one-upping.
Contempt: A feeling of superiority toward your partner — the sense that you are better, smarter, or more reasonable than they are. It shows up as sarcasm, eye-rolling, mockery, or dismissive tone. Contempt is the single strongest predictor of relationship breakdown because it says "you are beneath me," which makes repair almost impossible.
Trust: The belief that your partner is reliable and means well, even when they make mistakes. Trust has two parts: reliability (they do what they say) and benevolent intent (they are not trying to hurt you). When trust drops, every ambiguous action gets read as evidence of bad faith.
Attribution: The story you tell yourself about why your partner did something. When attribution is healthy, you assume situational causes ("they had a hard day"). When it is strained, you assume character causes ("they are selfish"). Over time, negative attribution becomes a lens that filters everything your partner does.
Spillover: When stress from outside the relationship flows into it — or when good things outside flow in. Negative spillover means work stress, financial pressure, or family conflict bleeds into how you treat each other. Positive spillover means outside wins and energy improve the relationship.
Dyadic Coping: How you and your partner handle stress as a unit. Strong dyadic coping means you frame stress as "something we are dealing with" and divide the load. Weak dyadic coping means each person carries their own stress alone, and the two stresses collide in the relationship.
Partner Responsiveness: The sense that your partner gets you, validates your experience, and cares about what you feel. It is the receptive side of intimacy — not just being heard, but feeling understood. When responsiveness is high, small misunderstandings stay small. When it is low, small things feel like evidence that you do not matter.
Self-Disclosure: Sharing your inner world — fears, hopes, memories, needs — with your partner. It is the expressive side of intimacy. Without disclosure, your partner has nothing to respond to. Without responsiveness, disclosure feels risky and stops happening.
Emotion Regulation: Your capacity to calm your own nervous system when it gets activated — during conflict, under stress, or when an old fear gets triggered. Strong regulation means you can stay in a hard conversation. Weak regulation means your body floods and you either escalate or shut down.
Self-Compassion: How kindly you treat yourself when you make a mistake or fall short. It matters for relationships because people who are harsh with themselves tend to be harsh with partners too, and they struggle to repair because shame makes it hard to apologize cleanly.
Gratitude: Noticing and naming specific things your partner does that you appreciate. Generic gratitude ("thanks for everything") does not land. Specific gratitude — naming the exact action and what it meant — strengthens the bond because it tells your partner you actually see what they do.
Forgiveness: The process of releasing the hold a past hurt has on you. It does not mean forgetting, excusing, or staying in a harmful situation. It means the hurt stops driving your current behavior toward your partner. Forgiveness is a process, not a single decision.
Maintenance: The proactive things you do to sustain a relationship when nothing is wrong — check-ins, rituals, shared activities, openness about your day. Relationships do not stay healthy by default. Maintenance is the upkeep that prevents small drifts from becoming real distance.
Shared Meaning: The sense that you and your partner are building something together — aligned values, shared rituals, common goals, a story about what your relationship is for. When shared meaning is strong, daily friction feels small. When it is weak, even good days can feel disconnected.
Self-Expansion: The degree to which your relationship helps you grow — try new things, develop new perspectives, become more than you were alone. Relationships that expand both partners tend to stay vital. Relationships that contract them tend to feel stagnant over time.
Within-Relationship Loneliness: The specific pain of feeling unseen or emotionally alone despite being partnered. It is different from being alone — you are right next to someone, but the connection is not there. It often builds slowly when disclosure and responsiveness both drop.
Relationship Efficacy: Your belief in your collective capacity to solve problems together. When efficacy is high, a hard situation feels like "we can figure this out." When it is low, the same situation feels like "what is the point." Efficacy builds from small wins and erodes from repeated unresolved conflict.
Positive Perspective: A mild, realistic idealization of your partner — seeing them slightly better than they see themselves, in a way that is grounded in who they actually are. This is not denial. It is the tendency to notice strengths first and give the benefit of the doubt. It predicts satisfaction and stability.
Intimacy Alignment: How well you and your partner match on physical closeness — desire, frequency, and what intimacy means to each of you. Misalignment does not mean incompatibility. It means the topic needs open conversation, not silent assumption.
Autonomy Support: Supporting your partner's independent goals, friendships, and identity — not as a threat to the relationship, but as part of what makes them a full person. When autonomy support is high, both partners feel free inside the relationship. When it is low, the relationship can feel like a constraint.
Reliability: The degree to which you follow through on what you say — small commitments, shared responsibilities, daily tasks. Reliability is not glamorous, but it is the load-bearing structure of trust. Small follow-throughs accumulate into a sense that your partner can count on you.
Stress Reactivity: How easily your nervous system activates under pressure — how quickly you feel anxious, irritated, or overwhelmed. High reactivity means small stressors feel big. It is not a character flaw. It is a baseline setting that can be shifted with practice.
Cooperation: Your tendency to approach conflict as a shared problem rather than a contest. High cooperation means you can yield on low-stakes things and hold your ground on what matters without turning it into a battle. It is the difference between "us versus the problem" and "me versus you."
Growth Mindset (in Relationships): The belief that relationship fit is built through effort, not fixed at the start. A growth mindset frames friction as information about what to work on. A fixed mindset frames friction as evidence that you are not right for each other. The same conflict means very different things depending on which lens you use.

Recommended Techniques — Solo

Techniques your report may recommend that you can practice on your own, without needing your partner to participate. These target patterns that are within your individual control.

Start the Conversation Gently: A way of opening a hard conversation that lowers the chance it escalates. The structure is: "I feel [emotion] about [specific situation] and I need [positive request]." The first three minutes of a conflict predict how the rest of it goes. A soft start keeps your partner's defenses down.
Calm Your Body First: A 20-minute solo timeout when you feel emotionally flooded — heart racing, chest tight, urge to fight or flee. The rule is that you must tell your partner a specific time you will come back. The timeout is for calming down, not for avoiding the conversation.
Give Them the Benefit of the Doubt: A practice of generating one situational explanation for your partner's behavior before accepting a character-based one. "They had a hard day" before "they are selfish." This interrupts the negative attribution spiral that turns every mistake into evidence of a flaw.
Decompress Before You Walk In: A 10-minute solo decompression ritual between an external stressor (work, commute, family event) and your shared relational space. The goal is to not carry outside stress directly into the relationship without a buffer.
Self-Soothe Before You Process Together: Practice calming your own nervous system before trying to process a hard issue with your partner. If you bring a flooded body into the conversation, the conversation becomes about the flooding, not the issue.
Effort Reframe: Reframing conflict as the mechanism through which you build understanding, not as evidence that something is wrong. "Conflict is how we learn each other" instead of "we should not be fighting about this."
Name the Fear, Not the Behavior: When you feel the urge to seek reassurance, state the underlying fear directly instead of acting on it. "I feel scared you are pulling away" instead of checking in five times. The fear is real. The behavior it drives is what creates friction.
Timestamp Before You Withdraw: When you feel the urge to shut down or leave a hard conversation, give a specific return time before you go. "I need 20 minutes. I will come back at [time]." Then come back at that time, even if you do not feel fully ready. Showing up matters more than feeling ready.
Daily Body Scan: 10-15 minutes a day of noticing tension in your body from head to toe, without trying to fix it. The goal is to lower your baseline stress reactivity so that small relationship triggers do not feel like emergencies.
One Commitment at a Time: Pick one recurring responsibility, commit to a specific day and time, and follow through for two weeks before adding another. Reliability is built one visible follow-through at a time, not by promising to do better in general.
Small Wins Practice: Deliberately solve one small, low-stakes decision together to build collective problem-solving confidence. The point is not the decision — it is the evidence that you can figure things out together. Name the win out loud so it registers.
Strength Spotting: Each day, write down one specific, observed strength your partner showed — not a general compliment. This counteracts negativity bias, which makes negative moments stick and positive ones slide off. Writing it down makes it stick.
Show Them You're Listening: When your partner shares something — good, bad, or neutral — stop what you are doing, make eye contact, and ask a follow-up question before responding with your own thoughts. The goal is to make them feel received before you add anything.
Name Your Own Needs First: Before raising alignment with your partner on physical closeness, write down — just for yourself — what you personally want more or less of. No judgment, no comparison. You cannot ask for what you have not named to yourself.
Values Naming: Write down the three things that matter most to you in life right now. Share the list with your partner and ask them to do the same. Shared meaning starts with knowing what each of you is actually building toward.
Small Vulnerability Practice: Share one small piece of your inner world this week — a worry, a hope, a memory — even if it feels unimportant. Small disclosures build the muscle for bigger ones. Waiting until something feels "big enough" to share often means never sharing it.
We-Framing Practice: Verbally reframe a stressor as "something we are dealing with" instead of carrying it solo. The language shift changes who owns the problem. "We" problems get handled together. "I" problems get handled alone and then spill over.
Physical Reset First: When you feel your body heat up during a disagreement — face flushed, heart racing — pause and do a physical reset before speaking. Cold water on your face, a few slow breaths. Continue the conversation only once your body has calmed, not before.
Rebuild Respect: Before any criticism, state one thing you appreciate about your partner. If sarcasm or an eye-roll slips out, immediately pause and repair: "That was not fair. Let me try saying that differently." The repair matters more than the slip.
Stop and Ask More: When your partner shares good news, stop what you are doing, look up, and ask one follow-up question about it. Then count to 10 in your head before bringing up anything related to your own day. Let their moment stay theirs for a beat.
Specific Thanks: Name one exact thing your partner did and what it meant to you — not a generic "thanks." Repeat daily for two weeks, out loud or in a short note. Specificity is what makes gratitude land. Generic thanks slides off.
Write It Out: Journal exactly what happened and how it affected you, without judging yourself for still feeling it. This is a first step toward letting go — not the whole process. Naming the hurt on the page makes it less shapeless in your head.
Scheduled Check-In: Put a 15-minute weekly relationship check-in on the calendar. Not a state-of-the-union summit — a short, regular time to name what is working and what needs attention. Ritual structure prevents the check-in from being avoided until things pile up.
Curiosity Before Reaction: When your partner shares an independent goal or plan, ask why it matters to them before reacting to the plan itself. The reflex to react first often misses the reason. Curiosity first changes what the conversation becomes.

Recommended Techniques — Together

Techniques your dyad report may recommend that require both partners to participate. These target patterns that exist in the interaction between you, not in either person alone.

Celebrate Their Good News: A shared practice of responding to each other's good news with enthusiasm and specific questions. Not just "that is great" — ask what it was like, what it means, how it felt. This builds capitalization, which predicts satisfaction more than conflict behavior.
Daily Stress Debrief: A 15-minute daily conversation where one partner shares an outside stressor and the other listens — without problem-solving. The listener's only job is validation. This prevents outside stress from bleeding into the relationship unprocessed.
Weekly Relationship Meeting: A scheduled weekly check-in with a light ritual structure: what went well, what needs attention, one thing to focus on. The structure prevents the meeting from being avoided until issues pile up. Regularity matters more than depth.
Withdrawal-Return Agreement: An agreement that whoever needs to step away from a hard conversation gives a specific return time before exiting: "I need 20 minutes. I am coming back to this." This turns withdrawal from abandonment into a structured pause — and the return is the commitment.
Team Up Against the Cycle: A shared practice of framing the demand-withdraw cycle as the shared enemy, not each other. "When the cycle activates, we both get stuck" instead of "when you do this." Externalizing the pattern makes it something you can tackle together rather than something you are doing to each other.
Find the Fear Under the Anger: A practice of identifying the primary emotion (usually fear — of being left, unseen, not enough) beneath the secondary one (anger or withdrawal). The anger is what shows. The fear is what drives it. Naming the fear changes what the conversation is about.
Notice & Express Gratitude: A shared practice of replacing generic thanks with a specific behavioral observation plus a character affirmation: "You handled that call with so much patience — that is who you are." Specific behavior + named strength lands in a way that "thanks" does not.
Written Vulnerability: Using letters or journaling as a way to share hard things when spoken conversation triggers too much flooding. For avoidant pairings, writing bypasses the body's alarm response enough to get the words out. It is not a replacement for talking — it is a bridge to it.
Map Your Support Network: Together, define which emotional needs the two of you address for each other and which are better met by a wider community. No single relationship can meet every need. Mapping this explicitly prevents the disappointment that comes from expecting one person to be everything.
Rebuild Trust Step by Step: A three-part process: atone (transparent remorse, no defensiveness), attune (turn toward your partner's bids for connection consistently), and attach (rebuild intimate rituals that signal commitment). Trust is not rebuilt by a single apology. It is rebuilt by a pattern over time.
Find What Already Works: A technique that asks: if the problem magically disappeared tonight, what would be different tomorrow? And when have things already been a little bit like that? The goal is to find existing exceptions — moments the problem did not happen — and study what made them work.
Take Turns Speaking and Listening: A structured communication practice: one partner speaks in short chunks, the other paraphrases what they heard before responding, then roles switch. The structure slows the conversation down enough that both people actually hear each other instead of preparing rebutrals.
Rebuild Touch Slowly: A structured approach to rebuilding physical intimacy in stages, with no performance pressure and mutual pacing. The goal is to remove the anxiety that often blocks closeness by making touch something you build back together, not something you perform.
Rituals of Connection: Designing one small micro-ritual at a daily transition point (a six-second kiss on return, a morning check-in) and one larger shared ritual (an annual trip, a weekly walk). Rituals are repeated, predictable moments that signal the relationship is a priority without requiring a conversation about it.
Name the Pattern, Not Each Other: A shared practice of naming the destructive cycle causing isolation — "the distance dance," "the pursue-retreat loop" — and discussing it as something external to both of you. "The pattern is pulling us apart" instead of "you are pulling away." This makes the pattern the problem, not the partner.
Tackle Stress as a Team: A shared practice of explicitly appraising a stressor as "we-stress" (something affecting both of you), dividing practical tasks, and offering reassurance. The shift is from "I am stressed and you are not helping" to "this is our stress and here is how we are handling it."
Write Down Who Does What: A shared written checklist of responsibilities with specific commitments and a weekly review. Ambiguity about who handles what is a major source of resentment. Explicit agreements reduce the mental load of tracking and the friction of dropped balls.
Self-Expansion Date: A weekly 90-minute activity that is novel and mutually engaging — something neither of you has tried before. The novelty matters. Shared new experiences expand both partners and keep the relationship vital in a way that routine does not.
Build Shared Social Time: Audit your shared versus independent social circles and set low-barrier shared social goals with built-in buffer time. The goal is not to merge all friendships — it is to ensure the relationship has a social context, not just a private one.

See These Terms in Your Own Report

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