The trust and dependability check-in

Twelve questions about the ordinary kind of trust — whether what gets said gets done, whether you can lean on it when it matters, and what happens after it has been let down.

12 questions · about 3 minutes · free · no signup

This is a self-reflection check-in, not a clinical assessment, and the twelve questions are ours rather than a validated instrument. It asks about everyday reliability and what happens after it slips. It cannot tell you whether to trust someone, and it does not try.

Start this check-in

Free · no signup · about 3 minutes

What you’ll get

A score out of 48, computed in your browser
Three sub-readings — follow-through, leaning, and repair
Which quarter of the scale you land in, and what that describes
A short written note, and one thing to try this week

What it measures

In plain language

The everyday half of trust, which is the half that gets built and spent in ordinary weeks. Four questions about follow-through: whether what gets said gets done at the scale of a Tuesday. Four about leaning: whether counting on them is a given or a decision you make each time. And four about repair — what happens after it has been let down, which is where the difference between a rough patch and a pattern usually shows.

The three come from a long-standing account of what trust in a close relationship is actually made of: that it starts as predictability, becomes dependability, and only then becomes something you extend past the evidence. Those are not stages a couple passes through once; they are three things that can be true to different degrees at the same time, which is why the reading comes in three parts.

What this check-in deliberately does not ask about is the other territory the word “trust” gets used for: being monitored, having your movements or money or friendships controlled, or being afraid of your partner. Those are not a coaching topic and a score is the wrong response to any of them. There is a line at the bottom of every screen of this one pointing somewhere better.

Where it comes from

Written by Thirdlight — not a validated instrument

These twelve questions are ours, not a validated instrument. Published trust scales exist and are free for academic research, not for a commercial product without written permission we do not hold — so rather than reproduce someone else’s items we wrote our own around the same three-part construct.

The research behind the idea

Rempel, J. K., Holmes, J. G., & Zanna, M. P. (1985). Trust in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(1), 95–112. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.1.95
Gordon, K. C., Baucom, D. H., & Snyder, D. K. (2004). An integrative intervention for promoting recovery from extramarital affairs. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 30(2), 213–231. doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2004.tb01235.x

The scale runs one way: the more of these that are true, the higher the number, and a higher number means more strain on the everyday kind of trust. It is not a score out of anything — 48 is simply the top of our own scale.

If what is happening is control rather than unreliability — being tracked, kept from money, friends or family, threatened, or made afraid — that is not something a check-in should score, and we have not written questions about it. Our safety page lists crisis lines and services by country, and they are the right first call. Our safety page.

Every result

What each outcome means

Written out in advance, so nothing about this check-in is hidden behind taking it.

Steady0–12: Across these questions the everyday version of trust — small things said and then done — is mostly holding. That is the part of trust built and spent in ordinary weeks rather than in dramatic moments, and it is the part people tend to notice only once it has gone.
Patchy13–24: Some of it holds and some of it does not, and the unevenness is the finding rather than the level. Trust that is patchy usually has a specific shape — a particular kind of promise, or a particular situation — and a shape is far more workable than a conclusion about the whole relationship.
Guarded25–36: Your answers describe holding something back: doing it yourself, building in a margin, checking rather than assuming. That is a reasonable response to being let down more than once. It is also the thing that makes the next repair harder to believe, which is the bind this band is really about.
Worn through37–48: On most of these questions the answer was near the top of the scale, which describes reliability that has stopped being something you can plan around. Something at this level is usually past what a check-in can help with, and it is a reasonable point to talk to a person rather than a page.

Questions

About the trust and dependability check-in

What does dependability mean in a relationship?

Whether you can count on somebody in the ordinary run of things — whether what gets said gets done, and whether you can lean on it when something matters. A long-standing account of relationship trust separates it into predictability, dependability and faith: the first is about patterns you have observed, the second about the person behind them, and the third about extending trust past the evidence you have.

Why are there no questions about checking a partner’s phone?

Because there is a line between unreliability, which is a coachable thing, and control, which is not. Monitoring, tracking, restricted money or friendships, threats and fear of a partner are components of an abusive pattern, and turning them into a score would be the wrong response — it treats something that needs a person as something a page can grade. We left them out on purpose and point at our safety page instead.

Is this a validated instrument?

No. Published trust scales exist, and they are free for academic research rather than for a commercial product without the authors’ written permission, which we do not have. So these twelve questions are ours, written around the same published construct. There is no cutoff behind the result and the four bands are quarters of our own scale.

Can trust be rebuilt after it is broken?

The clinical literature on recovery after a serious breach describes it as staged and non-linear rather than a single decision, with real setbacks along the way — which is one reason we do not put a timeline on it, and why any figure you have read about how long it takes is practitioner consensus rather than a research finding. A third of the questions here ask about what has happened since, because that is usually where the useful information is.

Does a difficult result mean the relationship is over?

No. It means that on the day you answered, the everyday kind of trust was under strain — which is a description of a state, not a prediction. The top band says plainly that a check-in is past its usefulness at that end of the scale and that talking to a person is the reasonable next step. That is the honest answer, and it is the one thing on this page we would not soften.

Ready when you are

3 minutes, one question per screen, and your result the moment you finish. Nothing is held back for an email address.

Start this check-in