Quiz: Is your marriage heading for a breakup?

Sometimes you fight -- loud enough to give you a red face the next time you encounter your neighbours. Or you never yell, preferring to seethe in silence. Why? He spends too much (or she's too tightfisted). One of you isn't "romantic" enough. He is too emotional.

And so it goes. Every relationship takes a nosedive occasionally. Small wonder: even loving couples -- who, after all, come from different families with diverse values and priorities -- can have core differences about communicating, child rearing, sex and spending money.

How healthy is your union? Is there any way to tell? Marriage experts such as David Olson, coauthor of Empowering Couples: Building on Your Strengths (Enrich Canada, 2000), think so. In studies that involve thousands of premarital couples, they can predict which ones will stay married based on their answers to the following questions.

To find out where your marriage is at -- and which areas might need improvement -- have a go at the quizzes on the following pages. Get your significant other to do the same and then compare notes. Adapted from Empowering Couples, the quizzes cover five specific critical areas: communication, family of origin, finances, sexual relationship and conflict resolution. They'll help you recognize your strengths and weaknesses and, who knows, maybe even lower the decibel level and increase the romance quotient.

For more information and couple resources, and to purchase a copy of Empowering Couples, go to www.prepareenrichcanada.com.

Communication
On an episode of "Ally McBeal," poor Ally is curled up with a book and her blow-up man after a bad breakup wondering if she'll ever meet Mr. Right. Eventually, she comes to the realization that ending up alone isn't the end of the world and that some of her loneliest times have been when she was in a relationship.

Ain't that the truth? There is nothing worse than pouring your heart out to the one you love only to have to repeat yourself because he was too wrapped up in a hockey game to hear anything you said. Ouch.

It's no news that communication is the key to the success of any relationship. In fact, of the 21,501 married couples that were surveyed for Empowering Couples, the No. 1 thing that distinguished happy couples from unhappy ones was communication.

Communication and intimacy go hand in hand. The more intimate you are with someone, the more important communication is. You expect your significant other to pay more attention to you than to the checkout clerk at the supermarket. This is not always the case. The majority of married couples surveyed -- some 82 per cent -- wished their partners were more willing to share their feelings. Over time, couples feel more comfortable with each other and often assume -- incorrectly -- that they know how their partner would feel about certain situations, so there may be less verbal communication.

And listening is crucial to developing intimacy. The key, says Olson, is to speak to each other in an honest, clear and positive way -- every day. So set aside five minutes a day to talk about your feelings, about each other and about your life together. Discuss what you enjoyed most about your relationship that day, what wasn't great and how to make things better. Finally, give each other at least one compliment a day. Eighty per cent of unhappy couples feel that their partners put them down. A compliment a day will make you both feel good and, with any luck, keep the divorce lawyers away.

Take the quiz!
Here are the questions:
Record a number for each response to indicate your level of agreement with each statement.
1=Strongly disagree
2=Disagree
3=Undecided
4=Agree
5=Strongly agree

1. We are good at sharing our positive and negative feelings with each other.
2. My partner is very good at listening to me when I speak.
3. We let each other know our preferences and ideas.
4. We can talk easily about problems in our relationship.
5. My partner really understands me.

Interpreting your score:
Add up the response numbers for each of you.

Partner 1:
Partner 2:

21-25 = Your communication skills are very good.
15-20 = Your communication skills are generally good, but there are some ways they could be improved.
11-14 = Your communication skills are good in some ways, but they also need some improvement.
5-10 = Your communication skills need improvement.