Older and similar-age situations have the same count
Across these 18 paired choices, older adult partner situations and similar age or life-stage situations were selected the same number of times. This is equality of the highest raw counts; it does not create a mixed age personality.
Equal counts do not mean that you do not care about age differences or that you are more open, accepting or mature.
Read every tied context
- Older adult partner situations involve more existing experience of life stages and daily rhythms established earlier.
- Similar age and life-stage situations involve roughly comparable stages and experience, with planning from similar starting points.
- The items include negotiating with older adults, receiving prior experience and adapting to arrangements from stages they have already experienced, alongside exploring together from similar starting points with roughly comparable experience.
Reading the shared highest count
Each direction appears in 12 comparisons. One selection adds one raw count; all three counts sum to 18. A tie concerns the shared highest count, not equal preference intensity. A reachable example, in older / similar / younger order, is 9 / 9 / 0. These are illustrative counts from the original item bank, not a private person’s answers or a population benchmark. Only the three-way tie has to be 6 / 6 / 6.
Revisit why you chose
- Consider which items you chose toward older situations and which toward similar life stages. Do the two groups correspond to different kinds of situation?
- Are your choices more affected by life stage, amount of experience or age in years? Would they change if age were removed?
Keep both adults’ choices visible
Whether ages are similar or a partner is older, both people need their own freedom to express themselves, decline and change their mind. The result cannot determine whether a particular relationship is equal.
An optional next step
If you wish, record what the choices have in common within each situation group. You can also leave the result exactly as it is.
A fictional example, counterexample and private exercise
- Fictional situation: Faced with an unfamiliar task, Keke welcomes an adult partner’s prior experience. When discussing a shared daily rhythm, Keke prefers negotiating together from similar starting points. The two sets of options might accumulate equal highest counts in this question set. This only illustrates that two reasons for choosing can appear together. It does not establish two fixed age personalities or probabilities for a future partner.
- Counterexample: One person can have more experience in one task and learn alongside you in another. Reading every choice as a statement about a partner’s age misses differences between tasks and ways of negotiating.
- Optional exercise: Choose one situation where you would welcome experience and one where you would prefer exploring together. For each, ask whether the arrangement would still matter with a partner of a similar or different age. Thinking it through is enough; retaking the test to break the tie is unnecessary.
What these counts cannot establish
- It does not mean you are indifferent to age differences.
- It does not mean the two preferences have exactly equal intensity.
- It does not predict the age of a partner you will actually be with.
- The tie is kept as recorded, without breaking it or assigning a single leading direction.
- This describes only relative choices among adult relationship situations in this attempt. Psychometric validation has not been completed.
- This original bank has not established reliability, validity, norms or cross-language equivalence. Read the exact situations rather than treating a leading count as a trait.