The Instrument
The one measurement in this system you cannot influence.
The partner report: six questions, rated by the person who lives with you.
At day 0, day 45, and day 90 I send your wife six questions about behavior she can observe directly. She answers. I read them. You do not see her individual responses. It is the only instrument here that does not run through your own account of yourself, and that is exactly why it carries weight.
What it is
A behavior survey, not a verdict on the marriage
Every other measurement in the practice is either a lab value or something you log yourself. The partner report is neither. It is a short, structured survey completed by the person closest to you, at day 0, day 45, and day 90. Each item is a concrete behavior, not a feeling or a judgment about the relationship. She is never asked to interpret your motives, and never asked to report anything you have said to me.
The six questions
Six behaviors, each rated one to five
Emotional availability
Present and reachable, or checked out and distracted.
Patience under stress
Response quality during high-pressure moments at home.
Follow-through on commitments
Whether stated intentions matched observed actions.
Device presence
Phone and screen behavior during family time.
Repair speed after conflict
How quickly a rupture got addressed rather than avoided.
Physical affection and closeness
Non-sexual physical connection and proximity.
Who sees the answers
She reports to me. You receive the aggregate.
Her individual ratings come to me and to me only. You receive the aggregate — a single score at each checkpoint and its direction of travel — never her item-by-item answers. She is not reporting to you, and she is not being asked to manage your reaction to what she says. That separation is what keeps her honest.
Why it cannot be influenced
You cannot perform your way through ninety days
Presence is the one thing almost every man over-rates in himself. You cannot study for this survey, and you cannot act your way through it for three months straight. The only way the number moves is for the underlying behavior to actually change. That makes it the hardest measurement to fake and the most useful one to watch.
The presence delta
Your self-rating against hers
At each checkpoint you rate the same six behaviors in yourself. The gap between your score and hers is the presence delta. A small gap means you see yourself roughly as she does. A gap of three points or more on any single item is the signal: a behavior you believe you have handled is landing very differently at home, and it becomes the first thing we work.
The consent structure
Nothing happens without written consent from both of you
Nothing happens without written consent from both of you. She can skip any question and withdraw at any time, with no effect on your engagement.
About 2 minutes, three times. She receives the instrument directly from me with a consent form that explains what she is agreeing to and what she is not.
She should know one thing up front: if her rating on a specific behavior differs sharply from yours, that behavior may become something we work on. You still never see her individual answers.
If anything your wife shares suggests she may be unsafe, I contact her directly and privately with confidential resources. Nothing she reports in that context is shared with you, and nothing changes in your engagement that would point back to her.
If what surfaces is separation, infidelity, or a marriage in crisis, I refer you to a licensed marriage and family therapist and we pause relational work until you have one.
Her answers are stored privately and used only for your engagement. She can ask for them to be deleted at any time. They appear in published results only in aggregate, only with her written consent, and never in a group smaller than five.
The partner report lives inside Lineage, the fourth foundation. It is the measurement that moves before a man reports feeling any different.