Viral TikTok Test Claims to Determine the Success of a Relationship
How to know whether or not your relationship is going to last is a question that perplexes many couples, as if there was a way to avoid pain and heartbreak in the long run. But in lieu of a crystal ball, a relationship test that recently resurfaced on TikTok may be as close as you can get.
The “bird test,” as its called, became part of the discourse after TikTok user Lyss Lyss posted a video explaining how she “lives and dies by the fucking bird test, because it never fails.”
While she admits that the bird test is typically in the context of a romantic relationship, she uses it for friends, family members, and pretty much anyone she meets. The concept is fairly simple. One person in a relationship pretends to see a bird or some other innocuous observation to gauge their partner’s interest.
As Lyss notes: “If you say something that can be deemed insignificant and your partner responds with, like, genuine curiosity … that’s a really good sign that your relationship is going to last a long time.” However, if your partner is dismissive or uninterested, suffice to say, it’s probably a harbinger that the relationship isn’t going to be successful.
Bird test
Giving an example, Lyss shared a time that she used the bird test on a new friend she was meeting at Starbucks, who was not only interested in the woodpecker she saw out the window, but ended up sitting with her and Googling interesting facts about woodpeckers. To this day, she notes that she and the friend are still “homies as fuck.”
The bird test was first conceived by acclaimed psychologist John Gottman, whose work focuses on divorce prediction and marital stability through relationship analysis. In the course of his research, Gottman developed a model to predict whether newlywed couples would remain married or divorce within four to six years later, which fit the data with 90 percent accuracy.
Since going viral on TikTok, however, people have been trying out the bird test on their own partners, with the hashtag currently at over 8 million views on the platform. In other words, it seems like the best way of knowing what’s going on in your partner’s head short of asking them about the Roman Empire, if that’s your thing.
