The CLEAVE Temperament Self-Inventory

This is the temperament self-inventory from Appendix A of CLEAVE, free and complete. Nothing is held back for the book, and nothing here is scored by us: you keep your answers, and there is no form to fill in and no address to leave.

Print the score card, or keep a tally on any sheet of paper. The inventory works the same either way.

One note if you are reading along in your own copy. This version carries the corrections made in the latest printing, so a line or two here reads differently from the Appendix A in earlier copies. The substantive one is the guidance below for readers who are engaged, single, divorced, or widowed, which the first printing did not have: seventeen of the thirty-two statements assume a current marriage, and without that note they cannot be answered as written. Where this page and your copy differ, use this page.

Before You Start

Each spouse completes the inventory separately, and the work goes best when you answer about the person you actually are rather than the person you wish you were or the person you manage to be on your best days. Temperament shows itself most truthfully in your instincts, in what you reach for before you think, so answer from instinct rather than from aspiration.

If you are engaged, read “my spouse” as the person you are marrying. If you are single, divorced, or widowed, answer for the closest relationship you have or had, and read your scores as a picture of your wiring rather than of a marriage.

There are four groups of eight statements. Score each statement from 0 to 3:

• 0: Not like me at all
• 1: A little like me
• 2: Often like me
• 3: Almost always like me

Do not add the groups up until you have answered every statement, and try not to guess what each group is measuring while you answer, since the inventory works best when you are not steering it.

A word on what this is. The four classical temperaments are an old framework, older than psychology, used for centuries by pastors and spiritual writers as a way of describing the dispositions God knits into people. This inventory stands in that pastoral tradition. It is a self-understanding aid, not a clinical or psychological assessment, and it should never be used to diagnose, to label, or to excuse.

Group One

1. When something good happens in our marriage, my first instinct is to talk about it, often right away and at length.
2. I draw energy from being around people, and a marriage that kept me mostly at home would feel like a slow drain.
3. I tend to assume things will work out, and my optimism sometimes runs ahead of the facts.
4. When my spouse and I disagree, I want to talk it through soon, and the silence between us afterward is harder for me than the argument was.
5. I express affection quickly and say what I feel quickly, sometimes before I have fully thought it through.
6. I would rather keep our plans flexible and open than lock them down far in advance.
7. I notice when the warmth has gone out of a room, and I work to bring it back, often with humor.
8. I can lose track of a task or a promise when something more interesting comes along.

Group One total: ______ out of 24

Group Two

1. When a decision needs making in our household, I am usually the one who makes it, and I make it quickly.
2. I would rather address a problem in our marriage directly than let it sit, even when the conversation is uncomfortable.
3. I am goal-oriented, and I measure a good week partly by what the two of us got done.
4. I can become impatient when my spouse takes a long time to decide or to act.
5. I am comfortable taking the lead, and I tend to assume I should unless someone stops me.
6. When something is wrong, I want a plan to fix it, and I want to start on the plan now.
7. I am direct in how I speak, and I am sometimes surprised to learn that my directness landed as harshness.
8. I find it hard to rest while something in our life together is unresolved or unfinished.

Group Two total: ______ out of 24

Group Three

1. I feel things deeply, and the state of my marriage affects me more than I usually let on.
2. Before I act on something important, I need time alone to think it through.
3. I hold high standards for our marriage and our home, and I notice the gap between how things are and how they ought to be.
4. When my spouse and I are in conflict, my instinct is to withdraw and process privately before I can talk.
5. I am attentive to detail and to the things that are easy for others to overlook.
6. I can dwell on a hurt or a disappointment longer than I would like to admit.
7. I value depth and sincerity over surface cheerfulness, and small talk can tire me.
8. I am sensitive to criticism from my spouse, and a sharp word can stay with me for days.

Group Three total: ______ out of 24

Group Four

1. I value peace in our home highly, and I will often give ground to keep it.
2. I am steady and even-tempered, and it takes a great deal to provoke me.
3. When my spouse and I disagree, my first instinct is to avoid the confrontation rather than enter it.
4. I am content with the way things are more easily than my spouse is, and I am slow to push for change.
5. I am loyal and reliable, and my spouse knows I will be where I said I would be.
6. I can be hard to read, because I keep a good deal of what I feel to myself.
7. I would rather accommodate my spouse’s preference than make an issue of my own.
8. I sometimes let a real problem go unaddressed for a long time because raising it feels like more trouble than living with it.

Group Four total: ______ out of 24

Reading Your Score

Your dominant temperament is the group with your highest total. Your secondary is the group with your next highest. Most people are not one pure type but a blend of the two, and the blend is usually more accurate than the dominant alone. If two groups are tied or nearly tied, read both profiles below and let your spouse tell you which one they recognize, since the people who live with us often see our wiring more plainly than we see it ourselves.

Group One is the sanguine, Group Two the choleric, Group Three the melancholic, and Group Four the phlegmatic.

Each profile below names what that temperament brings a marriage and the watch-points where the same wiring, left undisciplined, can do harm. The watch-points are not condemnations. They are the specific places where a strength overused becomes the thing a spouse most needs to guard.

The sanguine spouse

Brings warmth, expressiveness, and the ability to keep a marriage emotionally alive. They reach toward connection, repair the mood of a room, and say the affection others only feel. The watch-points are follow-through and depth: the sanguine spouse can let promises slide when something brighter appears, and can keep a marriage so busy with warmth that the hard conversations never quite happen.

The choleric spouse

Contributes drive, decisiveness, and the willingness to face a problem head-on. They lead, they decide, and they keep a marriage moving toward its goals. The watch-points are gentleness and patience: the choleric spouse’s directness can land as harshness, and their drive can run over a slower-moving partner without noticing the damage. Temperament is never an excuse for sin, and that corrective presses hardest here.

The melancholic spouse

Offers depth, faithfulness, attention to detail, and a sensitivity that notices what others miss. They feel the marriage deeply and hold it to a high standard. The watch-points are brooding and withdrawal: the melancholic spouse can carry a hurt for days rather than bringing it into the open, and can let an ideal of how the marriage should be sour into quiet disappointment with the marriage that is.

The phlegmatic spouse

Supplies steadiness, loyalty, calm, and a peace-making instinct that keeps a marriage from boiling over. They are reliable, even-tempered, and easy to live beside. The watch-points are avoidance and passivity: the phlegmatic spouse’s love of peace can let real problems go unaddressed for years, and their willingness to accommodate can quietly erase their own needs from the marriage until resentment builds where peace was supposed to be.

Reading the Two of You Together

Once both spouses have a dominant temperament, read the pair as a pair rather than as two separate results. This is where the inventory earns its place, because most marital friction is not one spouse’s fault but the predictable meeting of two different wirings.

I spent twelve years as an air traffic controller, and the thing that took longest to learn was that two aircraft converging is almost never two pilots doing something wrong. They are flying the headings they were given. The conflict is in the geometry, and you fix geometry by changing a heading, not by getting on the radio and asking someone to be a different pilot. A good deal of marriage counseling is spent trying to talk a pilot out of being a pilot.

If your dominant temperaments differ, you are one of the six classic pairings: sanguine with choleric, sanguine with melancholic, sanguine with phlegmatic, choleric with melancholic, choleric with phlegmatic, or melancholic with phlegmatic. Chapter 6 of CLEAVE walks through each one, naming the specific friction those two wirings tend to produce and the specific gift each brings the other.

If you share a dominant temperament, Chapter 6’s pairings do not name you directly. Two sanguine spouses will rarely lack for warmth, though they may struggle to keep promises and to do the unglamorous work neither of them is wired to enjoy. A pair of choleric spouses will accomplish a great deal and may exhaust each other in the contest over who leads. Where both spouses are melancholic, the bond runs deep and sincere, and the shared danger is a slow slide into brooding that neither one is wired to pull the other out of. Two phlegmatic spouses live in remarkable peace, which becomes a problem only when the peace turns into a way of never addressing anything that matters.

Four questions to talk through

1. Where does the inventory match what each of you already knew, and where did a score surprise you or your spouse?
2. Which of your differences, named by the pairing, has produced the most friction in your marriage so far?
3. What does each of your temperaments give the marriage that the other could not supply alone?
4. Which one watch-point, from either profile, would your marriage most benefit from your guarding this season?

Then Set the Labels Down

The danger of any instrument like this one is that a couple will use it to harden, rather than to soften, the way they see each other. A temperament becomes a verdict, and a spouse is filed away under a label and no longer fully seen. Chapter 7 of CLEAVE was written against exactly that misuse, and its argument is the right note to end on: your spouse is not broken, and their temperament is neither a problem to be solved nor an excuse to be hidden behind. It is part of how God made the person you promised to love.

Use what you have learned to read your spouse more charitably and to guard your own watch-points more honestly. Then set the labels down. The goal was never to type each other. It was to understand each other well enough to cleave more wisely.