You probably came here hoping for a yes or a no. A score is tempting because it feels settled. But a score cannot see the parts of your life that actually decide the answer, and the answer shifts with the week you happen to ask.

This page does something slower. It asks twelve questions about your life as it is right now and reads them back as six pots on a windowsill. Some pots come up, some are on their way, and some are resting under straw. Nothing is added into a total, and nothing tells you whether to start dating.

Readiness is timing, not a trait

Psychologists have begun to study readiness directly. Working with single adults, Hadden, Agnew and Tan found that people who felt ready for commitment were more interested in starting a relationship, more active in pursuing one, and more committed to the relationship they went on to form (Commitment Readiness and Relationship Formation). The framing is the useful part. Readiness is a sense that the timing is right, and timing moves. It is something to check, the way a gardener checks the soil in spring, not something you either have or lack.

The six pots

Each pot stands for one part of your life that a relationship would need room in.

• Room in your week. Whether an ordinary week has space for someone, and whether your days leave any of you over for them.
• What you want. Whether you could describe what you are looking for, and how much of the pull is about sharing a life you like rather than hoping someone will change how things feel.
• The last one. How you would tell the story of your last relationship's ending, and how much of your week it still takes. A breakup can shake your sense of who you are: one set of studies found people felt less clear about themselves after a split, and that lost clarity tracked their distress (Slotter, Gardner and Finkel). If there has not been a last one yet, the pot reads that as fresh soil.
• On your own. How a free Saturday feels, and what another single year would mean to you. This pot matters more than it looks. Research on the fear of being single found it predicted settling for less, including more interest in less responsive partners and more staying put in unsatisfying relationships (Spielmann and colleagues).
• What you'd bring. Whether you can name something a partner would be glad of, and how ready you are to share your weekends, friends and routines.
• What you'd need. Whether you could say what you need early on, and what you would do if it kept being missed.

How the sill works

Every question has a few honest answers, and none of them is wrong. When both answers for a pot are in, the pot changes: a leafy seedling when the two lean ready, a small sprout when they are mixed, a bed of straw when that part of your life is still resting. Tap any pot to revisit its questions. The pot and the reading change with you, so an old reading never outlives a new answer.

Once all six are in, read the sill. It sorts the pots into what looks ready, what is on its way and what might still be healing, quotes your own answers back to you, and picks one question worth sitting with from the quietest pot. A line waits beneath it if an answer comes. Under the reading sit two seed packets, three to a packet: what you would bring to a relationship and what you would need from one.

What the evidence does and does not say

The studies above suggest that feeling ready shapes what people do next, that a breakup can leave the self blurry for a while, and that a strong fear of being single can lower the bar. None of them hands you a waiting period. A study of rebound relationships found that people already seeing someone new after a breakup felt more desirable and more resolved about their ex than people who were not, and that starting sooner went along with better well-being rather than worse (Brumbaugh and Fraley). That work was correlational, so it cannot show that rushing helps. It does suggest the calendar is a poor judge of whether you have healed.

The twelve questions here were written for this page. They are not a validated scale or a clinical assessment, and the sill describes only how you answered today.

When to use it

Take it when a friend asks whether you are seeing anyone and you are unsure how you feel about your own answer, or when a dating app is open and your thumb hesitates. Take it again next season; a resting pot often comes up on its own.

If a pot is resting because closeness itself feels unsteady, The Harbor Chart looks at how you attach to the people already in your life. If time alone is the hard part, the Self-Love Journal builds warmth toward yourself three short lines at a time. And if the needing pot is quiet, the Boundaries Worksheet helps you find the exact sentence that holds a need in place.