About this site
Relationship Closeness Inventory is a free online questionnaire that helps you reflect on how close you feel to one specific person. It grew out of interest in classic relationship research and in the inventory’s pop-culture mention on The Big Bang Theory, where characters use a similar closeness measure as a plot device.
This website is operated as an independent educational and entertainment project. It is not affiliated with the authors of the original study, the APA, or the television show.
The research behind it
The questions and structure are inspired by Berscheid, Snyder, and Omoto’s Relationship Closeness Inventory, published in 1989 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (volume 57, issue 5). That paper defined closeness in terms of interconnectedness: time, activities, influence, and future orientation.
Our version is a simplified online adaptation. Wording, activity lists, and scoring are tuned for the web. It has not been re-validated in a new clinical trial. Use it to prompt honest conversation and self-reflection, not as published psychometric data.
What we hope you get from it
A number you can compare with a partner, share with friends, or keep to yourself — plus enough context on these pages to interpret that number responsibly. If you want depth, start with How it works and the Guides.