One of the 24 character strengths
Being close to people and letting them be close to you — valuing relationships where the caring runs in both directions.
Love is the strength of closeness that runs both ways. Being cared for is as much a part of it as caring, and it is the half people find harder.
This is about a small number of relationships rather than a general warmth. Somebody who leads here has people they tell things to, and they tell them the real version, which is a specific and not especially common thing.
The receiving half is what the questions really get at. Letting somebody help, letting them see a bad week, letting them matter enough that their opinion could hurt: that is the part that separates this strength from simply being fond of people.
Curious which of these lead in you? Take the free assessment and find out.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentSomething goes badly wrong on a Wednesday. Instead of handling it and mentioning it in a month, this person calls somebody that evening and says it out loud while it is still raw.
Closeness like this is expensive when it ends. A falling-out or a bereavement lands at full weight here, and stays a long time. The same openness that made the relationship good is what makes the loss cost what it does.
It gets read as romance, and it covers far more than that. A friendship of twenty years, a sibling, a parent: this strength is about the quality of the connection rather than the category it falls into.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
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