It seems that you have conflated the concept of a “report card” with the concept of information about a relationship. These are not the same! Report cards are an attempt to capture, tame, mechanize, and (too often) trivialize complex and subtle relationships. You don’t need to establish simplistic scales or polarized category schemes to get a sense of how a relationship is going, do you?

Even if you find report cards helpful, the insidious side effect of that approach is to warp our view of relationships such that only what is overtly measured will be acted on. That in turn will cause you to manipulate or overload the measured parameters so that they also represent the unmeasured ones that you care about– which turns the whole thing into little more than a game of sanctioned lying and mythmaking.

If you sanction even one kind of lie or one kind of oversimplification, all lies become okay. See, you have me doing it, now! That last statement was itself an oversimplification.

I do not want to be measured by a report card, as if this were some sort of video game leader board. I want to my clients to reflect and converse and make sense of things fluidly.