0–4 · Close, not asymmetric
You care about this person a great deal, and your state is not being set by theirs. This is what a close attachment looks like. Nothing here needs fixing.
Sixteen statements
Favorite person checklist
Loving someone intensely is not the pattern. The pattern is asymmetry — one person's ordinary behaviour setting the temperature of your entire day, while for them the day was unremarkable. These sixteen statements ask about that.
Tick what is true about one specific person
Pick the person before you start, and keep them in mind throughout. Answer for the last few months rather than for the current week.
Write the number down with today's date. Then read the next section before doing anything at all with it — particularly before telling the person.
What the count means
Four bands, and what each one suggests as a next step rather than as a verdict.
5–9 · Leaning that way
Some of the mechanism is present, usually in a new or uncertain relationship where anxiety is running high. This tends to settle as security builds — and it is a good moment to widen the base, because that is what stops it consolidating.
10–13 · The pattern, clearly
One person is carrying a load no individual can carry, and it is probably costing both of you. This is the range where chapter 2 will be uncomfortably recognisable, and where the work is redistribution rather than restraint.
14–16 · Fully consolidated
Your emotional regulation is effectively outsourced. That is not a moral failing and it is not sustainable — it is the arrangement the book describes as the one that reliably produces the abandonment it fears. Worth taking to a therapist as a specific topic rather than trying to manage alone.
What to do next, by count
Concrete first moves, because the most common response to a high score is to do something drastic.
Do not
Tell them their score
Presenting someone with a checklist about themselves reliably lands as an accusation, whatever was intended. This is information about your experience, not about their behaviour.
Do not
Cut contact to prove something
Withdrawal as a corrective is still the relationship setting your behaviour — just inverted. It also tends to produce exactly the rupture you were trying to avoid.
Do
Widen the base first
Two or three other people who get regular, ordinary contact. This is the only move that reduces the load without removing the relationship, and it is slow, unglamorous and effective.
Do
Put a gap between impulse and message
Twenty minutes between wanting to send it and sending it. Most of what the pattern generates does not survive twenty minutes, and what does survive is worth saying.
The questions this raises
Asked by nearly everyone who scores in the upper two bands.
Does having a favorite person mean I have BPD?
No. It is not a diagnostic criterion and it is not in any manual — it is a community term for an experience the criteria describe obliquely. Plenty of people with anxious attachment recognise all of this and have no personality disorder.
Can they be my favorite person and my partner?
Frequently they are, and it is the hardest version. A partner is legitimately central to your life; the question is whether their ordinary variability — a tired evening, a short reply — is producing crisis-level responses in you.
Should I tell them?
Something, eventually, in your own words — not the checklist. 'I've realised I lean on you more than is fair on either of us, and I'm working on it' is a sentence that changes a dynamic. Handing over a scored list does not.
Will it go away?
The intensity redistributes as regulation improves and as other relationships thicken. It rarely disappears by decision, and it rarely survives a genuinely wider base.
What if they have already pulled away?
Then the useful work is the abandonment material rather than the favorite-person material, and it is worth being gentle about the difference. A withdrawal that has already happened is grief, and grief is a different chapter.
Is it different if the person is a therapist?
It is common and it is workable — and unlike most cases, it can be raised directly in the room. A therapist who hears 'I think you have become a favorite person for me' has something useful to work with, not a problem.
Educational disclaimer: this page supports book discovery and general learning about borderline personality disorder. It does not diagnose, replace individualised professional care, or provide emergency support. If you are in crisis, contact local emergency services or a crisis line — see the crisis support page.