Mind Hacks recently featured a highly amusing husband and wife rating chart from the 1930s, invented by marriage counselor George W. Crane, MD, Ph.D. How it works: your spouse earns merit or demerit points based on his or her behaviors and characteristics. Some (“Snores”) are things we can still relate to, while the rest offer a curious peek into the norms and expectations of that era (demerits for a husband who “talks of efficiency of his stenographer or other women” or a wife who “fails to sew on buttons or darn socks regularly”).

Crane aimed to be “scientific” in the development of this test; true to form, according to the American Psychological Association, he started the Scientific Marriage Foundation, which took a “scientific” approach to marriage and claimed to have set up more than 5,000 marriages.

I wonder what a modern version of this questionnaire would look like. Demerits for “brings laptop to bed”?