The Bonding Project is a research initiative that assesses how people prefer to bond in relationships, sorting respondents into sixteen four-letter archetypes across four relational axes.
Founded by sociologist 📝Elisabeth Sheff and 📝Jess Zakira Wise under the nonprofit 📝Center for Positive Sexuality, the project began with Wise's observation that people in non-traditional relationships lacked language for describing what they actually wanted. Sheff, a three-decade researcher of polyamorous families and BDSM, joined to put the instrument on a research footing. The founders have self-funded the work since 2020.
Its organizing finding is that bonding is not one instinct: preferences around romance predict little about preferences around sex, finances, or housing, so each resource is assessed separately. Within a resource, four axes generate the code — Bonding Scope (Anchored/Expansive), Openness Style (Focused/Open), Priority Orientation (Prioritized/Collective), and Self–Connection Balance (Interdependent/Self-Sufficient) — producing sixteen archetypes, from the 📝Pollinator to the Nester.
The project describes itself as public sociology rather than academic research, and is direct about the tradeoff. It holds no IRB approval, citing the cost of an independent board absent any academic affiliation, while reporting IRB-style protections in practice: pooled de-identified data, voluntary participation without incentives, and peer review through an academic summit and ongoing collaboration with its fiscal sponsor. The profiles state plainly that they measure orientation rather than current practice.
📝Jenn Chang put me onto this — she asked what my archetype was, which is a sharper opening question than most people manage, then pointed me at the survey. The four-axis vocabulary is the useful part: it separates how many from how close, which most relationship language collapses into one word.