The Giving Tree is a children’s book about a boy and a tree.

Their relationship unfolds over a lifetime, with the tree continually giving more of itself to the boy until its reduced to a stump.

I read The Giving Tree to my three-year-old the other night, and I found myself thinking about how relationships in stories don't move in a straight line. They strengthen, drift, and sometimes come back.

As a researcher, I got curious about measuring those changes. You can feel them as you read, but they're hard to describe—and even harder to quantify. Some would argue you shouldn't try. That the whole point of a story is to feel it, not reduce it to numbers.

I think you can do both.

I surveyed 150 Americans (18+) and had them click through the story page by page. After each page, they picked from a set of overlapping circles—like the ones below—to show how close they thought the boy and the tree were.

These circles are based on a scale developed by psychologist Arthur Aron in the 1990s to measure how close two people feel to each other. He called it the "Inclusion of Other in the Self" scale. (They may look familiar.)

What you're about to see is how that closeness moves across the full arc of the story. The book is short—about 26 pages, most with just a few lines—so the survey took around five minutes.

Here's the story in sequence, with annotations showing when the boy ages and how much time has passed.

A note on the data: 9 of the 20 readers were not familiar with The Giving Tree before taking this survey. Their ratings tend to be lower — not because they saw the relationship differently, but because they were reading the pages cold, without the emotional context the story builds over a lifetime of encounters. Keep that in mind as you read the chart.

This is the END!