Twelve questions in three courses, plus what to say when she answers in four words and goes back to her plate.
You booked the place with the good bread. She's across from you in the dress. You order, the plates come, and somewhere between the first bite and the check you notice the two of you have spent your anniversary talking about the kids' fall schedule, the guy who's coming to look at the water heater, and whether her fish is better than your fish.
It isn't a bad dinner. It's the same conversation you have at the kitchen counter, in a nicer room.
You don't need a script for the whole meal to fix that. You need three questions you picked before you walked in, and the willingness to ask the first one before the bread is gone.
In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath argue that three kinds of occasions are worth marking: transitions, milestones, and pits. A milestone counts as a defining moment whether or not anybody does anything with it. The date arrives, you eat, it passes. The anniversary got commemorated by a reservation.
The Heaths also explain why the food is not the part you'll remember. People don't rate an experience by averaging its minutes. They rate it on the best moment in it and on how it ended. So the entree is not what either of you keeps from this dinner. The best thing said at the table is.
Your anniversary is the one date on the calendar that comes with its own agenda already written. The year is over. You were both there for it. Nobody has to explain what the subject is.
All of which is good news, because you don't have to make the evening bigger. You only have to put something in it besides food. That's most of what I do for couples: Date Nights Dancing is easy swing dance moves taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you working from the same video. Tonight, what you put in it is a set of questions.
There are twelve questions below. You are not going to ask twelve questions. You're going to pick three, one from each group, and ask them roughly a course apart.
That spacing is the first rule, and it's what separates a conversation from an interview. A good question asked right after her last answer feels like interest. A good question asked right after your own last question feels like a questionnaire.
The second rule costs more: answer every question yourself, in as much detail as you asked her for. Otherwise she's the only one at the table taking a risk, and she'll notice by the second one.
There's research behind that one. In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe a study by the psychologist Art Aron in which pairs of strangers took turns answering thirty-six escalating questions over about forty-five minutes. By the end, those strangers rated how close they felt higher than 30 percent of students rated their single most intimate relationship. In the Heaths' reading, the specific questions weren't the active ingredient. The turn-taking was. And that cycle doesn't start on its own. One person has to start it, and tonight that's you.
If you want questions with no occasion attached to them, I keep a general set in questions to ask your wife. The twelve below are built for this particular dinner.
Start here even if you've been married thirty years. The look-back questions are the cheap ones. They buy permission for the expensive ones later.
1. "How would you describe our first date in one word?"
A light one to open with, and it puts the two of you at the start of the story while the bread is still out. Have your own word ready before she asks for it. If she gives you a joke word, take the joke and ask what the second word would be.
2. "What was your favorite date of ours this year?"
This asks her to rank the good parts of the year, and it hands you something you can use inside a week. If nothing comes to mind, don't defend the year. The follow-up is "what's the last thing we did that felt like a date," and how far back she has to go for it is the useful part of her answer.
3. "What challenge did we overcome well as a couple?"
Most years have one. This question names the two of you as a unit that handles hard things, and she may not have heard anybody say that since it happened. If she picks something you'd forgotten about, ask what she remembers about the day it started to get better.
4. "What happened this past year that you're especially thankful for?"
Not about the marriage, which is exactly why it's easy to answer honestly. Her answer tells you where her year really was. Yours should be a real answer too, not a compliment aimed back at her.
These are about the marriage as it stands tonight. Ask one. If she opens up, stay there and let the third course go.
5. "What do you think we're really good at as a couple?"
It has her say what's good about the two of you instead of you saying it. Follow it with "give me an example from this year" so it doesn't stay general.
6. "What do you wish we did more of?"
She may have wanted something for months without ever putting it in a sentence. The whole job here is to not answer it with logistics. No sitter math, no calendar, no reasons this year got away from you two. Whatever she names, the only useful reply is a question about when.
7. "What recent experience made you feel closer to me?"
This tells you which of the things you already do reach her, which is worth knowing and hard to get at any other way. If she answers in general terms, ask her for the day it happened.
8. "What do we need to talk about more?"
The brave one in this group. It gives her room to name something she hasn't brought up on her own. Ask it, then let it sit. The temptation is to fill the gap with your own guess at the answer, and that ends the question. If what comes back is bigger than a dinner, say so plainly: "do you want to get into it now, or do we pick a day this week?" Either answer is a good one.
Look-back questions make a nice evening. Look-ahead questions make a plan, and a plan is what you'll still have in March.
9. "What are you most looking forward to this year?"
Simple, and it lets her do her thinking about next year in front of somebody who is paying attention to the answer. When she names something, ask which month she wants it in. A month makes it real.
10. "What's one thing on your bucket list that we can do together within the next 3 months?"
Three months is close enough that neither of you can file it under someday. If she names something big and expensive, ask what the small version of it looks like.
11. "Is there something from our dating days that we can or should start doing again?"
You might get back something you can do inside a week: a bar with a jukebox, driving somewhere with no plan, dancing at a wedding and being the last two off the floor. If the answer is dancing, that's the Date Nights Dancing program in one sentence: easy swing taught at home, both of you working from the same video, no dance experience required.
12. "What do you want us to be able to say we did by this time next year?"
Ask this one last, over whatever the dessert is. It makes next year's anniversary dinner the place her answer gets checked, and it means next year the two of you already have an opening question. Put whatever she says in your phone before you pay the check. Not later, before you pay. This is also how an anniversary tradition starts, on purpose, with a sentence one of you wrote down.
Sometimes you'll ask a good one and get four words back. That usually means the question was too big for how far into the evening you are, or she's still coming down off the day.
Neither one is a failure, and neither one gets fixed by you talking more. Take the last thing she said, say it back as a statement, and ask about that instead. "You said work has been a lot. What's the part of it that's a lot?" A short answer with a follow-up attached to it turns into a long answer more often than a new question does.
Don't solve anything she names. Nothing on this list is a request for a solution, and an anniversary dinner is a rough place to receive one.
And if she asks why you're asking, tell her the truth. It's your anniversary and you didn't want to spend it on the water heater.
Every one of these came out of the weekly email I write for couples. It's called The Spark, it's free, and most weeks it carries a few questions like these along with one idea for the two of you.
The car works nearly as well as the table, if you have a drive coming up: road trip questions for couples.
Open your phone, take one question from each of the three groups, and put them somewhere you can see them without making a production of it. Ask the first one after you order. Answer it yourself before she has to ask you to.
Then stop at three. You are not running the list. You're having dinner.
You already did the part that takes planning. The date is on the calendar, the table is booked, and you went looking for something better to talk about than the fish. That last part is the one a reservation can't do for you.
If you want the rest of the evening built out too, things to do on an anniversary covers what happens after the check, and the ideas hub has the at-home versions for the years the restaurant isn't in the budget.
One question, asked after you order, and answered by you too. Everything else about the night can stay exactly the way you already planned it.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
