Every resolution you've made was a solo project, and solo is the reason it died. The two-person version runs on a different mechanism.
By the last week of December you've got a short list going, even if none of it is written down. Lose fifteen pounds. Get up earlier. Cut the drinking back. Read something that isn't your phone. Every item on that list is something you'd do by yourself, and every one of them comes down to whether you feel like it on a cold Tuesday in the second week of February.
You already know how that goes. Most of us do.
This month I went through my own files looking for New Year's language: customer emails, comments under my ads, the messages people write when they send the program to somebody as a gift. The resolutions in there don't look anything like the list above. Almost all of them have two people in them.
Somebody wrote this under one of my ads:
..."this is our new years resolution to start learning dance moves with each other! I'm not playing I'm buying this!"
That's a person deciding in public, on the way to putting money down, and the resolution has a partner in it. It can't be abandoned in silence, because somebody else is already holding the other end.
I should say up front that I sell one of these. Date Nights Dancing is my program, easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you working from the same first video. No dance experience required. It happens to make a good shared resolution for a boring reason: it repeats weekly, it's short, and neither of you can do it without the other one showing up.
Four turned up in one pass, from three different places.
A customer wrote in asking for help getting back into the account:
"I bought the “Show Her Off” series for my wife and I . It was a long time ago but our New Years Resolution is to start doing the date nights"...
Two came through as gift messages. The first:
"This year I combined your gift with my new year resolution. ;-)"
And the second:
"We still have time to check this off our new year's resolution list. I would love to dance with you!"
Not one of those is a pledge to become a better person. Each one names an activity two people do together on a night, and in three of the four somebody has already paid for it.
The difference is structural. Willpower has almost nothing to do with it.
A resolution you make alone is witnessed by exactly one person, and that person is also the one grading it. On February 11 you can decide the goal was unrealistic for a year like this one, and nobody has to be informed, because nobody was ever informed in the first place.
In The Power of Moments, Chip Heath and Dan Heath put that harder than I would: they write that New Year's resolutions should really be called New Year's absolutions. The making of one is the part that feels good. If nobody else is holding the other end, the making is also all there is.
A resolution with your wife in it doesn't get that exit. She's in the house on the night it was supposed to happen. Skipping stops being a thought you have on your own and becomes a thing the two of you either do or don't do, in front of each other. Somebody else being there on the night is the part that keeps it going.
The Heaths are also where I would send you for why January 1 is worth using at all. They cite research on fresh starts: students went to the gym more often at the start of a new week (up 33 percent), a new month (14 percent), and a new semester (47 percent). A landmark date makes a stalled change possible because it draws a dividing line between the old version of you and the next one.
That's gym-attendance research, not marriage research, and I'm not going to stretch it further than it goes. But you're holding a landmark date this week and it costs nothing to use.
What the date won't do is carry it into spring. For that part, the Heaths point at the psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and what he calls implementation intentions: a plan whose trigger is as simple as a time and a place. Setting them more than doubled the number of students who turned in a certain assignment on time, doubled the number of women who performed a breast self-exam in a certain month, and cut recovery time in half for patients after a hip or knee replacement. There is power, the Heaths write, in preloading a response.
A pledge has no time and no place in it. A repeating Thursday has both.
Do these in order, tonight or on the drive home. The whole thing takes one conversation.
One. Not a category like "be more romantic," which nobody can tell whether they did, and not four things, which is a list you'll be embarrassed by in six weeks.
Pick something the two of you would do side by side, that has a natural weekly size, and that neither of you is already good at. If one of you starts as the expert, the other one becomes the student, and a student can drop out. Both of you starting cold keeps it even.
In Eight Dates, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman are blunt about this: don't make the mistake of thinking that after all the work is done, then you'll play. It won't happen. If it feels foreign at first, they write, schedule play into your weekly list of tasks.
So pick a named day, and once she's in, put it in both phones set to repeat. Not "we'll find a night," which is a decision you'd then have to make fifty-two more times, and each of those is a chance to say not this week.
Give the night something to be about, too. Fifteen minutes of the Date Nights Dancing program is roughly one lesson, and that's the size I built it at for this exact problem: a standing night with nothing planned inside it collapses into takeout and a screen by the third week.
Tell her before the year turns, in something close to these words: "I want us to do one thing together this year, every week, and I want it to be this. Are you in?"
Then let her answer. If she wants to change what it is, let her change it. A resolution she edited is one she has a stake in, and that's what gets it to March.
You'll miss one. Somebody will get sick, or her mother will call, or you'll get home with nothing left. The failure is the week after the missed week, which is where every resolution either restarts or goes into the ground.
So decide the answer now, while nothing has gone wrong yet and the two of you are feeling generous. Preload the answer, the way the Heaths describe: pick the fallback day and say it to each other this week. "If we miss Thursday, we do it Sunday afternoon, and if we miss Sunday we start again the next Thursday and nobody brings it up."
Say the last part on purpose. A missed week is only expensive if one of you decides it proved something.
And write down the date you started. Around the middle of January, when the list you'd normally have made is already gone and nobody has been told, the two of you could have three or four of these behind you. Tell her when you notice it. That's a real thing to have built in a week you'd otherwise have spent promising something to nobody but yourself.
You've already run the solo version enough times to know how it ends. This one runs on something else, and it survives for a reason you can point at: somebody else is in it with you.
If you want a starting night with a little more occasion on it, New Year's Eve at home is the one I'd use as the kickoff. If you want help deciding what the weekly activity should be, date night frameworks gives you four shapes to pick from, and keep date night fresh is about what to do around week nine, when the novelty is gone and the appointment is all that is left.
If the standing night is going to double as the place you two talk, standing date night communication covers that. Everything else lives on the ideas hub.
Pick the day you would want. Then go tell her, tonight, and let her have a say in what the two of you fill that night with. When she is in, put it in both phones and set it to repeat.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
