Six you can ask with the kids right there, six for after they clear out, and three worth asking every Sunday for the rest of your marriage.
Most nights of the week you and your wife sit down at the same table, which makes dinner the most reliable block of time the two of you have. And most nights it gets spent on the same four subjects: what happened at work, who is driving whom on Thursday, whether the dishwasher got run, and what's for dinner tomorrow.
None of that is a failure. Somebody has to sort Thursday. The problem is that the table is already yours, already recurring, and already has both of you facing each other with food in front of you, and it's being used almost entirely as a logistics meeting.
In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, John Gottman and Nan Silver make the case that what protects a marriage through change is detailed, current knowledge of the other person's inner world, and that this knowledge goes stale unless somebody keeps refreshing it. Their line on keeping it current:
Updating your love map is as important as the map itself.
The refresh tool they name is the open-ended question, which they define as one that can't be answered with a yes or a no, and they hand couples a long list of them to work through. Gottman and Silver also give the list a container: a weekly date, and one hour a week set aside for the marriage itself.
The container is the part worth stealing. Without a slot on the calendar, a question list ends up in a drawer next to the conversation deck somebody bought you. Your dinner table already is that slot. It exists, it repeats, and nobody has to schedule it.
One of the men who writes to me takes his wife out to eat every Friday night, and by his account the part she looks forward to is the questions he shows up with. He isn't doing anything you can't do at your own table on a Tuesday. He just stopped arriving empty-handed.
Date Nights Dancing, my program, runs on the same principle: you bring something to the evening instead of hoping it turns up. Easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you working on the same moves from the first video on. No dance experience required.
So, fifteen questions, sorted by who else is sitting at the table.
These are safe in front of a nine-year-old and a fifteen-year-old, which is a real constraint and the one most question lists ignore. They also put your wife at the center of the meal instead of leaving her to run the schedule for it.
Beren H. wrote in about where the questions I send out every week end up:
I just wanted to reach out and tell you that my wife and I love the conversation sparks you send us. In fact they’re fun for the whole family - we often drop them into family conversation with our adult kids at Sunday lunch.
1. "What was the funniest thing that happened to you today?"
Everybody at the table can answer this one, including the kid who answers every other question with "nothing." Funny has a low bar and it's the one category of daily news that people are eager to hand over. If your wife says nothing funny happened, ask who she talked to today and let her get there sideways.
2. "Everybody guess Mom's favorite meal."
Gottman and Silver put "What is my favorite meal?" in a twenty-questions game they built for couples, worth points if you get it right. It plays even better with kids at the table, because they may guess wrong with total confidence and she gets to hold court for a minute about a dish nobody has made her in years. Write down whatever she says.
3. "What would you change about this house if you could change one thing?"
Gottman and Silver have this one on their list too. It sounds like a home-improvement question and it usually isn't. You'll get the pantry and the light in the back bedroom. Somewhere in there you might also get the thing that's been bugging her about how the house runs, offered up as a renovation idea because that's the safe way to say it.
4. "What's the best thing somebody did for you today?"
Gratitude without anybody having to say the word gratitude, which is the version that survives a teenager. Go last, and make yours about her.
5. "If Saturday was completely free, what are we doing?"
This one is live, in the sense that it can end with an actual Saturday. Everybody gets one answer and no vetoes allowed during the round. If she says she doesn't care, hand her two options and let her knock one out.
6. "What were you like when you were their age?"
Asked of her, in front of them. Kids tend to be ravenous for this, and it's a story she doesn't get many chances to tell. The follow-up that gets the good material: "What did you get in trouble for?"
Same table, twenty minutes later, coffee or the last of the wine. These need the room emptied out, and most of them won't work if a ten-year-old is fishing for a phone across from you.
7. "What's the most exciting thing happening in your life right now?"
Gottman and Silver's list opens a lot of doors and this is the widest one. It's also a fair test of your current map: you should be able to guess her answer before she gives it, and if you can't, you've found the gap.
8. "What were the highlights and the low points of this past year for you?"
Another Gottman and Silver question. It gets a year of her interior life in one pass, and the low points arrive without anybody having to introduce a heavy subject. If she gives you a headline instead of an answer, ask which month she'd want back.
9. "What do you miss about us?"
The risk here is that it sounds like an accusation, so ask it with a plate still in front of you and answer it first if she stalls. Expect something small and specific: a drive, a bad apartment, the summer before the second kid was born.
10. "When did you last feel like we were on the same team?"
Concrete, recent, answerable. She might name a night you'd forgotten about, and the detail she picks is the useful part, because it tells you what teamwork looks like from her seat. It might not be the big rescue. It might be a Tuesday where you took something off her list without being asked.
11. "What have I stopped noticing?"
Only ask this one if you can hear the answer without defending yourself. If you can't yet, ask it in a month. When the answer comes, the correct next sentence is "tell me more about that," and then nothing at all.
12. "What's the best decision we ever made together?"
End the course here, on purpose. You'll disagree about the answer, which is the fun of it, and you'll both be arguing for the same marriage.
Gottman and Silver prescribe one hour a week for the relationship itself: what went right, appreciations you haven't said yet, anything that came up, and then a closing question. You don't need the hour. Three questions over a Sunday dinner will carry most of it, and unlike everything above, these don't rotate. Same three, every week, forever.
Nancy S. wrote in about how she uses the questions I send:
I just want to say we always do the connecting questions over coffee. I save them all. Not more noise.
13. "What went right this week?"
Gottman and Silver open their weekly meeting here, before anything difficult gets raised. Both of you answer. Two or three items each is plenty, and household items count.
14. "What did I do this week that you appreciated and never told me about?"
She answers first, then you go, and yours has to be specific. "You were great this week" does nothing. "You handled the call with the school on Wednesday and I would have made it worse" is the version that names what you saw.
15. "What can I do to make you feel loved this coming week?"
That one is Gottman and Silver's, word for word, and it's the closing question of their weekly meeting. It's a strange sentence to say the first time and an ordinary one by the fourth week. Whatever she names, do it that week. A question you ask and then ignore is worse than not asking.
Rule 1: Answer it yourself, every time. Gottman and Silver's own instructions for the open-ended list have both people taking turns, and they're explicit that after your partner answers, you answer the same question. Ask six and answer none and you're running an intake form, which is how it reads from her side of the table.
Rule 2: Treat a one-word answer as the start, not the answer. "Fine" and "good" are placeholders. In I Hear You, Michael S. Sorensen names them as cop-outs and describes what he does about it:
“Just good?” I’ll often ask. Their response to my follow-up is almost always more genuine and detailed, which sets the stage for a more authentic (and more enjoyable) conversation.
Two words, asked with real interest, and the second answer is usually the truer one. That works at a dinner table because neither of you has to get up.
Rule 3: Don't grade the answer and don't fix it. This is the one that kills question night. She says something true, you offer a correction or a solution, and the price of honesty goes up for next time. Gottman and Silver say it flatly in their own instructions:
Don’t pass judgment on what your spouse tells you or try to give each other advice.
If she tells you the thing she misses about your old apartment, she isn't proposing you move. Take the information.
You don't need fifteen. You need one, tonight, at a table you were going to be sitting at anyway.
Take one from Course One if the kids are there. Take number 9 or number 12 if it's just the two of you. If you want the same thing arriving weekly instead of you remembering to come back to this page, that's what The Spark is: a few connection ideas and a set of questions in your inbox once a week, which is how Beren and Nancy ended up with theirs.
The same setup travels. There are versions built for the car, versions for the last ten minutes before sleep, a set for the anniversary dinner, and a longer list of questions to ask your wife if you'd rather pick your own. More of that kind of thing sits in the ideas hub.
And if a good dinner conversation leaves the two of you not wanting the evening to be over yet, Date Nights Dancing is the standing-up version of the same idea: fifteen minutes of easy swing in your own living room, both of you on the same moves.
Tonight you can sit down at the same table you always do, with the same food and the same Thursday to sort out, and ask your wife something she hasn't been asked in a long time. You thought to bring something to dinner besides the food. That counts for more than which question you pick.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
