One Good Question A Week
Beats A List You'll Never Finish

You've seen the question lists. The long ones, the ones that promise a hundred ways to get past small talk with your wife. You may have saved one. Then you had a Tuesday, and a Wednesday, and the list is still sitting in a browser tab you keep meaning to close.

That's not a discipline problem. A list is a pile of raw material. Nobody works through a pile.

I've written one of those lists myself, a long run of questions to ask your wife, and I stand behind every question in it. What I don't believe is that you're going to sit down and work through it.

I send three questions out every Thursday and have been doing it for years. This is the smaller version of that: one question, one slot in your week, and twelve to start you off.

Nobody Finishes The Long Lists, So Start With One Question

In Atomic Habits, James Clear makes the case for shrinking a new habit until it's almost too small to be worth doing. His Two-Minute Rule says a new habit should take less than two minutes, and the reason isn't that two minutes accomplishes much. The reason is that you can't improve a habit that doesn't exist yet. As he puts it: "Standardize before you optimize."

One question a week is the two-minute version of talking to your wife on purpose. It takes about ninety seconds to ask, and the reason to keep it that small is so that it survives a bad week. A twenty-question date-night deck doesn't. It gets postponed to a better week, and better weeks are in short supply.

It's the same argument behind how Date Nights Dancing is built: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you in it together from the first video. Small and repeated by design.

So the ambition here is genuinely low. One question, one time a week, forever.

Pick The Day And The Slot Before You Pick The Question

Clear's other point is the easy one to skip. He writes that many people who think they lack motivation are missing clarity instead, and hands over a sentence to fill in: what you will do, at what time, in what place. He also gives the stacking version, which attaches the new thing to something you already do without thinking.

Applied here, that means you decide the slot first and the question second. Not "I'll ask her something good this week." More like: after we get in the car on Sunday morning, I ask the question before I put it in reverse.

The slots that hold up have one thing in common: they're already happening. You're not adding an event to the week. You're adding ninety seconds to one you already have.

A car is a particularly good container, which is why one of my favorite ideas to hand out is The Driveway Conversation: you pull in, and instead of getting out, you stay in the car for ten minutes with the engine off. No eye contact required, nobody can walk away, and there's a natural end to it when one of you opens a door. Coffee at the table does something similar: both of you sitting, hands occupied, nowhere either of you is due for a few minutes.

Two things about the slot are worth getting right:

Same day, every week. Sunday coffee, Friday dinner, Wednesday drive to her mother's. A question with no day attached to it doesn't get asked.

Alternate who asks. One week you bring the question, the next week she does. If you're always the one asking, you end up running a segment, and she ends up being interviewed. Trading the chair keeps it a conversation, and it also means half the questions are ones you'd never have thought of.

Give One Question The Full Treatment

Three questions in an email give a reader options. One question a week can do something those three can't, because a single question has room around it.

One Good Question is the name I've been using for that shape while I build it out for The Spark, the weekly email those three questions go out in. It works just as well on a piece of paper in front of you. Start with the question, then put four things around it.

The question. What's the best thing that happened to you this week that I don't know about?

1. Why this one. It assumes there's something. That's a different starting position than "anything happen today," which invites a no and usually gets one.

2. What it can surface. Something at work she assumed you'd find boring. A compliment somebody paid her that she hasn't repeated to anyone. A small thing she pulled off and didn't think was worth announcing. Sometimes a hard thing she's been sitting on instead of a good one, which the second-to-last section covers.

3. Watch for the pause. If she takes a few seconds before answering, don't fill them. The pause is her deciding whether to give you the short version. Filling it chooses the short version for her.

4. The follow-up. One follow-up, not four. What made that one the best? Follow-ups are where the conversation lives. The opening question only gets you in the door.

You don't have to write any of that down. But run it in your head once before you ask, and you'll ask a better question than you would have cold.

Start With These Twelve, One A Week

Three months of Sundays. They get a little heavier as they go, which is on purpose: the early ones build the habit, the later ones are why you built it.

1. What's something small that made you happy this week? An easy opener. Nobody has to be brave to answer it.

2. Which part of our week do you look forward to, and which part do you just get through?

3. If you had a free Saturday with nothing owed to anybody, what would you do with it? Take notes on this one.

4. What have you been curious about lately?

5. What are you better at now than you were five years ago? She'll underrate herself here. That's your opening to disagree.

6. When did you feel most like yourself this year?

7. What's something I do that you've never told me you like?

8. Back at the beginning, what did you think I was going to be like that I turned out not to be? This one goes both ways and is usually funny before it is anything else.

9. What do you want more of right now that you haven't asked me for?

10. What's a decision we made together that you're glad we made?

11. What's on your plate right now that somebody else could be doing? Then take one of those things off her plate without discussing it further.

12. What currently gets in the way of fully appreciating that you are alive today? The heaviest of the twelve. Save it for week twelve, when you have some practice behind you.

Swap any of them for your own. The list is a starting stock, not a script, and by week four you'll have better material than I do because you'll know what your wife has been thinking about lately.

If a rotating twelve is more bookkeeping than you want, there's a case for keeping one permanent question instead and asking it every week for a year. I made that case in a separate piece on the one question better than "how was your day".

Don't Fix The Heavy Answer. Name It.

Do this every week and eventually one of the questions asks more than the last one did. One I sent out was What part of my heart do you wish you could heal? Tommy B. wrote back:

Yikes! You are coming with some heavy questions. I can’t wait to hear my wife’s response tonight!

Looking forward to the answer is the right instinct. It's also worth settling in advance what you'll do if the answer isn't a light one.

The reflex at that point is to solve it. In I Hear You, Michael Sorensen calls jumping in with advice or a silver lining "by far the most common mistake people make" in these moments, because offering a fix suggests two things: that you don't think she should feel the way she feels, and that you'd resolve it better than she would. He's specific about the alternative, and it has two parts, both required. Name the emotion she is expressing. Then give a reason it makes sense that she feels it.

Sorensen also gives you the escape hatch if you're unsure whether she wants your take. Ask for it. "How can I help?" is one version. "I have a few thoughts on the matter. May I share?" is the other. If she says yes, you have permission and she'll hear it. If she says she only needed to get it off her chest, you've saved yourself an argument that was about to be your fault.

One more thing from him is useful for the weekly question. Sorensen keeps a short list of what he calls cop-out responses: good, fine, better than yesterday, alright, okay, not great. They're the words people reach for instead of the true one, and his instruction is to dig past them for the feeling underneath. My own version of digging past one is a single unhurried follow-up. She says fine, and you say, "just fine?" Then you stop. One ask shows her the door is still open. Two turns it into an interrogation.

If listening is the part you feel clumsy about, I wrote a longer piece on how to listen to your wife that goes deeper than I can here.

Missing One Week Is Fine. Missing Two Is Where It Stops.

You'll miss weeks. There'll be a Sunday with a sick kid and a Sunday you both forget and a Sunday where the question gets asked and answered in four words because somebody's exhausted.

Clear's rule for that is the most useful sentence in his book: never miss twice. One miss is just a Sunday. Two in a row is usually the end of it. So if you skipped last week, you're not behind, you're up this week.

What you're building has a longer horizon than you'd guess from something this small. Ashley C. sent the whole case in two lines:

We answer our questions each week. 52 and 48 years old, married almost 30 years.

Almost thirty years married, and the questions are still a weekly thing in that house. You don't know your wife. You know your notes on her, and your notes were taken a long time ago, by a younger man, about a different woman. Notes go stale, which is how a couple nine years in can still turn up territory neither of them has been to. The only fix anyone has found is to keep interviewing each other, and one question a week is the smallest version of that which still counts.

If you'd rather not source the questions yourself, The Spark puts three of them in your inbox every Thursday, written by me, along with a couple of other ideas for the week. Plenty of people take one of the three and leave the other two, which is a completely legitimate way to use it.

Some weeks neither of you will feel like talking. There's a wider run of at-home ideas in the ideas hub for those, and Date Nights Dancing puts easy swing in your own front room for fifteen minutes instead of a conversation.

Last thing. A man who goes looking for a way to ask his wife one good question a week isn't a man who has checked out of his marriage. He's a man looking for a handle small enough to hold. This one fits in ninety seconds on a Sunday, and it'll still be working in ten years, which is more than most things you could do this weekend can claim.