A reader sent me this one: eight words, aimed at the two of you instead of at her calendar, with no autopilot answer available.
You've asked her how her day was most nights for years. If you had kept score it would run past three hundred a year, and you could probably call tonight's answer before she gives it. Good. Fine. Long. Then somebody starts the dishwasher.
The question isn't rude and you're not lazy for asking it. It went hollow somewhere along the way, which is why neither of you listens very hard to the answer anymore.
Look at what you're requesting. You're asking for an inventory of the eight or nine hours she spent somewhere you weren't. It's a past-tense question about a period you had nothing to do with, and the honest short answer really is "fine," because most days genuinely are.
You can answer it while reading a text. So can she. That's the tell.
And it points at everything except the two of you. Her commute, the meeting that ran long, the thing her coworker said. All real, none of it about the marriage, which is the part you were fishing for when you asked.
The two of you run most evenings on a script you wrote years ago and never revised: the question, the one-word answer, the dishwasher, the couch. Break the script anywhere and you get a different evening, which is one of the reasons I built Date Nights Dancing, easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you working on the same moves from the first video on. But you don't need a program tonight. You need a better question.
Every week I send out questions for couples to ask each other. That's part of what The Spark is. Raamon N. wrote back with one of his own:
Great Q’s! Thank you! Q suggestion: What makes you feel most connected to me?
I've kept it since. It's the one I'd give a friend who wanted a single replacement rather than a list of twenty he'd never get through.
"What makes you feel most connected to me?"
Three things are different about it, and none of them have to do with clever wording.
It's aimed at us: every word points at the space between you and her. There's no version of the answer that's a summary of her Tuesday. She has to think about you to answer it at all, and she can feel that while she's thinking.
It's about now: "how was your day" closes a file. This one is about what's working between you now, which means the answer is usable. You can do something with it this week.
There's no autopilot answer: nobody has a stock reply loaded for this one. Whatever comes back, she has to build it on the spot, and that's what makes it worth hearing.
The risk with a question this direct is that it arrives like a performance review. Three ways around that.
1. Ask it side by side, not across a table. In the car, on a walk, one of you washing and one drying. Nobody has to hold eye contact while saying something true, and there's somewhere else to put your eyes if the answer takes a second to arrive. A question that would feel like an examination at the kitchen table is an ordinary sentence in a passenger seat.
2. Answer it yourself first. Say what makes you feel most connected to her, in real detail, before you hand it over. Two things happen. She hears the level of detail you're after, and you've turned an interview into a trade.
3. Ask it once, then leave it alone. This isn't a nightly replacement. Ask it tonight and again in a month, or hook it to something that already repeats, like a standing drive or the one good question a week habit. Asked once, it's a real question. Asked every night for a week, it's a bit, and she'll start answering it the way she answered the old one.
The thirty seconds after she answers are easy to fumble, so it's worth knowing what's coming.
1. She names something you already do. When you text her from the store. When you sit out back with her instead of going in. When you put your hand on her back walking through a parking lot. Do more of it. Do not announce that you're doing more of it, and do not tell her you're glad you asked.
2. She names something you used to do. This one stings a little, and the instinct is to explain: the job changed, the kids came, the year was brutal. All of that is true and none of it is what she asked for. She just told you the exact thing she misses, by name. That's probably the most useful sentence you've gotten out of a conversation in months. Say a version of "I miss that too," and then put it on the calendar this week.
3. She says "I don't know." That's not a failure. "I don't know" usually means "I've never been asked, give me a minute." Answer it yourself in more detail, tell her there's no rush on hers, and change the subject on purpose. She might come back with it three days later while she's driving, and that version is worth more than anything she could have produced on the spot.
4. She opens something bigger than the question. Sometimes the answer is really about what's been missing, and the conversation gets heavier than the one you started. Do not solve it. In I Hear You, Michael S. Sorensen names unsolicited advice as the most common mistake people make when someone shares something hard, because it reads as a verdict that the feeling itself was wrong. Name the feeling instead and give it a reason it makes sense to feel.
Then, if you still have something to offer, Sorensen gives two openers that cover it: "How can I help?" and "I have a few thoughts on that. May I share them?" One of those, asked before the advice, changes the whole exchange.
One rule covers all four. The question was the work. After she answers it, say less than you want to.
You'll ask "how was your day" a few hundred more times, and that's fine. It's a fair greeting. It was just never going to tell you anything.
One question, asked on purpose at a moment you chose, about your marriage rather than her calendar, does more than a year of the automatic version. If you do want more than one, there's a longer list of questions to ask your wife, and a piece on the things you're still finding out about each other after years of marriage.
What you do with the answer is a separate skill, and there's a whole piece on how to listen to your wife if that's the half you'd rather work on. More of this kind of thing sits in the ideas hub.
And if her answer turns out to be about the two of you doing something together instead of near each other, that's what Date Nights Dancing is for: easy swing in your own living room, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you starting from the same first video. No dance experience required.
However she answers it, you went looking for a better question than the one you've been asking for years, and you found one. That was your idea, and it was a good one.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
