Power Questions For Marriage:
The Five You Already Use At Work

You spent forty minutes on a call this week asking somebody questions you'd thought about the night before. You asked one, then said nothing and let him fill the gap. You asked what else was going on. Twenty minutes in he told you the part that wasn't on the agenda, and he thanked you for the call.

Then you drove home and asked your wife how her day was.

You're not bad at this. You've been saving it for people who pay you.

You Ask Sharper Questions At Work Than You Do At Dinner

The work version of you has three advantages the home version doesn't. You prepared. You had a reason to be in the room. And there was a clock on it, so nobody had to decide how deep the conversation was going to go.

At home there's no invite, no agenda, and no end time. So the question that shows up is the one that costs nothing to ask and nothing to answer: how was your day. You already know how the answer goes before she opens her mouth, which is a decent sign the question stopped working a while back.

In Power Questions, Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas write that "The average five-year-old asks 200 questions a day," and that curiosity drains out of us as we get older. They cite the number without a source, so hold it as a picture rather than as a finding. The picture is still worth sitting with. Nobody replaces the questions they lose. They just stop asking and call it being settled.

It's part of why I built Date Nights Dancing around something you do together instead of something you talk about: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you working on the same moves from the first video on. It's easier to talk while you're both doing something than it is to sit down and start cold. But when you want the conversation itself, you need better material than you're currently bringing.

You have better material. It's in your work bag.

A Sales Question Doesn't Arrive Home Intact

Power Questions is a business book. Sobel and Panas wrote it for consultants, bankers, and salespeople, and most of its examples are meetings with a buyer across a conference table. I'm adapting it here, not reporting it, and it's worth being clear about which parts survive the drive home and which ones don't.

What survives is the shapes. A question that opens a guarded executive works on the same principle as a question that opens your wife, because both people are deciding in the first few seconds whether you want the short answer or the true one.

What doesn't survive is the cadence and most of the wording. Three specifics:

• The interrogation problem. In a discovery call, four questions in a row reads as thorough. At your kitchen counter it reads as an audit, and she will tell you so.
• The why ladder. Sobel and Panas recommend asking why up to five times to get past what someone says they want and down to what they need. They say themselves to use careful judgment with it. In a charged moment at home, why sounds like blame no matter how you say it, so this one stays at the office.
• The agenda language. One of their questions is "What's the most important thing we should be discussing today?", and they list your spouse among the occasions for asking it. The idea is right. Say that sentence at your own table and you've called a stand-up meeting.

So I've kept their shapes and rewritten their words. Five of them, below, in the phrasings a husband can say without sounding like he's billing for the hour.

Rewrite The Five Shapes For Your Kitchen

1. The Follow-Up: "Tell Me More About That"

Sobel and Panas put it as plainly as it can be put: "Can you tell me more?" Their instruction is "Ask it often."

At work you ask it to gather information. At home the reason is different and better. Most of what your wife says in a day gets one response and then the subject changes. Asking twice about the same thing tells her the first answer wasn't a toll you were paying to get to the end of the conversation.

If she gives you three words: name the piece you want more of instead of asking again in general. "Tell me more about the part where she said no." A specific request is easier to answer than an open door.

2. The Silence: Ask, Then Say Nothing For Three Seconds

This isn't a question. It's what you do after one, and it's the hardest of the five for people who are good at talking.

Sobel and Panas put the instruction as plainly as that: "Don't fill in the silence." They give it for the moment when someone is weighing a personal decision, and the reasoning carries over exactly. Three seconds of nothing after a real question is her deciding whether to hand you the short version or the real one. Every word you put in that gap picks the short version for her.

If she gives you three words: hold the pause one more beat, and look at her while you do it instead of at your phone. If it stays short after that, let it be short. She may come back to it while you're brushing your teeth.

3. The What-Else: "What Else Is On There?"

Sobel and Panas write it, for a heated situation, as "What else can you tell me?" I use the two-word version at home: what else.

The first answer to almost anything is the one she's already given somebody else that day. It's sorted, it's short, and it's true. The second answer is the one she hasn't finished thinking about, and it's the one worth having.

If she gives you three words: put yours in first. "Mine's the thing with the insurance. What else is on yours?" Going first turns a question into a trade.

4. The How-Did-That-Feel: "How Do You Feel About That?"

Sobel and Panas name this one, alongside "What do you think about this?", as an example of a question that can't be answered yes or no.

At work it's a temperature check. At home you might find it goes wrong when you aim it at a story she's telling for laughs, because it turns a funny story into a session. Aim it instead at something she just reported flat. She says the review went fine. That's a fact with the feeling stripped out of it, and it's an open invitation. "You said it went fine. How do you feel about it?"

If she gives you three words: don't ask twice. Offer two guesses and let her correct you. "Relieved, or annoyed it took that long?" Guessing wrong is fine. Guessing wrong in front of her is usually what gets you the right answer.

5. The Repair Question: "What Would Make Next Week Easier On You?"

Sobel and Panas put this pair in their feedback set for professional relationships: "What should I be doing more of? Less of?" and "How can I make your life easier?" The reflection question behind them, they say, works "whether it's running a company or running a household," which is about as close as they get to writing for you specifically.

Asked cold at home, though, that exact pair sounds like a performance review with the roles reversed, and she'll answer it like one. Anchor it to a week and it turns into something she can use. "What would make next week easier on you?" Once a season, ask the bigger one: what you should be doing more of, and what you should be doing less of.

If she gives you three words: propose two and let her pick one. "I can take the Wednesday pickup, or I can handle dinner Thursday and Friday. Which one helps more?" A menu gets answered when a blank page doesn't.

Ask One A Week, Not Five In One Night

Five in a night is a deposition. She'll know by the third one that something is going on, and you'll spend the rest of the evening explaining the book instead of hearing the answer.

One a week is the dose that holds. Pick the shape that fits whatever she's already talking about, ask it, and then say nothing for three seconds.

Two limits worth naming. The first: none of the five works in the middle of an argument, and Sobel and Panas would agree. Their rule for a heated conversation is that "your goal is to win the relationship, not the argument," and that "Judgment stops empathy dead in its tracks." A question asked to win a point isn't one of the five, and she can tell the difference instantly.

The second: none of it works if you don't want the answer. A question is a request for something. If you're going to be annoyed by what comes back, the honest choice is to skip it this week.

Will S. wrote back after using a set of questions I'd sent out:

we did use your opening questions on our date tonight. It was great! Keep 'em coming, we appreciate you.

Opening questions, prepared in advance, on a date. That's the same thing you do before a client call, pointed at your own marriage. If you'd rather have one handed to you every week than pick your own, that's what The Spark is, and it's free.

Bring The Work Question Home On Purpose

There's a longer list of questions to ask your wife if you want specific ones rather than shapes, a piece on how to listen once she's answering, and a companion to this one on turning closed questions open. More of it sits in the ideas hub.

And if you'd rather have a standing thing on the calendar than a plan to ask better questions, Date Nights Dancing is fifteen minutes of easy swing in your living room, both of you working on the same moves, and no dance experience required. It gives the two of you something to be doing while the talking happens.

You're already the guy who asked a good question today and got a real answer back. None of that skill belongs to your job. Tonight you get to point it at her.