Ten Questions You Should Ask Your Partner Every Three Months

Or how to have a relationship development conversation

Photo by Korney Violin on Unsplash

I had an epiphany the other night: we focus on succeeding at our careers a lot more than we focus on succeeding at our relationships.

Career development is something almost every employer and employee I know thinks about a lot, myself included. All the companies I’ve worked at — startup to enterprise — proactively manage employee retention rate and overall employee satisfaction. At my current job, I use designated tools for goal tracking, responding to employee pulse surveys, manager check-ins, collecting real-time peer feedback, and for my annual performance reviews. On top of all that, I have to have monthly development conversations with my manager.

Why aren’t we applying that much rigor to improving our relationship satisfaction and partner retention?.. Most of us just go with the flow, let our relationships progress organically, and don’t spend too much time, if any, on collecting our partners’ feedback or discussing their performance.

Wouldn’t it make sense to check-in with our partners regularly to see how they were doing and to find out if there was anything we could be doing to support them better?.. “Of course we do that already,” you might say, “I ask my partners how their day was every night!”

Well, I’d like to challenge you to go deeper than the superficial “how are you?” and “how was your day?” conversations that you may be having already. I believe that three critical components needed for a happy and fulfilling relationship are self-love, emotional safety, and complete acceptance of and by our partners. By regularly asking each other about how we feel in those three areas, we can gauge how secure and satisfying our relationships are.

When we did our first check-in with my boyfriend, we came up with a ton of ideas for what we could be doing differently and how we could be supporting each other better. It was not only an enlightening conversation but also exciting and fun. Having that check-in made me feel more connected to him and gave me peace of mind about how things stand.

Here is how we did it.