20 Questions to Ask Your Significant Other Instead of “How Was Your Day?”
The question “How was your day?” has always frustrated me. It’s right up there with “How are you” and “How’s it going?” These questions may be polite, but rarely does the questioning party actually care.
In fact, I have found more often than not that the person who asks doesn’t even wait around for an answer before they walk away. This turns the polite question into an impolite action.
Until recently, I would come home after work or meetings and my well-intentioned boyfriend would ask this question and I would almost snap at him for asking. I, for my part, stopped asking these questions sometime ago. However, this made me appear as if I did not care at all.
After a lot of thought, I finally realized that the question needs to change, not stop.
Instead of asking the generic and easily ignored question, I started coming up with better, more meaningful questions to ask. Here are some of the questions I ask my boyfriend and some that he has asked me:
- Did anything out of the ordinary happen today?
- What was the best thing that happened today?
- Was today better or worse than yesterday?
- What did you have for lunch?
- If you had to call out, who would cover for you?
- What is the most interesting part of your job?
- How often do you get to do that?
- What was the worst part of your job today?
- How was your drive home?
- Is there anything exciting coming up?
- Is there ever a time you wish we worked together? (Usually followed by, nah, me neither!)
After awhile, you start to get to know what happens at his/her job and can start asking even more relevant questions:
12. Did [coworker so and so] get that promotion?
13. How is [coworker so and so] doing with that project you were helping with?
14. Did [coworker so and so] ever get back to you on that thing?
15. Today was the day that you were going to do [insert activity], right? How did it go?
16. What happened with the project from last week?
17. How many [enter task] did you manage to get through this week?
18. How did that meeting with [department or coworker’s name] go?
19. Did [coworkers name] have [her baby, that procedure, etc.] yet?
20. If you got to pass that responsibility to someone else, who would you give it to and what would it be?
Many of these questions tend to lead to longer and more interesting conversations. It’s nice to get to know more about his job and what he does all day. He feels the same way.
