Relationship Questions for Couples: Questions to Ask Your Partner

People in more established relationships often underestimate the benefits of continually finding the right questions to ask their partner. Many tend to think that the intense inquiry starts to fade with the end of the talking phase of the relationship that tentative couples explore in the early stages.

However, long-term relationships are where intimacy and communication models truly start to take shape. Good relationship questions that have structured goals and are adapted to your partner naturally foster closeness through familiarity and will begin to form a reliable roadmap for your journey together as a couple, with more personally enriching milestones along the way.   

Coming up with the ideal questions to ask your partner isn’t simply about deepening your bond through a better understanding of each other. If your relationship is going through a rough patch, it can help you trace the root of the problem and inform how you can both approach changing it and growing as a couple. Questions can help spice things up in relationships by revealing certain unspoken desires, sexual aspects you’ve wanted to explore with your partner and making you more comfortable with sharing over those topics. You can even use it as a structured way of checking in on the health of the relationship and calmly exploring how to improve it.

Many people look at a question as simply a request for information. A tool for when you need to figure out how to get to know your partner better. However, just the act of asking questions and being open to certain topics can create an atmosphere of trust-building and mutual respect, where both your needs are given equally open platforms.

Let’s look at different types of relationship questions and how they can positively impact your relationship. 

Best questions to ask your girlfriend

When it comes to good questions to ask a girl you’re in a relationship with, it’s often best to shape some of your questions around conflict resolution and identifying issues in the relationship that may become more troublesome with time. Follow-up questions, further probing certain problem issues, can be essential, with certain girls. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that women express a greater tendency towards people-pleasing in potentially higher-stakes social situations.¹ Finding mature and serious questions to ask your girlfriend – ones that approach conflict-driven topics more neutrally – can help your girlfriend feel more at ease to give meaningful answers that improve how you two engage.

Because some women show a higher sensitivity to potentially problematic topics, it’s often best to approach these questions in a more structured way, rather than surprising her with them. Try to ask a good mix of relationship questions by including flirty, deep, juicy and spicy ones so that it feels less intense and covers all the relationship bases.

Here are some great questions that are better suited to a more feminine approach to relationship issues.

1. What’s one thing I do that makes you feel loved?
2. What’s your favorite memory of us so far?
3. What’s something you want us to do together this year?
4. How do you like to spend a quiet night together?
5. What’s something small that makes you think of me?
6. What’s a dream you’ve always had that I can help you achieve?
7. What’s your favorite way for me to show affection?
8. When do you feel most connected to me?
9. What’s something about our relationship that makes you proud?
10. What’s your love language, and how do you like it expressed?
11. If we could take a spontaneous trip together, where would you want to go?

Best questions to ask your boyfriend

Conversely, men have been shown in studies to have a problem-solving approach to relationship issues, using it as a coping mechanism for conflict.² When it comes to deep or romantic questions to ask a guy, you’ll often find that they default to whatever solves the conflict fastest with the least amount of effort.

But as we know, conflicts are rarely about actions themselves than the broader implications and meaning of those actions. For instance, your partner missing an important planned event is going to be a larger conversation than simply their sense of punctuality. This is why it can be prudent to find more serious and mature questions to ask. Ones that speak directly to the underlying issue and specifically frame the conversation about how these things make you both feel heard. Not simply find a practical solution.

However, men are more open to questions. Use this facet not just in conflict but to be playful by also asking juicy, spicy and cute questions about the relationship. Often, the more pressing issue isn’t when to ask these questions but rather how you decide to phrase them so that they seem more objective-based than accusatory. Here are some examples that can guide you.

12. What’s one thing you’ve learned about love since we started dating?
13. How do you know when you’re happiest in a relationship?
14. What’s something I do that you secretly appreciate?
15. What kind of moments make you feel closest to me?
16. What’s your favorite way to spend a Sunday with me?
17. How do you show someone you care about them most?
18. What’s something you’ve always wanted to tell me but never have?
19. What kind of adventures would you love to have together?
20. How do you imagine our future if everything went perfectly?
21. What’s something you think makes our relationship unique?

Coming up with fun questions to ask each other can be a great relationship-building exercise in so many ways. Making questions part of how you interact as a couple can make your everyday conversations feel more spontaneous and engaging. It creates a positive pattern in your growing relationships that you both feel open to talking to each other about a range of topics, from being openly flirty with your questions to discussing deeper topics that may stir sensitive emotions in each other.

In this sense, the best relationship questions are ones that achieve one of two goals. Either they help you understand the other person better, or they express a positive and intellectual curiosity in understanding the deeper aspects of them. Finding fun and interesting questions to ask can make conversations more rewarding in and of themselves, where your partner will start to associate talking to you with having a good time.

Ask some of these questions whenever you feel like knowing more about your partner or just want to turn up the heat on your conversation.

23. How do you think we’ve grown since we first met?
24. What’s your favorite memory of us laughing together?
25. What’s something we can do to make our bond even stronger?
26. How do you like to be comforted when you’re stressed?
27. What’s a dream you’d love for us to chase together?
28. What’s your favorite thing about our communication style?
29. If we could relive one special day together, which would it be?
30. How do you think we balance each other’s personalities?
31. What do you think makes a couple truly last long-term?

Good questions to ask your partner

Good questions to ask in a long-term relationship should speak to different aspects of your bond, including making each other laugh, being interesting in conversation, seeming attentive to your partner’s needs and expressing emotional intelligence when discussing deeper relationship issues. It’s not an overestimation to say that a healthy and supportive relationship is to a great degree built on consistent conversation and inquiry. 

The great thing about questions is that they’re often a two-way street that encourages reciprocity. By coming up with some vulnerable questions to ask the person you’re dating and treating their answer with respect and understanding, you create a trust-building moment. Through these, you can not only encourage them to be more open with future answers but help them feel less inhibited and respond with deep and interesting questions of their own. 

A good question paves the way for a good conversation. Try to make a variety of questions a regular part of how you interact with each other to have conversations that feel more meaningful and rewarding in the moment, and build on your bond over time. Try a few of these to get you started.

32. What’s one goal you’re working toward right now that I can support?
33. How do you define a healthy relationship?
34. What’s something you’ve always wanted to try as a couple?
35. When do you feel most appreciated by me?
36. What’s a small thing I do that means more than I realize?
37. How do you like to celebrate important moments?
38. What’s one thing we’ve learned from each other recently?
39. What do you think our biggest strength as a couple is?
40. What’s a new tradition you’d like us to start?
41. When do you feel most at peace in our relationship?

21 questions for a new relationship

Unlike the similarly named conversationgame, the 21 questions game is a structured bonding exercise that, true to its name, involves you and a newfound partner asking each other twenty-one questions. You can either have your own questions or take turns answering the same questions. The intimate questions you ask can cover a range of topics, including personal details, relationship issues, deep questions, funny questions or really anything you want to know about a new partner.

You can introduce a theme for each round of the game, like only coming up with humorous and fun questions to ask each other. The topics are often less important than the act of exchanging itself. 21 questions is effective because it normally compels both participants to answer the same questions, which can help build trust and make you both comfortable with being vulnerable around each other early on in your relationship. The fact that it’s a game also means that you should try to put more thought into your questions, finding ones that not only help with how to get to know your partner better but also understand what deeper passions drive them. Use a few of these examples to inspire your list of 21 questions.   

42. What made you interested in getting to know me in the first place?
43. What’s your idea of a fun date?
44. What’s something small that instantly makes you smile?
45. How do you usually like to spend your weekends?
46. What’s your favorite way to show affection?
47. Do you believe in love at first sight or slow-built connections?
48. What’s something about relationships you’ve learned from past experiences?
49. What do you value most in a partner?
50. What’s a habit that helps you feel grounded?
51. How do you usually express gratitude?
52. What’s a song or movie that describes your outlook on love?
53. How do you handle stressful situations?
54. What’s something you think makes two people compatible?
55. What’s a dream or goal you’re working toward this year?
56. Do you prefer texting or phone calls when staying in touch?
57. What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?
58. How do you know when you’ve truly connected with someone?
59. What’s one thing you want your next relationship to have that others didn’t?
60. What’s a deal breaker for you in dating?
61. What’s the sweetest thing someone could do for you unexpectedly?
62. What’s a funny or charming story from your childhood that shaped your personality?

Questions to ask your long distance partner

When it comes to a long distance relationship, conversation and questions are vital. Video chat and other technologies have allowed many long-distance couples to date more fully, including having video dates and freely sharing images. But conversation and finding interesting questions to ask, both over text and voice, will form the foundation of how your relationship develops.   

A study published in The Family Journal found that the only significant difference in terms of relationship health indicators for long-term relationships was that they tended to experience greater stress and required more creative approaches to relationship maintenance. Relationship health and satisfaction weren’t reported to be significantly different between the two groups.³

Planning interactions, creating shared experiences and interacting more deeply to attenuate relationship stress become essential. Finding the right relationship questions can help you address all three of these areas by ensuring your questions are fun, deep and personally engaging. Try a few of these examples the next time you’re interacting with your partner over long distance.

63. What’s the best part of our long-distance relationship so far?
64. How do you like to stay connected when we’re apart?
65. What’s something you look forward to the most when we see each other?
66. How can we make our communication even stronger?
67. What’s one way I can make you feel loved from afar?
68. What do you miss most about being together in person?
69. What’s a small ritual we can start doing to stay close despite the distance?
70. What’s a surprise you’d love to receive from me?
71. How do you picture our next reunion?
72. What have you learned about us since we started doing long distance?
73. What’s something that always reminds you of me?
74. How do you think distance has changed our relationship for the better?

Questions to ask before moving in together

Having a shared living arrangement is a big step in a relationship. After that, there’s only marriage or some other form of lifelong commitment. It’s one of those times when coming up with mostly direct and serious questions to ask your partner that deal with the practicalities of living together is the most prudent course of action.

These questions can include exploring compatibility in your lifestyles, finding ways to compromise where your living arrangements differ and uncovering subtle aspects of living together, like their hygiene habits, level of preferred cleanliness and division of responsibilities. These questions may not feel very romantic in the moment for such a big step in the relationship. But starting this new stage on the right foot can ensure it runs more smoothly in the long run with fewer petty domestic squabbles.

It’s best to ask the questions we’ve included below when you first start exploring the idea of living together, rather than leaving it until you’ve already set a moving date and the situation has become a lot more intractable.   

75. How do you imagine our day-to-day life once we move in together?
76. What’s your ideal way to divide household chores?
77. What makes a home feel comfortable and relaxing for you?
78. Do you like to have your own space sometimes, and how can we balance that?
79. What’s your daily routine like in the morning and evening?
80. How do you like to handle household decisions?
81. What’s one thing you’d want us to prioritize when setting up our home?
82. How do you think living together might change our relationship dynamic?
83. What are your thoughts on decorating styles and sharing spaces?
84. How do you like to handle finances and budgeting as a couple?
85. What’s a simple tradition we could start once we move in?

Questions to ask before marriage

By the time you start exploring marriage in your relationship, you’ll have already lived together for some time and have likely already covered most of those typical intimate and serious questions to ask that special person in your life. Questions before marriage are like the ones you pose before deciding to move in together, except far more important and consequential, long-term.

This is the time to explore fundamental life questions, like where they see their life going, their long-term plans, desire to have children, their views on gender and familial norms, shared finances, lifestyle stability and a whole range of urgent topics. These don’t make for the most scintillating dinner conversation but they are essential to being on the same page and going into this profound commitment with a full understanding of what marriage practically means to you both.    

This can be a planned conversation where you gradually explore how to get to know your partner better in different ways. It can also be a series of deep conversations where you gradually but comprehensively cover more of your potential dynamic as a married couple. Here are some great questions to include.

86. What does marriage mean to you personally?
87. How do you define commitment in a long-term relationship?
88. What are your biggest hopes for our marriage?
89. How do you want us to handle disagreements in the future?
90. What’s your view on balancing independence and partnership?
91. What are your thoughts on managing money as a married couple?
92. What’s a value or belief you’d like to share with our future family?
93. How do you want to keep romance alive after marriage?
94. What kind of future do you envision for us in five years?
95. What’s a fear you have about marriage that we can talk through together?
96. How do you define success as a couple?

Questions to ask your fiancé

The previous two sections may seem like a serious and dry approach to ensuring a happy and healthy cohabitation dynamic. But once you’re engaged, the kind of questions you ask your partner can go back to being light, romantic and centered around forging a more playful and complex bond.

Try to see this less as a responsibility and more as an introduction to a whole new world of topics you can explore with your questions. Being engaged is a serious romantic commitment. But in the modern world, it serves as a kind of trial period for how things will be when you’re married. Take advantage of this stage of profound understanding and intimacy to really explore the deepest aspects of each other. This will create a bond that is both unshakeable and unique from all your previous relationships.      

You should make open-ended relationship questions and curiosity a natural part of your dynamic, so you can both feel open and free to ask each other almost anything in the run-up to your ceremony. Try a few of these questions to establish a stronger connection during your engagement.

97. What’s something about marriage that excites you most?
98. What kind of wedding vibe do you dream about?
99. How do you imagine our first year of marriage?
100. What’s a goal you’d like to achieve together after we’re married?
101. What’s something you want us to always prioritize as a married couple?
102. How do you think our relationship has grown since we got engaged?
103. What do you think will be the best part about being married to me?
104. What are your favorite little things we do that make our bond special?
105. What’s one value you want our marriage to be built on?
106. What are you most grateful for in our relationship right now?
107. What’s something we can do to prepare for married life in a fun way?

Questions to ask your husband

Being in a long-term marriage with a man will come with its emotional ups and downs, as your relationship grows and matures. But the general aim is to have more ups than downs. Finding the right funny or deep questions to ask your husband can help foster an energy where you’re always curious and learning new things about each other.

Having this kind of positive communication style, characterized by a sense of security in the relationship and self-confidence around each other, was found by a study to be strongly linked to couples’ satisfaction levels in a marriage.⁴ Building intimacy with your husband is a lifelong commitment but this shouldn’t be seen as a burden. Questions make this vital relationship exercise more fun and engaging for both of you, instead of conversations becoming lackluster and routine.    

As with most stages of the relationship, you should aim to come up with vulnerable questions to ask each other and make it an organic part of how you two interact. If you often struggle to come up with meaningful questions in the moment, here are some suggestions that can help you plan your questions.

108. What’s your favorite thing about being married to me?
109. What’s something you think we’ve done really well as a couple?
110. What’s a new tradition you’d like us to start this year?
111. How do you like to unwind and reconnect after a busy day?
112. What’s something you want us to focus on improving together?
113. What’s a small thing I do that makes your day better?
114. If we could take a second honeymoon anywhere, where would it be?
115. What’s a memory from our wedding or early marriage that always makes you smile?
116. What’s a long-term dream you still want us to achieve together?
117. What’s one lesson you’ve learned about love through marriage?

Questions to ask your wife

You may be wondering whether you’d need to adapt your questions when you’re married to a woman. The general content of the intimate relationship questions you ask doesn’t really make a difference when looking at men and women in long-term relationships. However, you should take stock of how frequently you ask your wife questions and what moments you choose to ask her.

A handy rule of thumb is to try and ask a question back whenever your wife asks you a suitably meaningful question first (one that’s about your relationship rather than your diary for the week). You can ask her the same question back or, better yet, build on your answer to ask a follow-up question that immediately signals your investment in the conversation.    

But try to surprise her with questions you’ve preplanned that specifically address how to get to know your partner better. You can even set a personal schedule for it until it feels routine to ask your wife at least one meaningful question every day. Here are some examples to help get you started.

118. What’s one thing I can do to make your days a little easier?
119. What’s a memory of ours that always makes you feel warm inside?
120. How do you think we’ve both grown since getting married?
121. What’s something you’d love to do together that we haven’t yet tried?
122. What’s your favorite part about the life we’ve built?
123. How do you like to celebrate milestones or special occasions?
124. What’s a dream of yours that we can work on together?
125. What’s something I do that makes you feel especially loved?
126. If we had a weekend just to ourselves, what would you want to do?
127. What’s one way you think we bring out the best in each other?

How to get to know your partner better?

Depending on what you want to know, there are so many different questions to get to know someone better. Let’s look at how to get started.

• Pick a certain aspect or general category of things you want to know about the other person to shape your questions around.
• Don’t explore too many topics or they may begin to find the questions awkward or intrusive.
• Topics should explore things like the experiences that have shaped them, little tidbits of their life story, their position on issues or their philosophical outlook. All of these little parts speak to a larger concept of the self, and every piece helps.
• If you don’t know them very well, a great way to get started is to come up with intimate questions to ask the other person that speak indirectly to their values, attitudes and personal history. For instance, instead of asking them if they get along with their family, ask them about fond childhood memories.
• Testing the waters with more generic questions helps you take the temperature of the conversation and guides you on which questions would make the best follow-ups.
• Questions should align with your rapport and level of trust.

Finding the right good questions to ask your partner can help your relationship in so many ways. Let’s look at a few.

• Builds intimacy – Beyond the positive neurological effects of self-disclosure on feelings of mutual closeness,⁵ knowing more about each other’s emotional universe makes you naturally more attuned to it. 
• Maintains the relationship – Asking questions is a great way to check in with your partner. But you should explore more than just the relationship. Ask them about their day, frustrations, moments that upset them and reinforce the times they felt happy or proud.
• Expresses curiosity and understanding – If you’re stuck on how to get to know your partner better, the right questions can not only reveal new layers of your partner’s personality but also express a positive curiosity in their inner world.
• Addresses growing relationship issues – This is different from checking in, in that you should generally try to explore their negative experiences and drill down on the ones that directly relate to you or that you can influence.

How does asking questions strengthen communication in a relationship?

Finding the right questions to ask in conversation expresses three things: “I’m here. I care. I want to understand you better.” A study of getting-to-know-you conversations from Harvard Business School found that while the number of questions you ask didn’t affect likeability in any given interaction, questions that were seen as apt follow-ups to the current conversation did – expressing a genuine understanding built on previous questions.⁶

The right follow-up question shows that you’re responsive, caring, and interested, which are all features of active listening, which has come to be regarded as an invaluable social skill.

On a more practical level, relationships hinge heavily on familiarity. The more we understand someone, the closer we estimate our relationship with them to be. Asking questions is simply a request to reduce the amount of ambiguity between you. This is one of the key social cognitive biases underlying the social concept of Error Management Theory (EMT).⁷

How do thoughtful questions build emotional intimacy between partners?

A thoughtful question to ask another person takes into account your rapport and level of familiarity to inform your question so that they’re appropriate to the conversation and lightly probe for deeper aspects. This is part of a sociological concept known as Social Penetration Theory, which directly explores how intimacy is formed throughout a relationship’s lifecycle.⁸

The theory looks at intimacy as a function of self-disclosure and reciprocity. Much like Shrek’s observation of his own character, people can be like onions. We peel back layers over time as we get to know people, with each layer representing a deeper notion of the self. These layers include: the outer layer – basic biological facts like passions or hobbies. The middle layer – which contains our shallower values, attitudes and personal opinions of things. The inner layer – our core values, fears, goals, dreams and secrets.

Finally, there’s their core personality, which is the apex of intimacy but still a rather nebulous psychological concept. So, relationship questions that suit the current layer you’re on, while trying to peel back the next layer gently, will naturally come across as more appropriate, personalized and socially present.  

How can asking questions promote better understanding between couples?

In their most basic form, the questions you ask are requests to understand. The main factor in most communication modes, including conflict, is feeling understood. Not being right or validated or even justified. Simply being understood by the person you’re dating makes you feel represented and seen in the relationship, even if the resulting compromise doesn’t lean in your direction.

A study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that just perceived understanding (as opposed to true understanding) was an incredibly effective social buffer against the damaging effects of conflict in a romantic relationship.⁹

Questions alone won’t help you understand your partner. You have to take on board what they’re telling you, interpret it, and give them your take on the issue while expressing a critical interaction with their way of thinking. This is true understanding and it can only be achieved by being fully present.

How does asking questions encourage trust in a relationship?

Choosing the right questions to ask acts as a social signal that shows our attention, interest and willingness to understand. In particular, willingness to understand – or what’s termed as perspective-taking questions – naturally creates trust.

This is because the desire to understand someone’s emotional world is perceived by people as the natural way trust is created in normal human relationships. A study found that children interacting with an obvious robot that was prompted to respond with further questions increased the levels of trust the child had in the robot afterwards, regardless of the children having knowledge of its lack of agency.¹⁰

This suggests that trust isn’t necessarily being tightly guarded in social situations, but that we often simply require the right social ritual – like perspective-taking relationship questions – to kickstart the trust-building process.

How can asking questions keep a relationship exciting?

Questions can reintroduce pleasant novelty into the relationship, which our brain instinctively reacts positively to. It’s easy to see why finding interesting questions to ask that are novel and surprising has such a potent effect on your partner. 

How do asking questions help partners solve problems together?

Finding the right kinds of questions to ask in the right way can cause a conflicting couple to shift their mindset from being blame-based, which tends to escalate tensions, to a more reflective and understanding one, promoting greater cooperation and a problem-solving mindset. This is one of the most prominent ways in which questions do so much more than answer the question of how to get to know your partner better.

A study of couples counseling sessions by Simon Fraser University confirmed this by having the therapist introduce more structured questions into sessions that focused on seeing issues from their partner’s perspective. This generally prompted couples to stop trying to figure out who was right and begin approaching the issue collaboratively as something they could solve together.¹¹

You don’t necessarily need a therapist to achieve this. By simply taking a step back from the argument and framing it as a problem question that might be solved together but will be impossible to address through conflict, the social human mind naturally begins steering itself towards collaboration to address this question. 

What questions to ask your partner during a conflict?

Sometimes, the right relationship questions can completely change the tone of an argument and shift you both into a more collaborative problem-solving mindset.

What questions to ask your partner after a conflict?

Sometimes, doing a postmortem of an argument can help you identify how you can improve conflicts in the future. Here are some questions to ask to create the space for that conversation.

• How does arguing with me make you feel? – Understanding your partner’s state of mind during conflict is the key to understanding how to address them productively.
• How can I do better next time? – If you feel like you had a large part to play in the conflict, this very simply expresses that you’d like to avoid upsetting them in future.
• Do you feel like I’ve taken accountability for my part? – How an argument is resolved often sticks in our mind longer than the argument itself. You both want to walk away from an argument feeling like you owned your respective parts in it.

How often should couples have deep conversations?

Everyday. You should have a conversation with your partner every day and explore multiple emotional areas within that conversation. This includes humor, playfulness, flirting, serious topics, and deep topics, as these are all perceived positively. The best way to inspire a deep conversation is by having some good deep questions to ask your partner on hand.

One study showed that the more time couples spent engaged in positive conversations (versus negative ones like arguing or conflict resolution) saw their relationship in a more positive light and experienced a higher degree of closeness with their partner.¹²

People enjoy deep topics a lot more than they think. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that we consistently underestimate our desire to have deep conversations, even with strangers, and are often surprised by how rewarding we find the experience.¹³

What are the signs that your partner is not ready for deep conversations?

While we may enjoy deep conversation more than we expect, sometimes your partner just isn’t ready to go there with you. Here’s how to tell if your partner is emotionally immature. 

• They avoid any kind of serious topic – If they find a reason to change the topic every time things go deep or respond with a joke when you think of serious questions to ask them, they may not be properly invested in the relationship yet.
• They struggle to express their feelings – This lack of emotional intelligence is quite easy to reveal by simply asking them how positive experiences make them feel. If they use the word ‘vibe’ more than any concrete adjective, they may not even have the capacity for a deep conversation yet.  
• They shut down – This is often due to an unhealthy fight, flight or freeze response to heavy conversations. In this instance, the deep topics may elicit genuine social anxiety and cause them to withdraw. This can often be addressed with time and patience.