The internet has a problem with couple questions, which is that the people who write them have not, recently, been in the kind of relationship the questions are supposed to deepen. You can tell. The lists read like a high-school yearbook ("if you could have any superpower") or an HR training module ("what is one boundary you'd like to set this week"). Nobody asks each other these things on a Sunday.
What follows are thirteen questions that aren't a quiz. There is no scoring. A few are sex-adjacent because that is half of what a relationship is. The rest are aimed at the small misalignments that accumulate quietly in any couple of more than six months: the things you assumed, the things you stopped saying, the things you've been waiting for the other person to notice. They work best read slowly, one or two an afternoon, with no agenda other than to find out what is actually in your partner's head this season. Read all thirteen in one sitting with a notebook open and you've reinvented the quiz.
1. What did you assume about us that you've stopped believing?
The opening question because it disarms the quiz frame. Every relationship is built on early-days assumptions: we'll move to a city like this, we'll have kids by this year, we'll always sleep on these sides of the bed. Some of them quietly evaporate and nobody mentions it. Asking out loud which ones your partner has let go of, without judgment, gives you both permission to update the contract in plain language. The answers are almost always interesting, sometimes a relief, occasionally a small ache. All three are useful.
2. When was the last time you wanted to tell me something and decided not to?
Sounds like an interrogation and isn't. It assumes, correctly, that the answer is yesterday or this morning, because everyone in a long relationship edits themselves constantly, mostly for sensible reasons. The interesting part is what the edit was protecting: your mood, their image, an argument neither of you had bandwidth for. Asked once a season, the question keeps small unspoken things from compounding into the bigger ones we wrote about in resentment, quietly. Ask it without flinching at the answer.
3. What do you think I'm avoiding right now?
Your partner almost always knows. They've been watching you avoid it for weeks and waiting to see whether you'd name it on your own. Inviting them to tell you is a small act of trust that pays out disproportionately. (Warning: the first time you ask, the answer may be specific enough to ruin your afternoon. This is the question working. Sit with it.)
4. What's something we used to fight about that we don't anymore, and why?
Couples notice when fights start. They don't notice when fights end. But the death of an old fight is data: either one of you conceded, the underlying thing changed, or you both got tired and the topic went underground and is eating at someone in private. We figured it out, I gave up, and we just stopped talking about it are very different futures. The question tells you which one you're living in.
5. What's a kindness I've done for you that you wish I'd noticed you noticed?
Recursive on purpose. Everybody does small invisible work in a relationship (the unloaded dishwasher, the calendar held in someone's head, the social labor with the difficult relative), and almost everybody, at some point, performs an invisible kindness back and waits to see if it lands. When it doesn't, it stings in a way that's hard to bring up because the bringing-up undoes the kindness. This question gives it a place to land late.
6. Where in your body do you carry me?
A sex-adjacent question that isn't, in fact, about sex. Long partners build a physical map of each other: a hand on the small of the back, the weight of them on your shoulder on the couch, the way they breathe in their sleep that is the soundtrack of half your decade. Asking where, literally, the other person lives in your nervous system produces answers that are tender and slightly weird, which is the texture of a real relationship and the opposite of a quiz.
7. What do you want me to do to you that you've never asked for?
The sex question, asked the only way it works. What's your wildest fantasy is bad because the honest answer is usually I don't have one ready and now I feel auditioned. This version assumes the asker is willing and the only obstacle was the asking, which moves the conversation from theory to logistics. The answer might be a kink. It might be that they want you to wash their hair in the bath. Both are useful; both are things people don't say at dinner parties.
8. What does my best mood do to yours?
Most couples have mapped each other's bad moods extensively: warning signs, de-escalation moves, which side of the bed to leave them alone on. Almost nobody has mapped the good moods. Your partner's joy has an effect on your nervous system, and naming it (charged, calmed, occasionally a little jealous) is one of the few ways to make the good days visible to each other. The relationship is also the good days. You're allowed to talk about them.
9. When did you last feel like a stranger in our life?
The lonely-in-a-relationship question, and it's almost never about the relationship. It's about the slow drift of two people changing individually inside a shared structure, and the moments when one of you looks up from a Tuesday evening and doesn't quite recognize the room. The honest answer is rarely a crisis; it's more often a small, recent moment. We've written more about the texture of this in when you've lost attraction to your partner, and when you haven't, but the question stands on its own. Ask it; don't fix it; just listen.
10. What's the version of me you miss?
A trap if you ask it defensively, a gift if you ask it openly. People change inside long relationships, some of the changes are losses, and the loss doesn't have to be anyone's fault to be worth naming. Maybe you used to play more, or read more, or you laughed louder before the job that ate two years. The question does not obligate anyone to go back. It lets the missing be spoken, which is often most of what missing wants. The reverse question closes the loop: what's the version of you I'm meeting now that I haven't met before.
11. What are we pretending is fine?
The most useful question on the list and the hardest to ask without sounding like you've already decided the answer. The trick is genuine curiosity: there's almost always something, and it's almost never what the asker expected. The pretending might be about money, about a friend you have feelings about, about a habit one of you acquired that the other decided to absorb. Naming it isn't fixing it. Naming it is the precondition for fixing it, which is why the pretending has been going on for so long.
12. What do you wish we had more of in bed, and what do you wish we had less of?
The hardest sex question to ask honestly because the less of half is where most couples flinch. More of is easy. Less of requires both people to be grown-ups for the length of the answer, because the honest reply might be a position or a habit the asker has been quietly proud of. Hearing it without going defensive is a learnable skill and one of the most useful ones in a long sexual partnership. (If your partnership can't survive this question, that's also information.)
13. What would you like us to be like at sixty?
The closer, because it's the only question on the list that points forward instead of inward. Not about plans (kids, money, geography), although those will come up. It's about the texture of the life: whether you're still touching often, still arguing about the same things, still curious about each other's interior, still cooking dinner together on a Wednesday. The answers double as a soft commitment device. Most couples have never said any of it out loud, which is strange given that the whole point of a long relationship is to walk slowly toward that version of yourselves on purpose.
A note on how to use any of these. Don't bring a notebook. Don't ask more than two in one sitting. Don't treat the answers as verdicts; treat them as the start of the actual conversation, which is the part the question itself doesn't do. The list isn't the work. The list is the door.
If a question lands flat, that's also information. The territory isn't ready yet, or one of you needs a different setting, or what's really wanted is just an afternoon together with no questions at all. That last one is allowed. It's one of the things you're supposed to be protecting.