150. 8 Dates to (Re)Discover Each Other

150. 8 Dates to (Re)Discover Each Other

8 Dates to (Re)Discover Each Other

You just met your crush and you want to make sure you’re compatible and know if they’re the right partner for you.

Or you’ve been in a relationship for a while and you feel like you don’t know your partner deeply enough.

Or finally, you feel like you have a recurring topic of conflict in your relationship or have lost connection.

In this episode, I revisit the teachings from John Gottman and Julie Schwartz’s book “8 Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love” and give you a summary of the questions you can ask during these 8 dates.

The Principle Behind These Dates

The idea behind these dates is for each partner to take time beforehand to reflect on the given theme, then share with the other during the date, the goal being not to agree but to better understand how the other person works.

This is a concept widely used in couples coaching with the Save Your Love Date journals (I talk about it in episode 96) and the We Bloom ones (episode 48).

I find this concept interesting for the following reasons:

  • In the early relationship phase, it forces you to talk about all the topics that could potentially be sources of conflict. Even though conflicts are inevitable, knowing your partner’s point of view will help you better understand your differences, see if you can have a constructive dialogue, and decide to stop there if you have too many incompatibilities. If you want more advice for this phase, I invite you to listen to episode 132 Is This the Right Partner for Me.
  • When you feel like you’ve lost intimacy and connection in the relationship, it’s often because either recurring conflicts keep resurfacing or you’ve lost the desire to know the other person—either from lack of time and energy or from the impression that you already know them well—and organizing 8 dates with open-ended questions on predefined topics can help you rediscover each other because the other person evolves; there are always things to discover.
  • Or because there’s a recurring conflict that keeps resurfacing and:

In both cases, you can’t avoid the problem and just have a good time if you want to keep your connection. I know it’s not easy, but cleaning up the dust as it arrives prevents having a big pile of dust under the rug that causes the relationship to reach a point of no return. To this end, I offer the program Cultivating Love

Cultivating Love

For you

FREE Webinar "HOW TO FREE OURSELVES FROM THE PATTERNS THAT PREVENT US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?"

Subscribe now to my newsletter and receive the replay of the webinar how a wound from the past is created ? 

* Mandatory fields

If you register for this webinar, you will be subscribed to my newsletter and you will be able to receive offers from me. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please read my
privacy policy (german only), to see how I process the data.

Date 1: Trust and Commitment

We all have a different vision of what trust and commitment in a relationship are and how the other person can show it to us. You can do this test: ask 10 different people their vision of trust and commitment and you’ll see that you’ll get 10 different answers.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. How did your parents show their commitment to each other? How might this influence the way you view trust and commitment?
  2. What does trust or commitment mean to you?
  3. How are we similar or different in terms of trust and commitment? And how can we accept our differences?
  4. What do you need to trust me more?
  5. What do you need to show you that I’m committed to this relationship?

Date 2: Conflict Management

As I said earlier, conflict is inevitable. The goal of this date is to identify potential sources of conflict, understand how the other person views and handles conflict, and whether your conflict dynamic is constructive or blocking.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. Your point of view on the following topics (other topics being covered in the other dates):
    • Cleanliness and tidiness
    • Time alone and together
    • Expressing/experiencing emotions
    • Health
    • Social life
  2. How were conflicts handled in your family?
  3. What do you think about anger? How was it expressed in your family?
  4. How can I best support you when you’re angry?
  5. How would you like to approach a disagreement?
  6. How would you like to reconcile after a disagreement?

Date 3: Sexuality

To be able to have this date, you need to let go of the assumption that sex should work right away without talking about it. If you feel this is a difficult topic, I invite you to listen to episode 69 How to Talk About Sexuality in Your Relationship.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. Think about all the times we’ve made love. What are your favorite moments and why?
  2. What turns you on?
  3. What’s your favorite way for me to let you know I want to make love with you?
  4. What’s your favorite place to make love and why? What’s your favorite position and why?
  5. What can I do to improve our sex life?

Date 4: Finances and Work

A vast yet essential topic because it’s often the primary cause of arguments in relationships. So I’ve included questions to start the discussion, but they’re far from the complete list of questions to ask.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. What does your professional life mean to you?
  2. What does work fulfill in your life?
  3. What work-life balance is right for you? How should the couple agree on this in your opinion?
  4. How did your family live and manage money? What stood out to you?
  5. What’s your biggest fear regarding money? Regarding work?
  6. How often do you think about money? What makes you feel insecure (in general or in the way I do things)?
  7. What are your dreams in terms of money and career?

Date 5: Family

I talk about this topic in more detail in episode 142 The Baby Clash or the impact of a child on couple life. John Gottman and Julie Schwartz have a scary graph in this book that clearly shows that couple dissatisfaction arrives when a child arrives and that this dissatisfaction is inevitable, and basically the goal is to prevent the level of dissatisfaction from being too great so that once the children leave, the couple is still sufficiently connected. So listen to episode 142 if you want more advice on managing this curve and perhaps having a more optimistic view.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. What does your ideal family look like? What about your circle?
  2. How did your parents seem to maintain love and intimacy in their relationship?
  3. If you want children:
    1. What issues do you think we might face in maintaining our intimacy in our future family?
    2. What do you think you’ll love about being parents together?
  4. If you don’t want children,
    1. How will we create a sense of family?
    2. Who do you consider your closest family? What do you want to deepen within this family?

Date 6: Fun and Adventure

This is often the notion that deserves to be discussed because, once routine sets in, it’s each partner’s natural desire for fun and adventure that can energize the relationship.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. What do fun, play, and adventure mean to you?
  2. How did you like to play when you were a child?
  3. How have you had the most fun in recent years? What adventures have you enjoyed?
  4. How do you think we could have more fun?

Date 7: Growth and Spirituality

In their book, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz specify that it’s often less the differences in religion that separate but more the way of approaching the world and the ability to respect the other’s spirituality.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. What is your family’s view on spirituality?
  2. What sustains you in the most difficult moments?
  3. How do you find peace within yourself? What is your source of peace?
  4. How have you evolved in your spirituality throughout your life?
  5. How do you think you’ve progressed the most?
  6. What spiritual beliefs do you want to pass on to your children?
  7. Why is it important to intentionally try to evolve?

Date 8: Your Dreams and Life Goals

Dreams and life goals can be unconscious sources of conflict in relationships (often the partner isn’t arguing about the topic of the argument but because it hinders one of their life goals). Dreams aren’t always truly conscious, so just taking the time to realize them for yourself can help you understand why certain conflicts are present in the relationship.

Here are the questions you can discuss:

  1. Did your parents achieve their dreams?
  2. Did they support your dreams?
  3. What are your dreams and why?
  4. Is there an underlying goal in achieving your dream (related to your story)?
  5. How would you feel if this dream came true? If it didn’t?

The Limits of These Dates

If you or your partner has insecure attachment, taking the time to dialogue and get to know each other isn’t enough simply because your past wounds are reactivated at the level of your survival system—namely your nervous system—and in those moments, even if you know your partner’s differences, it’s your survival automatism that takes over.

So yes, these dates are extremely important for choosing each other, but they’re not sufficient to build a healthy and peaceful relationship.

For me, you need to do deep work on your relationship patterns through the body and learn to choose the appropriate response when your survival mechanism is activated, because generally it’s in the relationship that all your attachment mechanisms resurface.

You can watch the free webinar titled “How to Free Yourself from Relationship Patterns That Prevent You from Being Happy in Love” for this purpose.

For You

FREE WEBINAR

"How to Free Yourself from Patterns That Prevent Us from Being Happy in Love"

Sign up now for my newsletter and receive the webinar replay.

* Required fields

If you subscribe to my newsletter, you will also receive offers. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please read my Privacy Policy to see how I handle data.

To Go Further

If you want to explore the topic further and understand why your discussions go in circles, you have my book Happy Couples…Dare to Address Topics That Upset available in all bookstores.

Contrary to popular belief, couples that last aren't those who avoid conflicts but those who know how to navigate them. The book Happy Couples...Dare to Address Topics That Upset explains how to transform your tensions into connection in 5 steps!

Going further

🌿 CULTIVATING LOVE — if you’re in a relationship

A 5-month program to transform your relationship, rediscover complicity, communication, and the joy of being together every day.

It includes modules to do at your own pace as a duo or solo, the option to be coached by email in complete confidentiality, the option to add individual coaching sessions, as well as the Past Day option to deprogram relationship patterns through the body if you feel your wounded inner children are taking up a lot of space in your conflicts

CULTIVATING LOVE

Sandy Kaufmann

is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “ S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.

Facebook

Instagram

Youtube

Apple

Spotify

Sandy Kaufmann

Sandy Kaufmann est thérapeute psycho-corporelle et coach, basée en Suisse. Elle est l'auteure de deux livres publiés aux Éditions Eyrolles ("S'ouvrir à l'amour" et "Les couples heureux...osent aborder les sujets qui fâchent") et a accompagné plus de 600 personnes. Elle est la créatrice de la méthode de Déprogrammation Somatique et anime le podcast "S'ouvrir à l'amour", classé dans le top 50 français de la catégorie relations.