Every Marriage Needs...A Meeting?

Date night is so last year. What you ought to want is a meeting night. It may not be the sexiest concept, but listen up: This couple swears it’s the way to guarantee true happiness, long term.

- Allison Sweet Grant and Adam Grant

Last fall, adam, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, made the mistake of agreeing to do an “Ask Me Anything” session with a class of undergrads. It was a course on organizational behavior—psychology applied to work—but the students went straight for love. “What advice do you have for romantic relationships?” they wanted their business professor to answer.

The students were expecting something profound. Maybe something Freudian, or at least Dr. Ruthian. Instead, they got this: “My wife and I have a weekly meeting.”

Weekly meeting? Sounds like work. Like, your actual work—a part of your job you’d never want to bring home, same as those unmarked leftovers from the office fridge. But it’s not akin to that at all, we promise.

It started when Adam got back from a long trip and there was a giant list of household stuff we had to discuss. The gardener had said twice that he’d caught the groundhog, but he hadn’t— and Allison just couldn’t deal with it anymore (the groundhog or the gardener). Plus, she really wanted Adam to get the DVR working again so she could watch The Fault in Our Stars for the 23rd time. Meanwhile, Adam desperately needed Allison’s help writing a joke for a speech and making sure his shoes and belt didn’t clash. So we sat down and went through the list together. We found that when we got all of these things out of the way in one sitting, we didn’t have to nag each other throughout the week about them. Then we decided to make it a habit. Taking the time to schedule a regular, quiet, uninterrupted discussion to figure out who was doing what helped ease anxiety about household tasks and eliminated loose ends (like: Oh, wait, I thought you were taking care of that groundhog).