Couples journal prompts
A couples journal works best as a record rather than a conversation. Each of you writes your own account of the same week, in your own words, and neither of you is obliged to answer the other. What you end up with is two voices on one page, which is a truer picture of a shared life than either half on its own.
How to use these
Pick the same evening each week, write your half before you read theirs, and keep it a record rather than a negotiation. The hard conversation deserves a room and a face; this page is for what the week actually held.
The week you both had
The plain record, and the half that is worth the most in five years. Detail beats significance every time.
- What did this week actually consist of, hour by hour, on an ordinary day?
- What did the two of you eat, watch, or listen to more than once?
- What made you laugh this week, and was it funny to anyone else?
- Who did you see, and what were they going through?
- What did the flat or the house look like this week, honestly?
- What was the weather doing, and where were you when you noticed it?
- What did money look like this week, in plain numbers?
- What is one small thing they did this week that you would forget by next month?
What went unsaid
Written for yourself, not at them. Nobody has to reply to any of this, and a week where the honest answer is "nothing much" is a fine week.
- What did you not say this week, and why did you leave it?
- What are you carrying at the moment that has nothing to do with them?
- When did you feel most like yourself this week, and were they there?
- What did you need this week that you did not ask for?
- What are you grateful for that you have stopped mentioning because it is ordinary?
- What did you get wrong this week, in your own account of it?
- What are you looking forward to that you have not told them about yet?
- What has changed about you this year that they may not have noticed?
What you want to remember about this
Write these last. They are the lines the two of you will actually stop on, years from now, and they are the reason the journal is worth keeping.
- What is this stretch of your life going to be called, when you look back on it?
- What do the two of you do that no one else would understand?
- What is a sentence they said this week that you want kept?
- What was hard this week that you would like to be able to say you got through?
- What are you building at the moment, and is it going the way you thought?
- What would you want a version of the two of you in ten years to remember about now?
- What is the best hour the two of you had this week, and what was happening in it?
- If this week were the only one anybody read, what would it get right about you both?
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