Getting to Know You Questions for Couples: How Well Do You Know Each Other?

About the technique

Love maps are John Gottman’s term for the part of the mind where a person keeps knowledge of their partner’s world: their history, worries, hopes, current stresses and preferences. In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, enhancing love maps is the first principle (Gottman & Silver, 1999). Partner-knowledge question games put the idea into practice by asking open questions about each other and rewarding curiosity rather than correct answers. This tool is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Gottman Institute.

The rationale is that partners who know each other’s inner world are better prepared for stress and change, and that the habit of asking keeps that knowledge current (Gottman & Silver, 1999). Gottman Method Couples Therapy, which includes love map work, improved marital adjustment and intimacy in a small randomized trial with 16 couples (Davoodvandi et al., 2018). Love map exercises on their own have not been tested, so the exercise is best treated as practice-based within a method that has early, limited trial support.

It suits couples in therapy or as homework between sessions, and it can lighten an early session while showing the therapist how partners respond to not knowing something about each other. Frame wrong guesses as information, not failure, and stop if guessing turns into scorekeeping or a painful knowledge gap needs more space. It is not for relationships with violence, coercive control or active high conflict, where disclosures could be used against a partner, so screen before assigning it.