Do You Review Your Netflix Subscription More Often Than Your Relationship?

We review our finances, our careers, our health and apparently every subscription we've ever accidentally signed up for.

But the relationship at the centre of our life? We often just assume it's still working.

Let me ask you something.

When was the last time you actually reviewed your relationship?

Not after an argument.

Not because something was wrong.

Not during one of those slightly terrifying conversations that begins with “We need to talk.”

I mean deliberately stopping and asking each other:

How are we doing?

It's strange when you think about it.

We review almost everything else.

Our performance at work. Our finances. Our health. Our goals. The mortgage. The insurance. The car.

Even Netflix occasionally gets hauled before the household committee to justify its continued existence.

But relationships?

We can spend years assuming that because we're still together, everything must be fine.

Still together and still connected are not necessarily the same thing.

The slow drift is the dangerous bit.

Most relationships don't suddenly change on a Tuesday afternoon.

Life simply starts filling the space between two people.

Work gets busy. Children need things. Parents get older.

Money needs managing.

Someone needs to book the dentist, organise dinner, answer the WhatsApp, arrange the holiday and remember that the bloody dishwasher tablets have run out again.

You become extremely efficient at running a life together.

And sometimes, without either person really noticing, running the life becomes the relationship.

There doesn't need to be a betrayal.

There doesn't need to be a dramatic event.

Sometimes there's just distance.

A little less conversation.

A little more assumption.

A little less curiosity about the person sitting opposite you.

Until one day you realise you know what's on the family calendar for the next three months, but you're not entirely sure what's going on inside your partner's head.

We give work more attention.

Think about the preparation that can go into an annual performance review.

You look back over the year.

What worked?

What didn't?

What did you achieve?

Where are you going next?

What needs to change?

You prepare. You reflect. You have the conversation.

And yet many of us can go years without bringing anything like that level of intention to our relationship.

Which is slightly absurd when you consider the stakes.

We review the things we manage. We assume the things we love will somehow manage themselves.

They don't.

Functioning can look a lot like fine.

This is perhaps the part that's easiest to miss. A relationship can function brilliantly while the connection underneath it is becoming thinner.

Bills get paid.

Dinner happens.

Holidays get booked.

Family events are attended.

You know who is picking up what and where everyone needs to be.

From the outside, nothing looks particularly wrong.

But functionality isn't intimacy.

And routine isn't necessarily connection.

I used to describe it rather less elegantly:

If you're driving the bus and nobody else is on it, where the hell are you going?

Crude perhaps.

But still true.

You cannot create a shared direction if only one person knows where you're supposedly heading.

Maybe the question isn't

“Are we okay?”

Because Are we okay? is incredibly easy to answer.

Yeah. We're fine.

Conversation over.

Perhaps the more interesting questions are different.

What has felt good between us lately?

Where have we lost each other a little?

What do you want more of?

What are you worrying about that I might not know?

Has anything changed for you?

And perhaps the biggest one:

Are we still building a life that both of us want to live?

Those aren't crisis questions.

They're relationship questions.

I think about this differently now.

I've learned that you can't drag a relationship towards clarity on your own.

You can't create shared goals for a party of one.

And you certainly can't assume that because two people once wanted the same future, they'll automatically continue wanting exactly the same things forever.

People change.

Life changes.

Relationships have to accommodate both.

These days, I value the check-in far more than I once did.

Not some formal annual summit involving PowerPoint and a hotel conference room. God forbid.

Just honesty.

Calling something when it doesn't feel right.

Talking before irritation becomes resentment.

Asking what's changing rather than assuming nothing has.

And sometimes deliberately stepping outside ordinary life long enough to remember who the two people inside it actually are.

The Relationship MOT.

I still rather like the idea of a Relationship MOT.

Not because love should become another bloody item on the annual maintenance schedule.

But because there is something powerful about occasionally looking at what you've built together and asking whether you're both still happy living in it.

Dinner might be enough.

A weekend away.

A long walk.

A bottle of wine and the photos on your phone from the year you've just lived.

Look at where you've been.

Talk about what happened.

What was brilliant?

What was difficult?

What changed?

What do you want the next year to contain?

And listen to the answers.

Not to fix each other.