In the third episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz, the marriage counselor, psychotherapist, and author warns that most relationships don’t show signs of failing at the end. They show them at the beginning — when no one is asking the hard questions.

What are those six questions you should ask before committing to any relationship? These aren’t surface-level compatibility questions; they are designed to take you and your partner into a level of emotional intimacy most couples never reach.

What does it mean if your partner won’t answer them? What can you tell by the way your partner does answer them?

Listen to this episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz and find out!

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You should never commit to any relationship until you ask these six questions.

Here’s what happens. You meet someone. You feel exactly what you were hoping to feel. You get excited. You feel this great connection. The endorphins are raging. Your interest is piqued. Your heart’s engaged. You think to yourself, hmm, maybe they’re the one. This could work. You’re really enjoying each other’s company.

Time goes on. Maybe the weeks turn into months. And after a number of months, you may be thinking to yourself, you want to commit to this relationship. And you make a commitment. Some more months go by, and you think, maybe we’ll get married, or maybe we’ll move in together. The process of commitment has begun.

But what are we committing to once again? We’re committing to the outcome. You’re saying I’m in a relationship, but you still don’t sufficiently know each other yet. You haven’t really asked each other the right questions.

My name is Mel Schwartz, and after 30,000 hours of counseling couples, I can tell it to you for sure, this is the pattern: Two people sharing a pillow at night, but not opening up to really sharing with each other what’s in their thoughts, what’s in their feelings, really getting to know each other sufficiently. We don’t talk to each other about really important things. Death, life, politics, love, children, parenting, identity. We don’t share it.

Today, I’m going to provide you with six questions that you can ask each other, which is going to take you so much deeper into knowing each other on emotionally intimate levels that most couples actually go in a lifetime. Ask these questions before you think about committing to a relationship, and you’ll either discover that you have a foundation for a relationship that might actually prosper and benefit you, or you realize there’s nowhere to go with this relationship and save yourself years of disappointment and confusion and wondering who you were to think that they were the right person for you.

Let’s uncover some uncommon sense, and please feel free to leave me a note and let me know what other questions you’d like to have asked of each other in addition to the ones I’m going to share with you.

I’m going to delve today into some really important essential questions that we tend not to ask each other out of fear of upsetting that apple cart. By the way, I’m making up the number six. It could be 12 or 14 or an infinite number of questions. But for today, I’ve created six questions just to illustrate the importance of asking different kinds of questions for different streams and directions of a relationship so we can really know each other from a different perspective.

We commit to relationships in my professional and personal experience very prematurely. In other words, we might meet, date, feel what we hope to feel, have a great attraction to each other. We may even feel in love or we’re sexually compatible and we enjoy each other’s company. That’s all a great start. This should be the point where we say to ourselves instead of committing to the outcome, again we commit to the process. This is the point where we think, I need to get to know this person more deeply. And it’s not just about enjoying each other. It’s about truly getting to know each other and sharing yourself with each other, opening your vulnerability to each other, not pretending to be someone but sharing who we really are. And we don’t tend to do that. We prematurely commit to the relationship by saying things like, I’m in a relationship.

So my thesis is we commit to relationship prematurely before we truly know each other on the level that we really need to. And it’s fundamentally because we don’t ask deep important questions of each other. It’s astounding to me. I’ve worked with couples where after many, many years or decades of being in a relationship and being coupled, married or committed to each other, and they don’t know deep fundamental things about each other because they’ve never asked.

Okay, here’s question number one. Ask your future or potential partner, hey, what is the most humiliating or embarrassing experience you ever had? Would you be comfortable sharing it with me?

It’s a red flag or certainly a deep yellow flag if they’re reluctant to share it with you. Why am I saying that? If your future partner is going to withhold parts of themselves out of a fear of what you may think of them, then how’s that going to work out? How are you truly going to get to know them?

I find that hiding insecure parts of yourself can be catastrophic to your relationship. It becomes inauthentic. This is a roadblock to emotional intimacy.

If they begin to open up and share that embarrassing moment with you, great. You might then ask them questions about exploring, like how did you handle it? Did you share it with anyone else? Am I the first person to ask you this? Is this something you would have shared with me if I hadn’t asked you about it?

And then the person asking the question needs to actually do the same. Share your insecurities, your embarrassments. This should not feel like an interrogation. It should feel like a natural flowing, opening up and conversing with each other where you let your boundaries down. You’re being free to be yourself.

You might ask, have you learned anything from this experience? Have you learned how to deal with embarrassment and shame? Is this something you would hide from other people? Is this something you would hide from me? And if so, that impacts self-esteem and it impacts self-worth. And as I always say, and I’ve always related, self-esteem is a core ingredient on what happens in a relationship, what impacts the relationship. If you have one or both people who have marginal self-worth, how do you think that’s going to impact your relationship with each other?

So question one, would you share with me your most humiliating or embarrassing experience?

Question two, this is more of a vision statement for a relationship. You might ask, do you believe in sharing everything in the relationship? Do you think that there are any parts of your thoughts and feelings that you should keep separate, tucked away, and private? Of course, you shouldn’t have to share everything. That would be virtually impossible. But in a relationship, do you think there are things that you should choose to keep private?

I’m talking about those core themes of emotional and verbal intimacy here. What would you keep for me or for someone else? And why? Is it because you feel embarrassed or ashamed or judged? Would you be concerned about what I might think of you or how I might react to you? And to deepen that

Now again, I’m not suggesting you don’t have a right to certain privacy. It would be monotonous to share everything. But to not share something because you’re afraid of what the other person thinks is an issue. Why bother being in a committed relationship?

Can you appreciate the depths of these questions? If I could see and hear your private thoughts that go unexpressed, what would that tell me? What would I learn about you that I don’t currently know? What would I learn about how you’d see me and experience me?

By the way, the answer could be a very positive answer, right? It doesn’t have to be negative. But it’s a deeper reveal. Committing to a relationship should require a deeper, fuller sharing of ourselves prior to making that commitment. Otherwise, what are we really committing to?

Here’s question number three. Is there anything you long for in your life which has gone unexpressed? What are your goals, your life visions? What’s your heart’s longing? Do you think you can achieve it? Can you accomplish it? Are you afraid to go for it? What could get in the way? Tell me your secret unexpressed visions for your life and your relationships.

Now, the answers to this question will really illuminate whether both of you are on a compatible path, whether there’s a shared vision. Remember, if you have divergent visions, you’re not likely going to succeed. You’re going to derail. You don’t have to operate from the same script, but your visions have to be compatible.

Question number four. It’s about anger. What is your relationship with anger, your own anger, or other people’s anger? What was your experience of anger as a child? What do you do when you’re feeling angry? How do you process that anger? Do you express it or do you push it down and subordinate it?

If you push it down, a yellow flag turning to red, folks, it’s going to come out sideways,maybe with resentment or hostility, some other direction.

Do you act with a hair trigger and get very reactive the moment you feel angry or do you try to slow down the process and respond and share what you’re feeling? Responding here means, hey, when you said that, I noticed I was starting to feel angry. Let me tell you what was coming up for me. That would be a healthy way of communicating, wouldn’t it? So I don’t push the anger down, but I try to notice it and share it. That’s a healthy thing. I want to know that.

This exploration around anger is going to reveal your potential success at resolving issues in your relationship and past wounds, which happened before you met each other. Can you appreciate how vitally important this is?

Here’s question number five. In regard to your own identity, what you think of yourself, your own personality, what was most influential in shaping what you think of yourself, how you identify yourself, how you’ve come to know yourself? Typically, this comes from your childhood. What messages, good, bad, or in between did you receive from your parents? Were there moments that left you feeling humiliated and ashamed, scarred? Were there moments that were joyful and made you feel proud of being yourself?

Our identity needs to be known to ourself and cultivated and shared with each other, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. We’re going to be getting into a committed relationship. We’re going to become the closest partners we can be. We cannot accomplish this by protecting ourselves and not sharing ourselves fully with each other and getting into really deep dialogues without right or wrong, without fear or apprehension, but just this sense of great discovery about each other.

Ask each other, what were your disappointments in your life? What were your great accomplishments? Again, that question of what do you long for? What makes you feel disappointed? What are you doing with that disappointment? Share the core influences of your identity, what you long for, and what you’re disappointed in.

My last question for this episode is question for this episode is question number six. Can you tell me about your fears, specific and general, your fears about relationships, our relationship, fears about yourself? You could have fears of the financial. You may have fears about health. You may have fears about death. These are important things to share with each other, absolutely essential. Again, are you sensitive about what other people think of you?

Open up and share your fears with each other. What’s your relationship with these fears and insecurities? Do they impact you? Do they subordinate you? Do they overwhelm you? Do you avoid them? Do you push them away?

The issue isn’t fear. The issue is your relationship with fear. Do you have a fear about whether I’ll love you or love you forever? Do you have a fear about whether I’ll leave you? Do you have a fear about my fidelity and monogamy and whether I’ll cheat on you? What informs those fears? If you’ve had your heart broken, something I spoke about earlier, did you ever have a lover or a close person to you betray you? Do you not trust people out of that instinct to protect yourself? Do you not trust yourself?

You see what I’m getting at here? These six questions have to open up into an infinite number of questions. We have to take down the guardedness and really open up and share in a deep emotional dialogue with each other to know what is it we’re committing to in this relationship? Is this relationship we should be in with each other?

Let me share a personal story with you in which this all became a revelation for me. In my first marriage, I was married for 13 years. At that point in time, 13 years into my marriage, I had a moment’s revelation. I thought to myself, my former wife and I could not have been more different. Our tastes, our inclination, our curiosity were in opposition in every way. And I thought she hadn’t changed in those 13 years. She was actually the same person I thought I was in love with and wanted to marry and spend my life with.

So number one, I had no reason to be angry with her. She didn’t change. That opened me up to a greater revelation. Who was I 13 years earlier to think that she was right for me and would enhance my life?

I had changed. 13 years before, I was a very different man and I had a lot of insecurities. And maybe being alone is what prompted me to want to secure a relationship with her, to calm my stress and anxiety about being a certain age and being on my own. So I tricked myself. Clearly, if I had followed the advice I’m giving you today about a deeper involvement in opening up and sharing myself and yourself, we wouldn’t have headed toward marriage.

So my self-revelation here is no different than what I’m asking you to do. Cast aside your fear and your apprehension about how this will work out. You don’t want to secure a relationship that’s not going to enhance both of your lives. Throw caution to the wind, open up to it and go for it.

Forget about my six questions. Create your own questions. But go deep. Don’t play it safe. You deserve it. And you both need to have the awareness of whether this is really going to have a chance of succeeding. You owe it to yourselves.

This has been Uncommon Sense. If you want to thrive in your relationships with others and with yourself, be sure to follow the podcast and your favorite podcasting app. And if the podcast has helped you in any way, please leave a five star rating and a review.

I’m Mel Schwartz, and I’ll see you in the next one.

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