When you hear “report card,” does your stomach drop or do you feel fired up? Do you like being graded, or do you hate the idea of it?

Andrew and I have mixed feelings about report cards, but we love a metric. We love data.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that at the start of every year, we sit down for a goals and vision-setting meeting. We review how the previous year went and dream about the year ahead, and a lot of it is data-oriented.

We aren’t overly meticulous, but we have a pretty good idea of how many times we hung out with friends, how many dates we went on, whether we took too many or too few family trips, and if we traveled too much for work. Were we intimate enough? Did we spend our time where we said we wanted to?

Those data points have been massive for us, and we’ve shared more about how we do this in our book, The Courage to Commit. We also broke it down on our website too - click here 🙂

So, I think the consensus is that we like data, but the words “report card” still give us flashbacks. Hahaha!

Now that our kids are entering the report-card stage, it has been so funny to see how their different personalities respond to grades. One is super fired up by it, while another isn’t affected nearly as much. It will be interesting to see how the third does!

It’s funny because Andrew and I can both use something like a report card to motivate us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we love it.

Anyway, this got us thinking: Could we reuse the idea of a report card as a way to check in on our marriage halfway through the year? We wanted to keep it lighthearted while still taking the conversation seriously.

So, of course, we recorded it for the podcast.

We say this all the time, but the podcast has been such a great way to connect with you all. Selfishly, it also gives us an hour every week to sit down and spend intentional time together. We are so grateful that we get to do that.

Some days, it’s rough. Other days, it has been massive for our marriage. But even on the rough days, we grow from it.

We broke our marriage report card down into ten categories: friendship, communication, conflict, affection, physical intimacy, parenting, finances, household/mental load, faith/values/purpose, and fun.

Here are a few of the questions we asked each other:

We love having these kinds of conversations in our marriage and sharing them with you all so you can try them in your own relationships, too. We also love taking these “metrics” and applying them to other areas of our lives, like friendships, parenting, and personal health goals.

So, is a report card helpful, even if it doesn’t always feel good?

Would a relationship report card fire you up or make your stomach drop? Hit reply and let us know!

— Andrew East and Shawn Johnson East

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