Psychologist: People in the happiest relationships talk about 5 things every day—that most neglect

One of the most common myths about long-term relationships is that couples eventually run out of things to say. It’s easy to believe: Life gets busy, routines take over and conversations become more about logistics than connection.

As a psychologist who studies couples, and based on my own experience being happily married, I know how tricky communication can become if you’re convinced there’s nothing left to say. But couples in healthy relationships make a habit of talking about things that matter, every single day.

Their conversations stay fresh, connected and meaningful because they never stop learning about each other. Here are five things people in the happiest relationships talk to each other about every day — that most people neglect.

1. The state of their relationship

Couples in thriving relationships always make a point to check in and make sure the other partner is happy.

On some days, that means asking: “Do you feel loved? Supported? Connected?” Other days, it’s about expressing appreciation, sharing a laugh over a favorite memory or talking about something they’re looking forward to doing together.

Having these daily check-ins help prevent small misunderstandings from growing into larger issues.

2. What they’re currently into

In the strongest relationships, both partners stay curious about what excites the other. It could be a song they can’t stop listening to, a book they’ve been devouring, a hobby they’re exploring or even a TikTok that made them laugh.

Regardless of whether their interests overlap, they stay curious about each other’s passions. This is what keeps the spark alive.

Over their years together, these little updates remind one another of perhaps the most important thing to remember in a relationship: “We’re constantly growing and evolving, and we’re doing it together.”

3. Their future dreams

Happy couples are never stuck in the present or past. They often have conversations about long-term goals: owning a home, traveling more, starting a business or raising kids.

They also don’t shy away from less practical, more whimsical topics, like what they’d do with a year off, how they’d renovate their dream kitchen or where they’d go if money wasn’t a concern.

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Discussing dreams, no matter how realistic or farfetched, keeps the relationship future-oriented by instilling a joint sense of purpose and possibility. Even if a dream can’t be acted on right away, talking it over allows them to keep track of each other’s values.

4. Their fears and stressors

Happy couples aren’t uncomfortable bringing up what’s bothering them. A healthy relationship should feel like a safe space where couples can work through their troubles together as a team.

Whether it’s a tough day at work, a lingering insecurity or even a fear about the relationship itself, they trust their partner to respond with empathy.

Over time, this daily practice of being emotionally honest builds a rock-solid sense of safety. Both partners will never feel like they have to carry their baggage alone.

5. Their random thoughts

Even a half-formed musing can be a fun way to connect. Happy couples never think twice about sharing their random ideas: their shower thoughts, their “what-ifs,” their “this just popped into my head” theories.

And these don’t always have to be deep or profound. In fact, they’re usually pretty silly, weird or seemingly irrelevant. Adding a little bit of playfulness and spontaneity into every conversation also makes space for laughter and even intimacy.

I always remind couples that a big part of building a successful relationship is about being intentional with the conversations you choose to have. Couples who stay connected day after day create a shared space for curiosity, growth and joy.

Mark Travers, PhD, is a psychologist who specializes in relationships. He holds degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the lead psychologist at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching. He is also the curator of the popular mental health and wellness website, Therapytips.org.

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Couple lost $25K life savings on their bankrupt startup—6 years later, they sold it for $24 million

Mike and Kass Lazerow started the year 2000 on a high. Fresh off their honeymoon, the couple successfully sold their startup that tracked golf scores, Golf.com, in January of that year.

But six months later, they had almost nothing to show for the sale, and were scrambling to buy the company back.

“We had put our whole savings, a combined $25,000, in,” Kass, now 54, says. “I was angry.”

The entrepreneurial couple say they were able to buy back Golf.com and eventually sell it to Time Warner for $24 million in 2006. But in 2000, they lost nearly everything, including some friends from the fallout, they say.

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They had sold the company to Chipshot, a fast-growing e-commerce retailer that sold custom golf clubs. With nearly $50 million in venture funding, Chipshot was backed by major investors including Sequoia Capital and Oracle Venture Fund and gearing up to go public when it acquired Golf.com and its 35 employees for a reported $250,000 in cash and 3 million shares of Chipshot stock, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In late July, however, a funding round for the company fell through. That’s when Mike, now 51, says he got the call from Chipshot CEO Brian Sroub: The company was headed toward bankruptcy, and there was no money left.

“We had sold the business,” Mike says. “So we had employees who weren’t going to get paid.”

All of Golf.com’s assets had been consolidated under Chipshot through the deal, including Mike and Kass, who stayed on to manage their Golf.com team. When Chipshot went bankrupt just a few months later, Golf.com went bankrupt too, Kass says.

Mike and Kass say they also lost the life savings they invested in Golf.com. They didn’t pay themselves a salary before the acquisition, and nearly all of the deal was paid in Chipshot stock, which became close to worthless after the company declared bankruptcy.

What really “sucked,” Kass says, was having to tell family and friends who helped fund the company that their investments were gone as well.

Starting over from scratch

The Lazerows didn’t want to just give up on their concept. Mike says they almost immediately decided to try and buy the company back. In three months, they put together a new investment group and reacquired the company for “a bargain-basement price,” of $500,000, according to WSJ.

“I’m a super competitive person, and I just could not take this loss,” Kass says. “I knew immediately I wanted to try to redo it and start over.”

For two years, Golf.com “was mostly dead and partly alive,” Kass says. “We were limping.” At one point, the company was down to four people: Mike, Kass, their third co-founder Mike Casper and one other employee.

Then, momentum began to shift. Tiger Woods, a young phenom at the time, was captivating the world. With back-to-back Masters Tournament wins in 2001 and 2002, advertisers flocked to the golf market, seeking places to run targeted campaigns — and Golf.com became a go-to destination, Mike Lazerow says.

Time Inc., the publisher of Golf Magazine, took notice. “Mike was going up against them in every ad buy and winning,” Kass says. “He was kicking a–.”

Realizing Golf Magazine needed a stronger online presence, Time Inc. made a bid and ultimately acquired Golf.com in 2006. Kass says the three founders received $1.8 million each from the $24 million acquisition.

Having the tolerance to suffer

Looking back on the decision to buy back Golf.com and start over, Kass says, “I think we were just stupid, to tell you the truth. We didn’t know any better, and we were OK with suffering.”

They knew they didn’t want traditional office jobs and felt a sense of purpose in creating and following through on their original vision, Kass says.

To be successful, founders need a tolerance for suffering that’s “certainty higher than most people today coming into the market,” Kass says. The Lazerows went on to sell their next company, Buddy Media, for $745 million in 2012. Now, they support other founders through personal equity investments and give advice in their new book, “Shoveling S—.”

“We start things because it’s where we find our purpose,” Mike Lazerow says. “The best founders learn to love the misery, the suffering.”

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I asked 6,000 people what makes someone ‘cool’—or uncool. They agreed on 6 personality traits

Whether you’re in San Francisco, Santiago, Sydney or Seoul, one thing is universal: People want to be seen as cool. But what does “cool” mean? And does it differ from country to country?

My colleagues Todd Pezzuti, Jinjie Chen and I attempted to answer these questions in a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. We asked nearly 6,000 people, ages 17 to 75, across 12 countries to describe what makes someone cool (or uncool).

Each respondent rated either a person they considered cool or a person they didn’t across 15 personality traits: agreeable, conscientious, extroverted, open, calm, adventurous, autonomous, capable, conforming, hedonistic, powerful, secure, traditional, universalistic and warm.

In every country, despite cultural and geographic differences, six traits characterized cool people.

1. Autonomous

Most people follow the rules and strive to do what is expected. But cool people do things their own way.

Think Steve Jobs, who ignored industry standards to help create products like the Macintosh, iTunes and the iPhone. All these things changed how people interact with technology, music and each other.

Cool people aren’t merely deviants. They break the rules in a way that seems helpful or appropriate, like Robin Hood, who stole from the rich to feed the poor.

2. Open

Cool people question convention to pursue unusual experiences and ideas. Albert Einstein became one of the most influential and coolest scientists by pioneering a new way to think about how the world works.

More recently, Billie Eilish has become one of the most exciting artists of the 21^st century by experimenting with musical genres.

3. Adventurous

Rather than comfort and safety, cool people seek out the new, the risky and the exciting.

Literary character Dean Moriarity became a cool icon by restlessly pursuing new people, places and experiences in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

And Anthony Bourdain set the standard for culinary cool by trotting the globe to pursue the most interesting dishes and dives.

4. Hedonistic

Cool people know how to enjoy life, sometimes to a fault. They chase pleasure in the moment with little regard for the future.

Think of Hunter S. Thompson’s characters in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “The Rum Diaries.” Or real-life legends like Janis Joplin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Tupac Shakur, whose fast-living styles became part of their mythos.

5. Extroverted

Being cool means being seen. Cool people may march to their own beat, but they share their ideas, experiences, fashions and styles with others — and increasingly, with the world online.

The Fonz from “Happy Days” epitomized old-school social charisma. Today, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson exemplifies cool because he connects with athletes, businessmen, musicians, actors and even Disney princesses.

6. Powerful

Cool people have power and presence. They command attention and influence others, not through force, but by sheer magnetism.

And because they’re both extroverted and powerful, they drive change. Beyonce has shaped the direction of music, fashion, feminism and social discourse over the past 20 years, just as Muhammad Ali revolutionized sports and civil rights with his dominance, confidence and conviction.

Chasing coolness

Being seen as cool promises admiration and respect. But it requires questioning conventions and taking risks, traits that many people don’t have.

Some traits, of course, are malleable. For example, anyone can become more extroverted, adventurous and risk-taking through effort and practice. The bigger challenge is that most risks don’t work out. But when you discover new possibilities and communicate these discoveries, you’ll have a better chance of moving culture forward.

Caleb Warren is an associate professor at the Robert A. Eckert Endowed Chair in Marketing at the University of Arizona. He thinks about what makes things funny, what makes things cool and what helps people reach their goals. He has been published in academic journals, including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. Caleb teaches undergraduate, masters, MBA, and PhD students how to communicate and understand consumer behavior.

Target’s next CEO started as an intern—and rose up the ranks over 22 years

Twenty-two years ago, Michael Fiddelke was a finance intern at Target. Now, he’s set to become the company’s next CEO.

Fiddelke, currently Target’s chief operating officer, will take over the top position and join the board of directors on February 1, 2026, the company announced on Wednesday. He’ll replace Brian Cornell, who’s run the retailer for the last 11 years — overseeing it through record stock highs in 2021 and an ongoing market slump essentially ever since.

When Fiddelke interned at Target in 2003, he was a graduate student at Northwestern University studying business administration and finance. Target hired him as a full-time analyst the following year, and he got promoted or changed jobs within the Minneapolis-based company roughly every two years, all the way up to his CEO appointment.

His resume at Target between 2007 and 2024 includes several director titles, vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president and chief financial officer. “I can tell you that the intern that walked through those doors down the road 22 years ago wouldn’t have predicted a Target path that leads to today,” Fiddelke, 49, said in a video on LinkedIn on Wednesday.

Fiddelke’s job as CEO may not be easy. For the past four years, Target’s sales have been generally flat, a trend that the company’s leaders have described as a blip — but customers, former employees, vendors and analysts say is largely a result of subpar experiences in leanly staffed stores and a Trump-era turn away from diversity efforts, CNBC reported on July 15.

“They have kind of lost their identity,” said one former employee, who worked at Target for nearly 10 years.

Target’s fiscal second-quarter results exceeded Wall Street’s earnings expectations, but its full-year outlook still predicts a single percentage point decline in sales.

“Getting Target back to growth is my top priority,” Fiddelke wrote in his LinkedIn post. “We’ll need to operate differently, move with urgency and focus, and make bold choices to get there. We have the foundation to build new momentum, and I’m eager to accelerate work already underway and find new ways to deliver the incredible products and experiences our guests expect from us.”

When Fiddelke takes over, he’ll join the likes of Nike’s Elliott Hill, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and General Motors’ Mary Barra as people who went on to lead the companies they joined as interns. His decades of experience at Target during both high and low periods help him “understand this business” and what makes it “distinctly unique,” he said on Wednesday during a call with reporters.

“I know you’re not satisfied with where Target is today. Neither am I,” he said in the LinkedIn video, speaking to consumers. “Getting us back to growth is my No. 1 priority and I’m eager to get to work.”

Dad of 11-year-old college graduate: Here’s my No. 1 non-negotiable parenting rule

Much of Rafael Perales’ daily life revolves around his 11-year-old daughter’s education. Considering that the pre-teen is already a college graduate, that’s very much by design.

In May, his daughter Alisa earned two associate degrees — in mathematics and general science — from Crafton Hills College, a public community college in Yucaipa, California, where she matriculated as an 8-year-old. She’s set to start at the University of California, Riverside this fall, studying for a bachelor’s degree in computer science so she can eventually work in the tech industry, she says.

Rafael, 51, left his full-time career as a trial attorney in San Bernardino, California, when Alisa was just 1 year old so the single dad could prioritize and educating her. His career sacrifice is a reflection of his top non-negotiable parenting rule, he says: “Kids come first. She comes before everything, including myself. I’m pretty far down the list of important things.”

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When Rafael initially chose to leave his career, Alisa was already mastering her ABCs and counting into the hundreds, he says. His other child, a now-32-year-old son, was already out of the house and working as a plumber’s apprentice. When he thought about the potential benefits of Alisa receiving one-on-one attention and tutelage from her dad, the choice “became pretty easy,” he says.

Without his law income, the family struggled financially at times. They stayed “afloat” with the rent from a commercial property Rafael owned in Yermo, California, which he’d previously bought with a “modest inheritance” from his own parents, he says.

Even in moments when he worried about paying the bills, he remained certain that fully focusing on Alisa’s education was “the right thing to do,” he says. “I always had confidence that I would find a way to make it, no matter what.”

Establishing a regular routine

By age 2, Alisa could read on her own, says Rafael. He home-schooled her until she was 8 — when she completed the coursework required by California to earn her high school diploma — choosing from different curricula and online teaching guides based on her interests and skill level.

As Alisa’s home-school teacher, Rafael worked to establish a regular routine for her, he says — which experts generally endorse as a way to help kids feel more secure while learning and playing. They typically stuck to a schedule of instruction and schoolwork from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., five days per week, he says.

Rafael’s double role as dad and teacher helped keep Alisa focused, rather than ”[goofing] around too much” — but he was also conscious of the need to avoid overworking her, he says. Alisa frequently rode her scooter to friends’ homes in their neighborhood for after-school playdates, and on most Wednesdays, Rafael took her to Disneyland in nearby Anaheim to give her “a release valve” to look forward to each week, he says.

He also incorporated Alisa’s learning into vacations, visiting places like the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore to learn about subjects like history and geography, he says. “We weren’t really too different [from a public school] in the amount of studying we were doing. But we were definitely, I think, being more productive,” says Rafael.

Now, Alisa’s future plans look like those of many a recent community college graduate. She’s looking forward to “meeting new people and making new friends” at UC Riverside, traveling around the world and eventually working in the tech industry, possibly running her own startup, she says.

Since she’s still just 11, Rafael intends to accompany her for most of those plans — chaperoning her travel, and if Alisa launches a startup, he’ll likely be her co-founder, she says. She’ll live at home and commute to UC Riverside, and Rafael will wait on campus during her classes, which means he’s unlikely to return to a full-time day job anytime soon, he adds.

“When people ask: ‘Are you going back to work?’ [I say], ‘Yeah, I might slow down and relax and do something like a 9-to-5 again someday.’ But, not now,” says Rafael.

The value of quality time with your kids

Many parenting experts do caution parents not to completely disregard their own well-being, even when prioritizing their child’s health and development. Those who do risk burnout and a host of other mental health problems, according to the American Psychological Association.

But children in any educational setting can benefit from parents taking an active role in their learning and development, research shows. Kids in regular school environments whose parents who are invested and involved in their education typically show better overall academic performance, according to a 2011 study by researchers from Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Parents who consistently set aside time for hands-on learning activities at home can help their kids achieve higher test scores, and increased motivation and engagement at school, other studies show.

The quality of the time you spend with your kids — whether on educational pursuits or leisure activities — typically matters more than the quantity of time, child psychologist Tovah Klein told CNBC Make It in March 2023. Quality time is a major factor in raising kids who are happy, confident and motivated to succeed, she said.

“It almost always could be said that less is more for children. They just want to be with you,” said Klein, the director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development. “It’s always about the quality of the relationship [and] the quality of the interactions.”