We met in 2020. COVID was months in. We lived an hour apart, and the legal limit was 5km from home.

Our first date was on Zoom.

No coffee shop. No reading the room across a table. Just a screen and the particular attention you have to pay when you can't fill silence by looking anywhere else. So we asked each other questions. Real ones. The kind where you have to think before you answer.

We did this for weeks — over video calls, over voice messages, through the slow lifting and retightening of restrictions. Questions became how we knew each other before we were ever in the same room.

When we finally were, the questions didn't stop. They still haven't.

What six years of questions has actually taught us

We moved interstate together. Moved in. Got engaged. Now we're expecting our first child. Through all of it, questions have been how we've stayed close — not as a formal practice, but as a habit. At dinner, one of us pulls out the app and reads one aloud. In the car. On the couch at the end of a week when there isn't much to report but something still needs saying.

Here's what that practice has taught us:

Questions make you pay attention. Not to what you think you know about someone, but to what's actually true for them right now. People change. A question you've answered before has a different answer a year later.

The early ones feel light. They aren't. "What do you believe now that you didn't a year ago?" sounds easy. It requires you to have actually changed your mind about something. That alone tells you a lot about a person.

Depth 3 and 4 are where it happens. We depth-label our cards. The lower depths warm you up. By depth 3, you're in real territory — things you've thought but not said, things you believe but have never been asked to name.

You never run out. We've been together six years and the questions still surface things. Not because we don't know each other. Because knowing someone well doesn't mean you've asked everything. It means the answers go deeper.

Arthur Aron's 36 questions

We've used the 36 questions too — not on a second date at a wine bar like the canonical story goes, but later, when we finally could be in the same room. They work. Aron's research holds: mutual vulnerability, asked incrementally, builds something real.

Greg completed Gottman Level 1 relationship coaching and is working through Level 2. The Gottman Institute's research — four decades of data on couples — draws the same conclusion Aron does from a different angle: the quality of a couple's conversation predicts more about their future than almost anything else. Not how much they talk. How well they listen, and how honest they're willing to be.

The full list is here if you want it: The 36 questions to fall in love →

Why we built GoDeeper

We looked for an app that did what questions had done for us. We didn't find one.

There were apps with streaks and scores and algorithms deciding what you should talk about. We wanted something that got out of the way. Something quiet. Something that trusted the conversation to do the work.

GoDeeper is the deck we wished had existed in 2020, when we were an hour apart and the only thing we could do was talk.

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Greg & Kate · Newcastle · 2026