'How was your day' is the most asked and least productive question in domestic life. It gets 'fine' roughly every time, and both people experience this as evidence that there was nothing to say. There was plenty; the question just had no handle on it.
The reason it fails is that it asks for a summary, and summaries are boring to produce. Nobody has a day that compresses well. Arthur Aron's closeness studies — the ones that became the famous thirty-six questions — found that escalating specificity is what generates closeness between strangers, and the mechanism is not intimacy-by-topic so much as difficulty-of-deflection. A specific question is harder to answer with nothing.
So the swap is mechanical rather than emotional. 'What was the most annoying part of today' gets an answer. So does 'who did you talk to,' 'what are you dreading tomorrow,' 'did anything make you laugh.' None of these are deep. That is the point — they are small enough to answer honestly when you are tired, and the honest small answer is what the vague big question was fishing for in the first place.
There is a second half to this that gets skipped. Having asked something specific, the thing to do with the answer is ask about the answer. Most conversations at this hour go one question deep and then swap to the other person's turn, which is fair and also why they stay shallow. One follow-up — 'why did that bother you more than usual' — does more than another new question. Shelly Gable's research on how partners respond to each other's news found the same thing from the other direction: the response that builds a bond is the actively curious one, not the merely positive one.
Retire 'how was your day' for a week. Replace it with one specific question, and commit to asking one follow-up before you take your turn. Notice how much longer the conversation runs.
