“I Know It’s Kind Of Harsh To Some Of You”: Woman Explains How She Saved Her Relationship By Treating Her Boyfriend Like An Underperforming Employee

When people say relationships are work, they generally mean that for them to succeed, both parties need to make an effort, not take each other for granted, and so on. After all, your partner or spouse isn’t a parent (or child) that takes care of you or needs to be constantly managed.

But this couple decided to take the work aspect of relationships very seriously. In a viral TikTok, a woman details how she used management techniques when she and her boyfriend were struggling. She put him “on probation” and used daily and weekly task sheets to help him focus. And, perhaps surprisingly, it worked and they are still together.

The one thing most people don’t expect in their relationships are weekly performance reviews

Image credits: nadeenhui

“I’m going to share with you guys how I PIP’d my boyfriend in real life”

“For those of you not in tech, PIP stands for Performance Improvement Plan and it’s what you get put on when they’re about to fire you. So my boyfriend and I were having a lot of issues in the beginning, like a lot. And ultimately, I felt like we weren’t compatible even though we had a lot of love for each other. So as a last straw, we decided to do, like, a performance improvement plan. And before you come at me, I know it’s kind of harsh to some of you, but he’s an engineer and sometimes it’s really hard to communicate with him without using something that he can already relate to, plus he kind of liked it.”

This woman was going through a rough patch with her boyfriend, so she implemented a probation period and weekly meetings to help their relationship

Image credits: Parabol (not the actual photo)

“So we had a shared note with daily and weekly tasks he needed to do and a set of things that he needed to work on. And it worked out really well”

“Like, even now, for our household chores, things that he’s responsible for, we use a Kanban board that has been the only thing that has stuck and works. Like anything I need done, I just add it onto the Kanban board and he’ll get it done. But if I just tell him, he’ll forget about it. We also do weekly retrospectives where we check in with each other at the end of each week to see how we’re doing and that’s my favorite.”

You can watch the full video here

@nadeenhui we started living together really early on in our relationship so we saw all of each others living habits and lifestyles super quickly. and i honestly think it worked out better this way because we could decide if we actually wanted to work on these lifestyle habits together or split up. since it was so new, there wouldn’t be much love lost and we’d still be friends. but ultimately, we decided that we wanna stay together, and these lifestyle changes were for the better so why not do it? i had to learn to be more accepting and easy going, and he had to learn to be more tidy and considerate of shared spaces. #relationshipadvice #softwareengineerlife #lifeintech #girlsintech ♬ original sound – nadeen