Today I want to narrow in on one set of tools that my partner and I use every day to keep our relationship thriving. These are not only tools that I use in my own relationships every single day, they’re also tools that I recommend basically all of my clients use.

Here’s why smartphone apps can play an important role in keeping your relationship humming along: the day-to-day logistics of being in a relationship, especially a long-term relationship, especially if you live together, can be kind of romance killers. There’s just a lot of little things to take care of or keep track of

It’s helpful to have systems in place for you to reduce friction in your relationship and create space for fun, adventure, spontaneity, and that’s where romance grows. Of course, our phones can also pull us apart. I know that I and many clients that I work with at times fall into the trap of being on the couches and “Instagramming and chilling,” except we never get to the “chilling” part because we’re just stuck in our feeds scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

You may technically be spending time with each other on the couch there together, but you’re not actually having a meaningful connection.

If you’re in an open or non-monogamous relationship or polyamorous relationship, you might also find yourself distracted by dating apps and your partners right there in the room with you.

Instead of our phones pulling us apart, let’s use them to bring us together!

Here are 4 apps you can use to make your relationship just a little bit easier—and that way you can get onto the fun part:

The Reminders app

has been an absolute game changer in my relationships. And it’s the one thing that has reduced the amount of

conflicts and fights and tension in my relationship just like by so much. By putting things into the reminders app that I know that I need to do around the house, instead I get them on a recurring basis, it makes it so that my partner doesn’t have to nag me to do the things that we said that we would do. It makes it so that our lives can just run smoothly on autopilot. And neither one of us feels like we have to be like the boss of the other person. I also use the reminders app to remind me to buy presents far enough in advance so that I don’t have to wait until the last minute and I set those as recurring reminders as well, so every year when it rolls around, I have a new reminder waiting for me. And I also use recurring reminders to remind me to plan date nights and other special surprises for my partners.

Now, I could remember those all on my own, and I usually do, but having reminders in my app, on my phone that I use every day, makes sure that if there’s a busy period of my life where I’ve got something else going on, or I become really stressed, that I never lose track of the things that are most important to me.

Shared Calendar App

Having a shared calendar is so much of a polyamory cliche that I almost didn’t include it in this video, but it really is so important. And so many of my clients aren’t using calendars when I first start working with them. And when they add this piece into their equation, it just makes things run a lot smoother.

There are few different ways that you can set up shared calendars.

Make sure that you actually put the things that you have going on in your life into your calendar. So that’s like your work schedule, any appointments, meetings with friends, if you have other partners, like dates that you’re going on with them.

Then, have some sort of way that you can refer back to the calendars with each other.

The sort of least intrusive way is to set up a recurring check-in every weekend and just sort of look at your calendar in the weeks ahead. Use it to sync up your schedules and make a plan for how you’re going to spend your time together. That approach requires you to obviously like sit down and look at your calendars together, so…

What my partner and I shifted to doing is that we share our calendars with each other so that we can see what we’re up to. When we first started sharing our calendars, we didn’t want to let each other see all the details that we had going on. So we set it up so we only shared like the free/busy availability. And so I could see that he had something blocked off at different times on his calendar, but I didn’t know exactly what it was.

As we’ve progressed in our relationship and trust each other more and live together and are now married, we have gotten to a point where we actually just share all the calendar information with each other so that we can see like exactly what’s going on and make plans around each other accordingly.

Using the calendar app to share your calendars with one another is of course not a replacement for communication. You still have to talk to each other. That’s really important. But one of things that it does is it allows you to see in advance things that are coming up that might cause conflict or might bring up feelings so that you can deal with them well in advance rather than being taken by surprise by them. So that when the moment comes, you’ve reduced some of, at least some of the stress or the friction that could go into those events.

Notes App

And in particular, setting up a shared folder inside of a notes app that you and your partner or your partners all have access to. Human brains are really bad at remembering things. We’re great at making decisions and analyzing things, but terrible at long-term memory. So having a notes app that you dedicate to keeping track of all the stuff that you need to keep your relationship running along is gonna be so helpful.

There two types of things you’ll want to keep you in the shared folder of your notes app:

The first is boring, mundane stuff. Accounts that we have, information about my parents’ address, his parents’ address, how to run our set of our TV and our smart remote, anything that we might need to refer back to in some point in the future.

And the other is to keep track of fun things. And so we have one note for a list of present ideas for each other and also for our siblings and our parents and our closest friends. We have a different note for restaurants that we want to check out here in our neighborhood. We have another app note in the app for movies and TV shows that we might want to watch. Another one for date night ideas. And so that way when we’re sitting around and we’re like, what should we do tonight? We have an idea of things that we could do, places we could go, movies that we could watch right at our fingertips.

That way we’re not just going to the same old restaurants that we’re familiar with over and over and over again. We’re sort of planning in advance to have some spontaneity and adventure to get us outside of our routines.

Meal Planning App (I use Plan To Eat)

The last app that I will recommend is some sort of meal planning app. I use an app called PlantEat. Any meal planning app that you can find is probably gonna work well. You can also use your shared calendar from earlier in this video to plan out your meals if you want to. I like having a dedicated app because it helps me keep track of.

the recipes and the grocery list and all of that, all in one place. Meals are another sort of like tension point in relationships. It’s not just about food for many people. It’s also about care and commitment and quality time. And so like missing a meal together or not having a clear plan about what you’re going to do for your meal can become a point of stress or you end up just sort of like punting and taking take out all the time and spending lots of money that you don’t wanna spend.

I usually just plan it out like a week in advance. My partner and I sit down together during our weekly sync sessions where we also look at our calendars and we plan out our meals for the week. And this sometimes includes planning to eat out or planning to have leftovers or planning to do our things. We’re not committing to every single meal together, but it helps us sketch out for the week ahead when we’ll be eating together, when we’ll be eating separately. It just takes out some of the stress in the day to day of it. So that way you’re not having the same conversation every single day.

Figure out your meal plan in advance and then spend the rest of your week just enjoying your relationship!

This is especially important if you live together with your partner and you’re in an open or polyamorous relationship and so that you don’t just default to, well, we have all of our meals together. If someone wants to have a date night out or see a partner in the middle of the week, it can feel like it’s disrupting your sort of usual flow. Plan in advance to spend some meals separately!

Spending Time Together & Apart

I could make a whole other video about planning to spend time separately.

It’s one of the key ways to have more connection in your relationship is to have some time together and some time apart. so use your calendars and use your meal planning to create some pockets of time where you can just sort of like be by yourself, away from your partner. And so that way you have something to reconnect on when you get back together.

I want to leave you with the reminder that keeping your relationship in sync is one of the most important priorities that you could have. These articles and videos are only as useful as the actions you take, so I encourage you to start using at least one of these apps in this way.