This woman put her other half on ‘boyfriend probation’, so should we all be performance reviewing our relationships?

It would be so simple, wouldn’t it? Your partner lets you down by being late yet again, or makes a not-so-kind comment about what you’re wearing, and rather than trying to temper your feelings, see their side of things or communicate in the most perfect, tied-up-with-a-ribbon way possible, you simply react as your boss might: and put them on a performance review.

OK, it might sound bonkers, but with our work and personal lives increasingly blending into one another – see also: this recent research on work love languages, and how tuning into your colleagues’ might work – using the framework of professional performance reviews is a strategy some are adopting for their relationships.

It’s the subject of a trending Twitter video, from an apparently ex-Google employee called Pam, who tells her followers that her boyfriend has been put on “probation”. In the speaking-to-camera clip, Pam tells the Twitterverse how she’s “PIPed” her boyfriend. For the benefit of those “not in tech”, she unpicks the acronym: “Performance Improvement Plan…It’s what you get put on when they’re about to fire you”. 

The PIP came about because the couple were having “issues” and on their “last straw”, before Pam came up with the relationship-saving strategy. “He’s an engineer and sometimes it’s really hard to communicate with him without using something he can already relate to”.

So how did this work in practice? Apparently, Pam assigned a set of “daily and weekly tasks”, plus “a set of things that he needed to work on”, and it “worked really well”. The couple have also, apparently, integrated a Kanban board (for the uninitiated, another project management from, you guessed it, the workplace) where Pam lists tasks for her other half, which he then does successfully. If it works for them…

A more spoof-y take on the “relationship contract” has simultaneously surfaced on TikTok, in the form of the “Boyfriend Pyramid”. The video series features a group of couple friends, going through a weekly “BF Pyramid of the Week” where the respective male partners are ranked from best to worst. The review assesses the boyfriends’ weekly actinos ranging from being absent from the review (a black mark, putting him at the bottom of the pyramid ranking) to “top-tier” actions such as that of Logan (top of the pyramid) who changed his girlfriend Talia’s car tyres.