Here is a question I sometimes ask couples who have been together twenty years or more. What is your partner worried about this month?
The pause that follows is often long. Not because they do not care, and not because they are not paying attention, but because somewhere along the way the asking stopped and neither of them noticed.
Falling in love with a version of someone
Early in a relationship, curiosity comes free. You ask about childhood, about ambitions, about the worst job they ever had and what they think happens after we die. You build a detailed internal picture of this person, and that picture is one of the things that makes you feel close to them.
Then the picture finishes, more or less, and you stop updating it.
The trouble is that the person did not stop changing. At forty five they want different things than they wanted at twenty eight. Their fears have shifted. Their relationship to their work, their body, their parents, their own mortality has moved considerably. And you may be relating, with great affection and total sincerity, to someone who no longer entirely exists.
The map metaphor
Dr. John Gottman describes this internal picture as a love map, the part of your mind where you store the details of your partner's world. Couples with rich, current love maps weather difficulty better. They know what the stress is actually about. They know which comment will land badly today and why.
Couples with outdated maps are navigating a place that has been rebuilt since the map was drawn. They make reasonable decisions based on old information and end up in the wrong place, repeatedly, without understanding what went wrong.
Questions worth asking again
You do not need a retreat or a workbook for this. You need better questions, asked with actual interest in the answer.
What has been on your mind lately that you have not mentioned?
What are you proud of this year that nobody has acknowledged?
Is there something you have changed your mind about recently?
What do you need more of right now, and what do you need less of?
If the next five years went well, what would that look like for you?
These are unremarkable questions. They are also questions most long married couples have not asked each other in years, and the answers are frequently surprising to both people.
When the answer is I do not know
Sometimes the person being asked cannot answer either. That is worth sitting with rather than rushing past.
Plenty of people in the middle of a full life have not paused long enough to know what they want. Being asked, sincerely and without an agenda, may be the first invitation they have had in a long time to find out. That conversation is often more valuable than any tidy answer would have been.
Curiosity as an ongoing practice
There is a quiet assumption in many long relationships that the knowing phase is finished, that you have learned this person and the learning is complete. It is a comfortable assumption and it is the source of a great deal of loneliness.
The couples who stay close over decades are not the ones who figured each other out. They are the ones who never quite stopped trying to.
You are allowed to be curious about someone you have known for thirty years. In fact, it may be the single kindest thing you can offer them.
