Relationship Wellness Food for Thought: Curiosity Allows Us to Fall in Love Over and Over Again
Curiosity Comes Easily in the Beginning
You know when you’re on a great date. The conversation flows, you’re cheeks hurt from smiling, you’re buzzing with excitement and you find yourself dreaming long before your head hits the pillow.
In time, a mutual sense of compatibility between your values, interests and goals spark conversations about the future and, before you know it, you’re saying, “I do.” What happens next? If you’re like many couples, you start describing yourself as tired, busy and stressed. Maybe you have kids, pets or aging parents. Then there’s work, errands and dishes - so many dishes - and it seems all that exuberant curiosity about this person you’ve chosen to spend your life with has gone right out the window. Why? Because you know them already—you dated, you asked all the questions you needed to make a good decision, and here you are living your life.
The Only Constant is Change
Here’s the thing, the complexity of our humanity can’t be fully understood in a few years of dating—it takes time to open up, build trust, and share a variety of experiences that bring out the full dimensionality of our personhood. Not to mention that we change over time! We are not a book that can be read once and referenced at a later date.
It almost seems silly to say that people continue to have formative experiences after they get married, and yet, too many couples fall into a state of complacency—forging ahead with increasingly outdated information. In the absence of curiosity, couples slowly start drifting apart. Of course this doesn’t happen over night—it can take years for the answer to “how was your day” to be whittled down to a sentence or two. Conversations start slipping into logistics more quickly. Dates nights become fewer and farther between. Eventually, people start saying things like, “it feels like we’re roommates”, “we are ships passing in the night”, or “this feels more like a business arrangement than a marriage.”
When the simple pleasure of learning about one another is lost, it makes sense that partners feel increasingly alone. Unfortunately, when life’s inevitable hardship’s arise, couples who have not nurtured their curiosity find they are ill-prepared to weather the storm together.
A Daily Practice
Let’s take a quick look at the research. It will likely not come as a surprise that, for most couples, the birth of their first baby is a trying time. A study published in the Journal of Family Psychology found that for 67% of couples, parenthood coincided with a significant drop in marital satisfaction. Notably, the remaining 33% did not experience this decline—in fact, about 15% saw their marriages improve!
What was the difference between the satisfied and dissatisfied couples? The couples that had well developed processes for learning about each other faired better than their less curious counterparts. Researcher John Gottman explains, “the experience of parenthood is so profound that your whole notion of who you are and what you value gets reshuffled. Especially when your lives are shifting dramatically, it’s key to prioritize knowing each other.” He goes on to say that “a job shift, a move, illness, retirement or even just the passage of time can have the same effect.”
A daily practice of cultivating curiosity about your partner is scientifically proven to better prepare you for life’s challenges. While we’re on the topic of relational challenges, we have to talk about conflict for just a moment.
The Goal is Curious Engagement
There has undoubtedly been a time or two when you’ve been in an argument with your partner and found yourself utterly perplexed. “I have no idea why they would say that” or “how on earth did they think that was going to go over well?” When you feel confused by something your partner is doing, it’s time to start asking questions. Genuinely curious questions - not snarky rhetorical ones - will guide the conversation toward deeper understanding.
When your partner acts in a way that does not seem aligned with their values, your first emotion may not be confusion, however, it may be fear, and perhaps even fear followed by anger or sadness. It can be incredibly disorienting to feel like you don’t know your partner as well as you thought. The most upsetting conflicts often arise from the parts of your relationship with which you are the least familiar.
Practicing curiosity helps to prevent these jarring encounters by reducing relational blind spots, while increasing your confidence that you know your partner well. The goal is not to eliminate conflict altogether, rather, it is to engage with disagreement from a place of care and curiosity.
Next Steps
So how do we make this actionable? We get back into that great-date mindset where we are both interested and interesting. We look for opportunities to ask follow up questions. We stop using flat words like “fine” and start responding with more intention. We put our phones down when our partner speaks to us. We get curious instead of critical. We schedule and protect time to have conversations that last longer than 20 minutes. Create rituals that ensure you stay connected— chat for a couple minutes in the morning, exchange a few texts during the day, call your partner while you’re driving home, email them to share a bit about how you’re feeling, leave a sticky note with a question on the bathroom mirror, check-in during commercial breaks or enjoy some good old fashioned pillow talk—find what works for you!
Try incorporating a few of the following questions into your next conversation.
What are you doing when you feel most like yourself?
What have you accomplished in adulthood that your younger self wouldn’t have expected?
What are you most grateful in your life right now? Why?
What’s one habit you want to get rid of and one habit you want to form?
What is your favorite thing about your personality?
What gives you goosebumps?
What do you wish people better understood about you?
What do you love most about our relationship? Why that above all else?
What skills are you cultivating right now? What do you want to accomplish with them?
What compliment do you receive most often? What compliment do you want to receive more?
What is your least favorite question to be asked?
In what part of your life do you have the most fun? What role does/should fun play in your life?
If you could redesign your life from the ground up, what is the first thing you would change? What would you keep the same?
If you’re looking for more questions, quizzes or games to help you get to know one another better, Our.Love has you covered. Check out this post to learn how to keep these activities fun!
Curiosity comes naturally in the beginning and is a skill we practice as the relationship progresses. The perennial process of learning about our partner allows us to fall in love with them again and again. In the end, the excitement of lasting love comes from appreciating our partner for who they are while expressing curiosity about who they’re becoming.
Kristin Thieme is a Gottman Method couples therapist practicing at The Family Institute at Northwestern University. Ms. Thieme earned a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy from Lewis & Clark College. After graduating with honors (summa cum laude), she pursued additional education and certification in the Gottman Method while training directly with John and Julie Gottman in Seattle. Ms. Thieme joined The Family Institute as a therapist in 2019.
