I think one of the easiest ways to misunderstand a relationship is to measure its depth by how long two people have been together.
Ten years.
Twenty years.
Forty years.
People look at the number and assume they must know each other by now.
Maybe they do.
Just because you know what annoys them or which side of the bed they sleep on, doesn’t mean you know the person sleeping beside you.
True intimacy is a little more than knowing another person’s habits.
It is in the questions that people feel safe asking each other.
Questions where you are not certain of the answer.
Where no one is afraid of what may happen once the answer is revealed. That is what matters more.
Here are 9 questions I believe are a good indicator of the emotional quality of a relationship.
There is an entire life happening inside every person that nobody else can see.
You can sit beside someone for twenty years and still never know what thoughts visit them when they are alone.
A person does not necessarily need you to solve their thoughts.
Sometimes they just need a secure place to store them.
Because perhaps intimacy comes from knowing what someone chooses to share, not knowing everything about them.
Perhaps it is knowing that when they begin wondering about their life, their future, their mistakes, their mortality, or the strange little mysteries of being alive, they have someone beside them who is willing to wonder with them.
After all these years, perhaps that’s one of the quietest expressions of love.
Being unable to provide all the answers.
Still curious about the questions.
One of the easiest ways to discover something new about a person you have known for years is to ask about the person they were before you knew them.
People change so much that sometimes the person they married would be hard to recognize compared to who they were twenty years ago.
But there’s a part of their younger self that’s still there, too.
The music they loved.
The dreams they had.
The people they loved and lost.
Speak with anyone about who they were before you knew them, and you’ll find the whole little country within a person you’ve believed you’d known all along.
Yes, there might be embarrassing stories.
Good.
All relationships require certain stories to start with “Please promise me you will never tell anyone this.”
Before we move on! This post is public so feel free to share it.
This is a question that, in order to have any kind of response, needs trust from both sides involved.
And the person answering has to believe they won’t be punished for being honest.
There is a huge difference between privacy and secrecy.
People are allowed to have private thoughts.
They are allowed to have memories that belong only to them.
But when someone feels they have to hide important parts of themselves because they’re afraid the truth might affect the relationship, it becomes hard to feel truly close.
Sometimes the answer will be nothing.
Sometimes the answer will be something small.
Sometimes it will be something neither person expected to discuss over dinner.
You cannot build emotional closeness by demanding that someone tell you everything. You build it by making them feel like they can tell you the truth and still be okay.
I really love this question as it allows for a discussion of what people don’t like to discuss.
Relationships change. People change. Life changes.
The hardest part of a long relationship is accepting that you are both going to change, and you don’t get to decide how the other person changes.
Sometimes people change together.
They also change in completely opposite directions at times.
Asking this question is really a step up from, “Are we okay?”
It asks where both people think they are going.
In fact, sometimes the most personal discussions are about the future that no one can predict.
There is something wonderfully specific about it.
A person can love their partner deeply and still feel something in the relationship needs attention.
They can be thankful for their life and feel lonely.
They can have a successful marriage and fall short.
Humans are like that.
We are made of ancient matter, given a few decades of consciousness, and then returned to the universe. In between, we try to build a little home with someone else.
The universe does not collapse if we have two truths at once.
By asking this question, both are free to discuss the relationship and not assume that love means that everything is fine.
At times, the answer is yes.
In some cases, the answer is, “Mostly.”
But sometimes “mostly” is the start of a conversation to be had.
This could be one of the trickiest questions on the list.
Loneliness does not mean being alone.
Sometimes the loneliest place in the world is sitting beside someone you love and feeling like they don’t really see you.
You can live in the same house, share a bed, share children, share bills, share holidays, share 40 years of memories, and still feel emotionally distant.
It’s not something that anyone wants to accept.
Even if it isn’t meant to be an accusation, it can come across that way.
Couples who are able to ask this question without developing an immediate negative reaction have a good thing going.
They will accept a measure of truthfulness.
We tend to ask people how they’re doing.
They say fine.
We say good.
Everybody goes home.
Fine is one of the most efficient ways humans have invented to avoid an actual conversation.
Instead, ask a question about what a person is concerned about.
Now you may hear about money.
Their health.
Their children.
Work.
Something they haven’t told anyone.
If your partner can tell you what keeps them awake without feeling foolish, weak, or inconvenient, there is a kind of safety there that cannot be manufactured.
Sometimes the hardest things to say are not the things we fear will be misunderstood. They are the things we fear will change how someone sees us.
Sometimes, just being able to talk about the things you usually avoid brings two people closer.
Funny how that works.
Of course you have.
So have they.
So has everyone.
Long relationships have a weird aspect to them because sometimes we treat somebody like the person we met twenty years ago.
We remember them and expect them to still be that person.
But, experiences are what people gather.
They lose people.
They gain confidence.
They get tired of what they used to put up with.
They get to explore new hobbies.
Some parts of them become softer and some harder.
Perhaps your partner has changed.
Maybe you have too.
The interesting question is if you’ve been paying attention.
Because loving someone for a long time means getting to know them more than once.
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