Married 9 Years, And Still
Learning New Things About Her

You can fill in her answers now. Ask what she wants for dinner and you already know the two places she'll name. Ask how work was and you could give her side of it yourself, including the part where she gets to the thing that annoyed her. Nine or ten years in, that stops feeling like a hole and starts feeling like proof. You know this person. You've got her down.

Then something pokes a hole in it. She says a sentence you didn't see coming, about her mother, or about what she thinks about on the drive home, and for a few seconds she's not the woman in your file.

A customer named Shannon G. wrote in about exactly that. She was replying to my weekly email, the one that opens with three connection questions, and she put it plainly:

"Yes, the connection questions are our favorite! They help me know him on another level. You'd think after 9 years together we know everything about each other, but your questions prove otherwise."

Nine years in the same house, and a few written prompts were still turning up things neither of them had heard.

Nine Years Together Did Not Cover It

That comes as a surprise because time feels like coverage. Nine years of dinners and drives and hospital waiting rooms sounds exhaustive, and it is, in one narrow sense: you have covered a lot of hours in each other's company. Hours aren't the same as questions asked.

Run the arithmetic on your own marriage and it gets uncomfortable fast. A lot of what you know about her, you probably found out in the first two or three years, when you were still asking things because you didn't know the answers. After that you tapered off, because it stopped feeling necessary. Why ask a question you can already answer?

So you stopped asking. Not out of neglect and not because either of you stopped caring, but because the two of you got efficient, and efficiency is what you want out of a household. It's a terrible thing to want out of a marriage. Doing something new together is one of the few reliable ways to reopen the file, which is one reason I built Date Nights Dancing the way I did: easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you working on the same moves from the first video. No studio, and no dance experience required.

You Are Working From Notes You Took Years Ago

The trap isn't that you know nothing about her. You know an enormous amount. What you're consulting is a set of notes, and the notes have a date on them.

She has a favorite restaurant in your file. She may have gone off it eighteen months ago and never made an announcement about it. She has an opinion about her sister in your file, formed in 2019, which she's revised twice since. She has something she wants out of the next five years, and that entry is either blank or copied from a conversation you had before the second child.

None of that makes you a bad husband. It makes you a man consulting an archive instead of the person, which is what anybody would do with a source this convenient. She's right there. She answers when spoken to. It never occurs to you that the source might have changed since the last time you checked it, because she is the one constant thing in your week.

The Story Of How You Met Shrank To Three Words

In The Seven Levels of Intimacy, Matthew Kelly points at a small piece of evidence the two of you can check on yourselves tonight. At a rehearsal dinner, he writes, ask a couple how and when they met and when the proposal happened, and there's passion and enthusiasm in the telling. Years later the same question gets a three-word answer: in the library, on a plane, at a bar.

His point is that the story didn't disappear. Nobody kept telling it. A couple who forget their own story, he writes, are in the same position as a person who forgets his.

Try it as a test rather than an accusation. The next time somebody at a dinner asks the two of you how you met, listen to how long her version runs and how long yours does. If it comes out in under ten seconds from both of you, that's not a sign your marriage is in trouble. It's a sign that nobody has asked either of you a real question about it in years, so neither of you has had a reason to tell the long version.

A Question Set Built For Strangers Works On People You Already Know

The famous 36 questions came out of research by Professor Aron and colleagues, who assembled them to accelerate intimacy between strangers. Two people who had never met would work through the list in order and come out the other side closer than the clock said they should be.

The interesting part for a husband is that the list was never restricted to strangers. The instruction that comes with it is to try the questions on someone you're already a fan of, or somebody you might like to be a fan of you. Asking on purpose is what does the work in that study, not the hours two people log in a room. That's why a set of prompts still turns up new answers in year nine. If closeness were purely a function of hours logged, Shannon's email wouldn't exist.

Three conditions come attached, and skipping them is how this goes wrong at your kitchen table.

Answer your own question too. You ask, she answers, and then you give her the same honesty back. If you ask three in a row and answer none of them, she'll feel it and she'll stop answering.

It's not an interview. Don't charge through questions one after another waiting for your turn. One question, then a real conversation about the answer, is the whole evening.

Hold it lightly. Run it like a ceremony and it stops being a conversation. If she laughs at the first one, you're doing it right.

Five Questions From The Weekly Email, And What Each One Opens

These are prompts I've already sent out to subscribers, so they've been through real kitchens rather than a brainstorm. Take one. Not five, one.

1. What have we still not figured out about each other? This one gives her permission to say there's something, which is the part she may have been sitting on. It also puts the two of you on the same side of the table, since neither of you is being accused of anything.

2. When did you know you wanted to be with me? Not the proposal, not the wedding. The private moment she made her decision, which is often something you weren't aware of at the time and would never have guessed.

3. Who played the biggest part in the two of us getting together, other than you or me? A friend who pushed, a roommate who invited her, a boss who sent her to the conference. She has a candidate. You may have a different one, and comparing them is its own good half hour.

4. What's the most endearing thing about me? Slightly uncomfortable to ask, and worth it. What comes back is almost never the thing you'd have nominated for yourself.

5. What do you think I need to hear right now? This is the one to save for a week when something's off and neither of you has named it. Ask it, then say nothing at all until she's finished.

One a week is plenty. Fifty-two a year is a lot of real asking, and it compounds: a year from now you'll know things about her you don't know tonight. You're not running a project on her. You're back in the habit of finding out.

Her Husband Asked Where The Questions Came From

There's a postscript to Shannon's email that I like more every time I read it. Her husband noticed the questions were unusually good and asked her where they were coming from:

"My hubby asked me how the heck I was coming up with these deep, engaging questions and I told him that they were from Hunter at Show Her Off"...

She told him. No performance, no protecting the bit. Another reader goes the other way and lets his wife believe the good questions are homegrown, which he has written to me about twice and which is honestly pretty funny.

Either way, the part worth taking from her email is that using a prompt didn't cheapen the conversation for either of them. It got them a conversation they weren't going to have on their own that week. Nobody hands out points for having generated the question yourself.

You're not behind. You're nine years into knowing a person who has been changing the whole time, which is the good version of this problem, and the fix isn't a weekend away or a hard talk about where the marriage is going. It's one question, this week, asked because you'd like to hear the answer.

If you want more on the mechanics, the questions to ask your wife piece has the full range, and there's one question that beats "how was your day" if you'd rather replace the dead one than add a new one. If you want it as an evening instead of a habit, the 36 questions run as a date night works fine on married people.

And if the two of you want something new to talk about, the fastest way I know is to go do something new together. That's the whole argument for Date Nights Dancing in a house where the evenings run on rails. An hour of trying something in your own living room gives her a version of you she hasn't seen in a while, and gives you both material that isn't nine years old.

More ideas for the two of you are in the ideas hub.