What Keeps Couples Happy Long Term

What I am suggesting takes an iron will, but that falls out of a simple idea.

The most important thing in my life in my relationship with my wife.

I think about that every single day. The required willpower comes directly from that basic, foundational statement.

And our son is better for it, even though we have taken time away from him, every day.

These are key questions. What's interesting is not the questions, but the answers. And in listening. Listening is itself an investment. What's important to your partner? Find a way to make that important to you.

I can speak those six questions in a few seconds. But I am listening to the answers, and to the associated streams of thought, attentively, for about 30 minutes.

We used the six questions approach for our first seven or so years. In the last 10 years, we actually ask the questions less frequently.

We are apart about 10 or 11 hours per day, 5 days a week. So we each have about 30 minutes to catch up on 10 hours.

But I find the biggest value in the weekends, when we're together most of the day. In that case, I can usually predict will want to talk about. But that doesn't make it boring. That gives me an excellent chance to fine-tune my understanding of her mind and emotions. The gap between what I expect she has been thinking about and what she was actually thinking about is an excellent education.

And she does the same with me.

Recall the baseline assertion: my relationship with my wife is the most important thing in my life.

I listen to people talk for hours at work, which is pretty important. Listening to my wife for 30 minutes is a no brainer for me.

Wow, so many assumptions there:

1) All they do in a given day is work

2) Their work is monotonous

3) These questions result in boring, factual answers (perhaps instead they lead to long, interesting conversations far away from the original topic)

Etc, etc. IMO, it's much more productive to take the time to think about reasons why something would work for somebody else rather than immediately dismiss what they do.

Ever since the myth of the "obedient and silent wife" was dispelled in the '60s and '70s, it looks to me as intuition and research in this particular field overlapped fairly consistently. The interesting question would now be "why do people not do this already, even when rational and well-educated?". That would be noteworthy.

I don't know, maybe the point of this research was getting down to the details (which they do, a bit), but the overall structure is the same as always.

I still get asked to sign in when coming from Google though. I guess the way to read the article is to sign up/subscribe.