Cultivating a Deeper Connection with Your Partner

How well do you really know your partner as a person?

The therapeutic literature has long recognized that lasting relationships rely on the capacity of couples to know and understand one another. The Gottman Institute makes the creation of Love Maps--inventories and models of your partner's inner world--the foundation of their "sound relationship house" model. Gary Chapman argues that the secret of a successful relationship is fully understanding the "love languages" through which your partner experiences love and affection.

"Who do you say I am?" Jesus asks in this week's Gospel. Do his disciples really know who Jesus is as a Person? Do we? It's a crucial question not just for our relationship with God, but for any relationship, especially our marriages.

God calls us, in St. Thomas Aquinas' brilliant phrase, "to love the other as other." To love our spouses, we have to know them as persons apart from their roles in our lives. We have to be able to see them as the stars of their own show, and not just as supporting actors in our show.

There are literally hundreds of web sites offering you questions to ask one another in order to build these kinds of intimate understandings.

Some information about your spouse is simple and straightforward but still important: clothing sizes, favorite colors, foods, and beverages, preferred places to travel.

Others are more difficult to discuss, especially when they involve your spouse's experiences of you, and the relationship. This includes questions like:

• When you do you feel peaceful and content with me? When do you feel sad with me? Happy? Angry? Frustrated?

• What do you see as our current issues and areas in need of improvement?

• What concerns or worries you about us as a couple?  How could we try to improve these things together?

• Are there things you’d like to do that we have yet to try together?  

• What could I do or change to help you feel more comfortable sharing even more honestly and openly with me?   

• What things would you change about our sex life?

• In what ways do you trust me? In what areas do you feel I can't be trusted or relied upon? What would help help strengthen and deepen your trust in me in those areas?  

Sharing answers to these kinds of questions requires vulnerability and trust. How can we create safe spaces for this kind of sharing?

Some therapists suggest special date nights that target key questions to help you build your knowledge of your partner. Others recommend various kinds of conversation games designed to start simple and move into ever deeper levels of intimacy.

Lately, we have been trying a technique that was shared last month at the Eucharistic Revival in Indianapolis by Archbishop Blase Cupich of the Archdiocese of Chicago. According to His Eminence, Pope Francis wanted delegates at last year's Synod on Synodality to dispense with prepared speeches, and asked the delegates to participate in an exercise of sharing, listening, and reflecting.

As we have adapted it for ourselves and other couples, it works like this:

1. The couple should sit together in a comfortable place, with no distractions, and where they can be uninterrupted for at least 30 minutes. The exercise requires a simple timer, preferably one whose alarm is not shrill and disruptive.

2. A significant question is introduced. The question can be one of those above, or it can come from the Internet, or one that arose during the couple's "check-in" or "state of their union" meeting.

3. The couples contemplate the question in silence for four minutes.

4. Each spouse shares their thoughts and feelings raised by the question for four minutes each.

5. The couple sits in silence for four minutes, contemplating what their spouse has shared.

6. Each partner shares what they heard the other say, and what feelings it evoked in them. Each has four minutes. The focus is on sharing. They may not

   1. Ask questions

   2. Problem solve

   3. Pursue compromise

7. The couple ends with the session with a prayer.

The purpose of this exercise is, in the words of Archbishop Cupich,"active listening and speaking with the heart" in order "to learn what is in the heart of the other person" without any effort to answer them, or persuade them to another point of view. It is to enable you to have a clear and satisfying answer when your spouse wonders, "Who do you say I am?"

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