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Rory was a pediatrician who ran an intensive care unit for babies. He was beloved at the hospital, where everybody called him Dr. Rory. He was a reserved man but capable of great warmth, humor, and charm. He was also a workaholic who slept in the hospital an average of twenty nights a month. He didn’t know the names of his children’s friends, or even the name of the family dog. When he was asked which room led to the house’s back door, he turned to ask his wife, Lisa.
His wife was upset over how little she saw of Rory and how emotionally disconnected he seemed to be. She frequently tried to make little gestures to show him she cared, but her attempts just annoyed him. She was left with the sense that he simply didn’t value her or their marriage.
To this day, I’m struck by the story of this couple. Here was an intellectually gifted man who didn’t even know the name of the family dog or how to find the back door! Of the many problems their relationship faced, perhaps the most fundamental was Rory’s shocking lack of knowledge about his home life. He had become so caught up in his work that there was little space left over in his brain for the basics of his wife’s world.
As bizarre as Rory’s rampant ignorance may sound, I have
found that many married couples fall into a similar (if less dramatic) habit of inattention to the details of their spouse’s life. One or both partners may have only the sketchiest sense of the other’s joys, likes, dislikes, fears, stresses. The husband may love modern art, but his wife couldn’t tell you why or who his favorite artist is. He doesn’t remember the names of her friends or the coworker she fears is constantly trying to undermine her.
In contrast,
emotionally intelligent couples are intimately familiar with each other’s world. I call this having a richly detailed
love map—my term for that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner’s life. Another way of saying this is that these couples have made plenty of cognitive room for their marriage. They remember the major events in each other’s history, and they keep updating their information as the facts and feelings of their spouse’s world change. When she orders him a salad, she knows what kind of dressing he likes. If she works late, he’ll think to record her favorite TV show. He could tell you how she’s feeling about her boss and exactly how to get to her office from the elevator. He knows that religion is important to her but that deep down she has doubts. She knows that he fears being too much like his father and considers himself a “free spirit.” They know each other’s life goals, worries, and hopes.
Without such a love map, you can’t really know your spouse. And if you don’t really know someone, how can you truly love them? No wonder the biblical term for sexual love is to “know.”
From knowledge springs not only love but the fortitude to weather marital storms. Couples who have detailed love maps of each other’s world are far better prepared to cope with stressful events and conflict. Take, for example, one of the major causes of marital dissatisfaction and divorce: the birth of the first baby. Sixty-seven percent of couples in our newlywed study underwent a precipitous drop in marital satisfaction the first time they became parents. But
the remaining 33 percent did not experience this decline—in fact, about half of them saw their marriages improve.
What separated these two groups? You guessed it: the couples whose marriages thrived after the birth had detailed love maps from the get-go, according to a study of fifty couples by my student
Alyson Shapiro. These love maps protected their marriages in the wake of this dramatic upheaval. Because husband and wife were already in the habit of keeping up to date and were intently aware of what each other was feeling and thinking, they weren’t thrown off course. But if couples don’t start off with a deep knowledge of each other, it’s easy for a marriage to lose its way when lives shift so suddenly and dramatically.
Maggie and Ken knew each other only a short time when they married and decided to have a family. But what their relationship lacked in longevity, they made up for in intimacy. They were in touch not just with the outlines of each other’s lives—their favorite hobbies, sports, and so on—but with each other’s deepest longings, beliefs, and fears. No matter how busy they were, they made each other their priority—always taking the time to catch up on each other’s day. And at least once a week, they’d go out for dinner and just talk—sometimes about politics, sometimes about the weather, sometimes about their own marriage.
When their daughter Alice was born, Maggie decided to give up her job to stay home with the baby. She herself was surprised by the decision, since she had always been very career driven. But when she became a mother, her fundamental sense of meaning in life changed. She found she was willing to undergo great sacrifices for Alice’s sake. Now she wanted the savings they had earmarked for a motorboat to go into a college fund. What happened to Maggie happens to many new parents—the experience of having a child is so profound that your whole notion of who you are and what you value gets reshuffled.
At first, Ken was confused by the changes in his wife. The woman he thought he knew was transforming before his eyes. But because they were in the habit of staying deeply connected, Ken was able to keep up to date on what Maggie was thinking and
feeling. Too often when a new baby comes, the husband gets left behind. (More on this and ways of dealing with it in
chapter 10.) He can’t keep up with his wife’s metamorphosis, which he may not understand or be happy about. Knowing Maggie had always been a priority to Ken, so he didn’t do what too many new fathers do—he didn’t back away from this new charmed circle of mother and child. As a result, they went through the transformation to parenthood together, without losing sight of each other or their marriage.
Having a baby is just one life event that can cause couples to lose their way if they don’t have a detailed love map. Any major change—from a job shift to a move to illness or retirement—can have the same effect. Just the passage of time can do it as well. The more you know and understand about each other, the easier it is to keep connected as life swirls around you.
There are few greater gifts a couple can give each other than the joy that comes from feeling known and understood. Getting to know each other shouldn’t be a chore. That’s why the first love map exercise below is actually a game! While you’re having fun playing, you’ll also be expanding and deepening your knowledge of each other. By the time you complete all of the exercises in this chapter, you’ll know there’s truth in that old song “To Know You Is to Love You.”
Don’t pass judgment on what your spouse tells you or try to give each other advice. Remember that you are simply on a fact-finding mission. Your goal is to listen and learn about your mate.
For a printable version of this page, go to this page: http://rhlink.com/mmw003.
The love map questions above are useful for creating a broad outline of your current lives. But love maps shouldn’t just be broad—they should also be deep. The next exercise will ensure that yours are.
All of the above exercises and questions will help you develop greater personal insight and a more detailed map of each other’s life and world. Getting to know your spouse better and sharing your inner self with your partner is an ongoing process. In fact, it’s a lifelong process. So expect to return to these pages from time to time to update your knowledge about yourselves and each other. Think about questions to ask your partner. One therapist I know has taken to wearing a Bugs Bunny pin and advising couples that the key to sustaining a happy marriage is to ask periodically, “What’s up, doc?”
For all of their power, love maps are only a first step. Happily married couples don’t “just” know each other. They build on and enhance this knowledge in many important ways. For starters, they use their love maps to express not only their understanding of each other but their fondness and admiration as well—my second principle.