“I didn’t ask why his day had been bad. I’d asked this question so many times before, I thought I already knew the answers: his frustration with work, or else the unspoken hurt of our distance. Which is maybe how love dies—thinking you already know the answers.” – from Splinters by Leslie Jamison
–
There are risks in finding a second-chance love. One is the risk of trying too hard to make this love your redemption story. Another is vacillating between thinking you know now nothing or everything about relationships.
I can say for certain that I don’t know everything, even after heartache and personal excavation, but I do feel like I know a little more than I used to. I shared some of those reflections several months ago when I wrote about what I was doing differently this time around.
A number of people wrote to me after I published that essay, a few with questions about how to implement some of the things I said I was practicing. As I thought about these questions and reread the piece a few more times, I realized that the list of things I shared all actually flowed from the first one, the hardest one: I practice seeing my partner as a whole and distinct human being with separate experiences, desires, and needs.
It seems so simple, really – like it should be a given in any relationship of any type. And yet, for me it didn’t come to life until the dust had cleared on my first marriage. It wasn’t until then that I could see just how much we had both, over time, made each other into projections of who we thought the other was. It wasn’t until then that I could see that I’d long ago stopped asking about what he thought of the pasta or why his day had been so bad, instead assuming I already knew the answers.
–
It’s funny, really, to think about the vast difference between the early stages and later stages of a relationship. We could point to the flood of hormones early on, the newness and lightness of a burgeoning connection. So few joint responsibilities and obligations. Feeling enlivened in our bodies and minds. New Relationship Energy, as it’s sometimes called, is intoxicating.
What we might notice about this season of a relationship is that it’s marked by discovery, and that discovery is fueled by curiosity. Curiosity, I would suggest, is actually the magical elixir.
As time marches on, it’s our curiosity that starts to dampen with our partner. By now we know their favorite 90s jam band and the particular ways their sister gets on their nerves. We know how their Thursdays tend to go at work and their preferred cocktail at weddings. This familiarity can breed closeness and intimacy, though it understandably can make things feel a little stale. There’s less to learn, less to discover. Or at least, that’s what we assume.
But beyond the lack of novelty that can ensue, a somewhat darker – or at least more risky – tendency starts to emerge. We stop asking questions. We stop acting interested when they tell us a story (we’ve heard this one before, haven’t we?). We stop letting ourselves be surprised or moved. And, most detrimental of all, our internal prediction machines start to take over.
–
To understand this important phenomenon, we’re going to take a little jaunt into neuroscience and consciousness studies. Yes, there is indeed a whole field, one that includes philosophers, psychologists, engineers, and neuroscientists, dedicated to understanding how we develop conscious thought. What their work is really about is determining how human beings make sense of the sensory information around them. In a world of billions of sensory inputs surrounding us at a given time, how do we perceive what’s important? And how do we develop thoughts and feelings about them?
Let’s start by thinking about babies. Babies are the picture of neuroplasticity, meaning that their brains are in this perpetually juicy state of malleability. If you hand a baby a spoon, they could be entertained for minutes or even hours. They look at this new (shiny!) object with wonder, curious about its shape, its reflective surface, the loud clang it makes when it hits the floor. The baby has little context for this object and no expectations for what it’s supposed to do or be. The options are literally endless.
The freshness of that perspective is something that most of us will never experience again. As we encounter more and more spoons in our lives, we quickly adapt to the spoon as an instrument for a specific task. We will encounter hundreds or thousands of different spoons as we get older, but even if they vary in size, shape, or location, we aren’t surprised by them. They stop invoking wonder or curiosity. We know what we expect from a spoon.
We could think of this as us as humans just adapting to the idea of spoons – that they just aren’t exciting anymore, but it’s not just that. What’s happening is that the neuroplastic window is closing, locking in our expectacies of the world. Brain scientists have now shown that we can think of our brains as prediction machines. What that means is that what we think of as seeing what’s in front of us is actually seeing what we expect to see.
In fact, we can think of our brains processing information two levels at a time. The bottom level is what we might think of as the sensory data: the actual sights, sounds, smells, and so on that are coming into our field of awareness. The top level is the cognitive level: the inferences that we are making about the sensory data to make it make sense. As adults, most of our processing is happening top-down.
Consider it this way. If every time we encountered a spoon, we had to process every aspect of its color, shape, texture, and potential uses, we would never have enough cognitive resources to survive. We would have to take a nap every couple hours. Hence, babies.
But where this gets tricky – and potentially dangerous – is that this “predictive processing” means that we are literally not seeing things as they are as much as we are seeing them as we expect them to be. Our perceptions are quite literally distorted by our prediction machine brains. The interpretation happens so fast and so convincingly that we struggle to distinguish between what’s there and what we expect to be there. This happens even more so when the sensory information is more ambiguous (like a vaguely worded text, perhaps).
One way of understanding this is to think about some of the infamous line drawing that can look like a duck or a bunny depending on what your mind is expecting and, thus, interpreting. Our minds tend to shift back and forth between seeing the image as one and then the other, despite the fact that the lines on the page do not change whatsoever.
Think about how this plays out interpersonally, especially in situations where the data might be ambiguous. My partner doesn’t acknowledge me when he walks in the door. Duck: He’s mad at me for how impatient I was with him this morning. Bunny: He must have had a tough last meeting of the day with his manager. Reality: It could be both. It could be neither. I’ll never know unless I ask.
–
I’m not sure you could have convinced me that I didn’t know what my partner was thinking and feeling in my last relationship. Maybe I did have a prediction machine operating, but I was pretty certain I’d collected enough data that its output must be accurate. I was so sure I knew his thoughts and feelings that I could have written the script on most of our interactions.
But, of course, this was an incredible fallacy on my part. Because once the prediction machine is running the show, the self-fulfilling prophecy is underway. For example, once I’m convinced that my partner is uninterested in this story I’m telling (because he’s clearly distracted by his phone) and my prediction machine gives me the interpretation for that (he thinks the details of my life are irrelevant and he cares only about himself), it’s off to the races. I feel hurt and then angry, so my body gets tense and I shut down. He senses this as backs away, his own prediction machine telling him I’m ragey and I want him to leave. My expectations not only predicted the outcome, but helped to shape it.
This is what I recognized as I entered into my present-day partnership. I knew that patterns of prediction would get us nowhere, least of all to greater connection. I really didn’t want to repeat a cycle of seeing each other through the lenses that we adopted. But confronting the very way our brains are wired – to use expectation over novelty – seemed like a difficult task.
I dug into this question, exploring how we can cultivate more bottom-up processing, especially when it comes to romantic partnerships. It sounds hard and maybe even complicated, but it’s all really about what actually came most naturally to us as children and early in relationships (which one could argue is also a time of childlike wonder). It’s about bringing forward curiosity.
Here are some concrete ways that you can cultivate curiosity in your life and in your partnership:
- Pay attention. No, but really. What we think of as paying attention – even when we are off of our phones – is very often not really attention. It’s a sort of half-hearted semi-focus while we’re running through our to-do list or the way that we want to respond to what’s happening. Practicing mindfulness is a serious business and in fact requires practice.
- When you recognize a prediction taking hold inside of you, take a deep breath. Then another one. And now a third. Say to yourself (out loud if possible), “That’s my prediction machine talking. There’s a lot I don’t know right now.”
- Get into the habit of asking yourself what you do not know in a situation and what other interpretations might be possible. It’s not about finding the “right” answer. It’s about allowing for greater possibilities and recognizing the limitations of your perspective.
- Engage in novel experiences with your partner. This one hits lots of relationship buckets, from increasing positive hormones and making meaningful memories. But experiencing new things together (a new restaurant, a new city, heck even a new route to your kid’s school) allows you to get out of the zone of familiarity in a way that allows for greater curiosity.
- Make the Seeing You Questions a regular part of your routine. Asking each other questions is the most significant way I know of to resist the idea that you already know everything about each other. If you are getting the same answers, you need new questions.
And when we find that staying in the zone of curiosity is particularly hard, despite our intentional efforts, it’s often because there has been some kind of wounding that’s happened. Our core selves are naturally curious, and so when we are struggling hard to be, it could be because our core selves don’t feel enough emotional safety to do so. Sometimes that’s because of ruptures that have happened with the partner in front of us, and sometimes that’s because of ruptures that pre-dated that partner. If we’re noticing that, that’s where relationship or personal therapy can be really important and helpful.
–
As we start to build a practice of curiosity with our partner, we will hopefully find that we can be curious with ourselves too. Because just as we start to take for granted that we know who our partner is or what they are capable of, we can fall into doing the same with ourselves. The beauty is actually that we don’t yet fully know who we are.
I believe that the greatest gift we can give each other in a relationship is to keep showing up with the question, “Who are you?” And to answer it together again and again.
