How to Nurture a Relationship: Curiosity is Key
If you Google, “how to nurture a relationship” you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of pages filled with articles and videos answering this question. That’s because our romantic relationships are central to our lives and our happiness, and people everywhere want to know how to make them work.
While there are many ingredients necessary to make a relationship successful, curiosity is one of the most important. Relationships require curiosity to thrive. Curiosity can help even the most stressed and weathered relationships begin to heal. Research by John and Julie Gottman have shown that partners who stay curious about each other report long-term satisfaction.
Curiosity is like a highway that takes your mental focus out of your experience into someone else’s perspective (your partner’s, in this case), and broadens yours. We need to enter our partner’s perspective for two central healthy relationship goals:
To strengthen emotional intimacy
To de-escalate conflict and manage differences.
Curiosity leads to a deepening of understanding and empathy toward your partner in even challenging situations.
If you want to learn how to nurture a relationship, let’s take a closer look at the specifics of how curiosity improves emotional intimacy and reduces conflict in a relationship.
Curiosity Nurtures a Secure Emotional Bond
Curiosity is a pathway out of your head, your experience, your perspective. As such, asking questions is the only way to enter your partner’s internal landscape: their thoughts, fears, hopes, experiences, emotions. More importantly, as you listen and attune to your partner’s world, your partner feels cared for and seen, and will likely reciprocate as the asker, tuning in to your world next. This process of being curious about each other builds trust, safety, and connection.
When you’ve been with a partner for a long time, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you know everything about them. Here’s the thing: you don’t. Even if you did, people are always evolving and changing. There’s more there to discover. Alain De Botton, author and philosopher, beautifully articulates the need for curiosity in bringing this vitality to relationships:
“People are amazingly, wondrously complicated. So if ever you feel that you’ve genuinely conquered, understood, been there, done that with a person—you haven’t. People are like onions with a billion layers. There’s always another layer. So if you feel you know your partner, you just really haven’t gotten to know them. You shouldn’t ever legitimately feel that you’ve exhausted someone. Often it’s about changing the angle of the lens.”
Curiosity De-Escalates Conflict
Practicing curiosity de-escalates conflict and leads to better repairs. To understand how, first you need to know what happens to your brain during couples conflict.
During a conflict, you get emotionally aroused. The amygdala (the center of command in your brain) takes over and you lose the ability to maintain perspective and a long view of events. In addition, your brain will fill in any gaps where it doesn’t have a full understanding of events and facts, including your partner’s context and experience.
Because you’re emotionally aroused, the brain will fill in the gaps with a negative and biased version of the story in order to make your partner a threat. It does this because the brain is run by the amygdala, whose job is to scan the environment, locate threats, and keep you safe from them.
The Power of Asking Questions
Asking questions and getting curious during a heated moment helps down-regulate your brain out of that threat detection mode. It slows down the arousal process and prevents assumptions from hardening.
This view of the other person’s context forces you to reconsider the narrative you may have already formed. With curiosity, we can appraise the situation more accurately. Ellen Bader, a renowned couples therapist, reminds couples to think of this line when they are getting wound up: “Get curious, not furious!”
You will still have conflict (all couples do!), but practicing curiosity will help you hold onto empathy and connection when encountering your differences. You’ll be more able to differentiate the story your brain wants to tell you from the story that is grounded in the other person’s truth.
This means you’ll also be able to make a meaningful repair. A significant part of nurturing a relationship is managing conflict and making repairs after a rupture. Curiosity makes this possible.
How to Nurture A Relationship With Curiosity
As a coach and a therapist, I often encounter people who have fallen out of practice with asking questions of their spouse or partner. Initiating conversation feels daunting and intimidating and you may even worry that your questions would feel intrusive to your partner after such a long time of not asking questions.
If this is you, first, please know it’s normal to struggle with breaking out of the routines and roles you’ve slid into. If you feel intimidated about how to access your own curiosity or how to turn your curiosity into conversation here are some ideas to get the questions going:
Use a question prompt game. There are many of these available at bookstores or on Amazon. My personal favorite is Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? Ask your partner if he/she/they would be willing to try something new and introduce the idea of bringing one of these card decks on your next dinner date. Your partner is likely going to say yes because, deep down, we all love talking about ourselves!
Check out the book Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by John and Julie Gottman. This clever book breaks out different domains of couples’ lives into 8 categories, each one designed to be discussed on its own designated date. For each date/topic, the book provides open-ended questions to prompt conversation and inquiry.
Give Curiosity a Chance
If you want to know how to nurture a relationship, consider curiosity. Cultivate curiosity about your partner’s inner world, use tools like games and books to support your growth in this area, and bring that curiosity to the forefront of the conversation when your misunderstandings begin to create conflict. The winning strategy will improve connection and security in your relationship for the long haul.
Sources
Gottman, John. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Orion, 2000.
Gottman, John, et al. Eight dates: Essential conversations for a lifetime of love. Workman Publishing, 2019.
Fishbane, Mona DeKoven. "From Reactivity to Relational Empowerment in Couple Therapy: Insights from Interpersonal Neurobiology." Systemic Research in Individual, Couple, and Family Therapy and Counseling (2020): 265-279.
Bader, Ellyn, and Peter T. Pearson. In quest of the mythical mate: A developmental approach to diagnosis and treatment in couples therapy. Psychology Press, 1988.