“If We Were in Couples Therapy, What Do You Think We’d Talk About?”
And other fun “conversation-starter” questions I ask my husband on the fly.
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You probably know this by now, but being my life partner is not for the faint of heart. I will absolutely hit you with a random question that throws you completely off-guard at least once a month. It’s inevitable. I want to understand you fully and deeply, and if I love you even a little bit, this is how I will show it. Questions are my one true love…language.
Sometimes this fetish for knowing all the things about you better and more thoroughly than anyone else looks like this: You’re driving home from a brewery with a healthy tipsiness about you, thinking fondly about the enjoyable time you just had with your small family, when you wife hits you with, “hey, if we were in couples therapy, what do you think we’d talk about?” Or “If I somehow died before you—given that you are super old and have a lot of autoimmune diseases—would you ever get remarried?” Or “If you had the opportunity to hear from your deceased dad, is there anything you’d want him to say?”
It's a lot. But it’s also important to me to find out. I’m not the kind of person who is going to let you get away with not sharing your inner world. I can’t imagine keeping my relationship to my person an arm’s length away and only surface deep. If I don’t know your perspective about such-and-such article I sent you or the experience of your childhood and upbringing or how you’d most likely respond to certain hypothetical situations, do I even know you at all? I simply must know.
And perhaps it’s the journalist in me, but I find it BAFFLING when I talk to people about major life events their partners are dealing with, and that person has no idea what their person thinks about it. Sometimes they don’t even know the plan! Then, I instantly become the psycho who spends all the mental energy these two should be putting toward a come-to-Jesus conversation on my own nighttime spiral of endless questions: How did you not ask any questions about this? How did you avoid talking about it? How is this not a huge elephant in the room for y’all? It’s virtually impossible not to somehow address this! I’m not crazy. YOU’RE CRAZY.
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