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How to Stop a Bad Day From Turning Into a Bad Life
The dishwasher repair took three days, the beeping never stopped, and the most positive guy in our house spent all of it in a funk. Here's the one question that got us out.
We Have Pork Chops Two or Three Nights a Week
Jana has told me, more than once, that she cannot eat pork chops and salmon anymore. I've heard her every time. Then I go to the grocery store and buy pork chops. Not because I don't care what she thinks. Because I'm tired, and it's easy, and the list is the list.
We Turned Off the Lights and Hid in the Bedroom on Halloween
There is no recorded instance of me regretting going out to the driveway. Not once. And I still argue with myself about it every week, which tells you something about how much that argument is actually worth listening to.
Ten Hours at a Desk, and Where the Joy Actually Showed Up
My payoff comes at the end of the day, silently, in a journal, in a currency she can't spend. She doesn't get any of it in real time. What she gets in real time is a guy at a desk with his head down who isn't laughing. I got paid. She watched me not get paid.
Four Sentences to Repair a Relationship When You'd Rather Be Right
"When there's a disagreement, it's me planting my feet and wanting to be right. And I am right. I am right from my perspective and from my current level of understanding. That's my truth in the moment, until I can understand where you're right also."
Two accurate accounts of the same event, built from two different sets of information and two different nervous systems. There is no evidence either person can produce that will dissolve the other person's experience. So the argument has no exit. It only has an exhaustion point.
What If You and Your Partner Did This Together?
That shared intention, practiced over years, has done something to us that I don’t think either of us fully anticipated when we started.
It made us fluent in each other.
When you and your partner both practice asking what you want to experience, how you want to grow, how you’d like to contribute, and how lucky you are — separately, then together — something changes in how you see each other. You stop assuming you know what the other person wants. You start asking. You stop filling in each other’s blanks with projections built from habit and start actually listening to what’s alive in the other person right now, today, in this season of their life.
That sounds simple. It is not common.
The practice of asking “what do you want to experience?” — genuinely, openly, as if you don’t already know the answer — is one of the most quietly radical things two people can do for a relationship.