Rekindle Emotional Connection with Questions That Actually Matter

In this episode, we explore how recommitting to daily conversations and weekly date nights can reignite emotional intimacy and transform your relationship with your partner.

• Gottman research shows mapping your partner's inner world is crucial for emotional connection
• People constantly change and evolve—nobody remains the same person they were when you married
• Commit to 20 minutes of daily connection through walking and meaningful conversation
• Move beyond transactional topics (kids, chores, schedules) to discover what excites or stresses your partner
• Ask questions like "What are you learning right now?" or "Who are you enjoying talking to lately?"
• Use weekly date nights to explore the origins of beliefs about sex, money, relationships
• Investigate childhood experiences to understand where your partner's core beliefs originated
• "Weed out" unhealthy beliefs and intentionally plant new ideas in your relationship garden
• Emotional connection naturally enhances all other forms of intimacy
• Utilize resources like card decks, apps, and games for inspiration if you're struggling with conversation starters

I invite you to go for a walk with your spouse every single day, start mapping their inner world with really good questions, and make sure you're getting date night on the calendar every week. I promise it will make a huge difference in the connection, closeness and emotional intimacy you feel with your partner.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome and Episode Introduction
• 1:24 Importance of Mapping Inner Worlds
• 3:18 Daily 20-Minute Connection Walks
• 5:40 Questions That Spark Meaningful Conversation
• 9:13 Weekly Date Nights and Deep Topics
• 13:50 Resources and Episode Summary

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast. I'm your host, Monica Tanner, and I have a fun and quickie episode for you today. Since we talked about sexual disconnection last week, I wanted to talk about something that you can do right now to restart your emotional connection, to get your heart pumping and you feeling really fired up about wanting to be close to your partner. I was doing research on covers for my new book, so I'm super excited. We are in the process of sending it to the designer to put the front and back cover together, and so there is a form that I had to fill out where I talked about covers that I like and covers that I don't like and elements of each, so that I could give my designer the best ideas of what I like and dislike and how I see the front cover. And so I was scrolling through Amazon looking at a bunch of covers to other books that are about marriage and relationships, and I saw several books with the title something to the effect of how to improve your marriage without talking about it, and I definitely sent that as one of the ideas I didn't like because, first of all, the title is terrible. Not talking about it is a horrible idea and I personally cannot see any way to improve your marriage without communication and talking about it. So I'm not even curious as to what's inside that book because I feel like it's probably all garbage. No disrespect to the author, I'm sure they meant well, but in this episode my main objective is to get you talking to each other more. But I'm not going to give you any skills here, like of repair or the feedback wheel or different things like that. I just want you talking lightheartedly to each other, getting to know each other, connecting emotionally on a daily and weekly basis, and I want to give you a whole bunch of ideas on what you can talk to about each other. That would be getting to know each other's inner worlds better, Because, according to Gottman, being able to have a detailed map of your partner's inner world is so crucial to emotional connection.

Speaker 0: 2:35

And one thing that happens over time as couples are together for a long time, is they start to feel like they just know all the things about each other or they get bogged down in very transactional communication about the kids, about the housework, about each other's careers, money, those types of things, and so they stop getting really curious and mapping each other's inner worlds, which are always changing. So one of the chapters in the book I talk about how I hate it when I hear couples say they're just not the same person I married. Of course they're not the same person you married. They're not even the same person they were 15 minutes ago.

Speaker 0: 3:18

I am constantly learning and growing and changing my ideas and opinions and preferences about things based on minute to minute what happens in my life. So there is an literally unlimited amount of things that you can learn about your partner if you just decide to be intentional about asking really good, fun questions. So in today's episode I want to suggest that you recommit to daily connections, which I describe as 20 minutes each and every day. So we all get 1,440 minutes in a day. Nobody gets less, nobody gets more. It doesn't matter how much money you make, how many friends you have, how much you can bench press Like literally nobody gets more time or less for that matter. So if you will commit to spending 20 minutes reconnecting, usually towards the end of the day, but you definitely could do it at the beginning of the day and I recommend walking or maybe exercising together, going for a drive Now that the weather is getting nicer in most of the places where I think my podcast is listened to.

Speaker 0: 4:32

Getting outside and going for a walk with your partner every single day, even if it's just once around the block, is such a great habit to get into and I know my husband and I have really really loved walking and talking and sharing our ideas with each other. So this goes beyond just how was your day and giving again transactional, like here's what I did today or here's what the kids did today or here's what needs to happen, Like those types of things are good and need to be talked about for sure. But when I'm talking about these daily connections that are going to bind you together emotionally and eventually they're going to raise the level of all the other connections meaning recreationally, intellectually, physically. Meaning recreationally intellectually, physically, sexually, emotionally when you map each other's inner worlds well, you get excited about learning more and sharing more with your spouse. So one of the things my husband and I have been talking about a lot recently is religion and different ideas about religions, different takes on religion, our experiences about religion, whether it's in the past, growing up or recently, and how we're feeling about different things. We've been spending a lot of time on our walks discussing that because it feels big in our life right now.

Speaker 0: 5:55

But here are some ideas of questions you can ask each other to move beyond how was your day? So one of my favorite questions is what are you most excited about in life right now? And this can be anything. You can share anything from work things to family things to personal development things. And then, on the flip side, you can ask what do you feel like is the biggest stress in your life right now? These are kind of the most immediate daily things that will probably change from day to day, ways that you can map each other's inner worlds. But there's lots of questions like who are you loving talking to right now? So for me, I think about people that I see at the gym. There are ladies that I see at the gym that I absolutely love connecting with and talking to, and I think it's cool to be able to share with my partner who those people are and maybe what I enjoy talking with them about. And my husband same thing at work. He works with like a hundred people and some days he loves talking to one person and another day he'll come home and say, oh, I had the coolest conversation with this other person, or I'm really enjoying working around this person. Those things are really fun to learn about each other. And then also, what are you learning from the people around you? Or what are you learning from the book you're reading or listening to? What are you learning from podcasts that's interesting to you?

Speaker 0: 7:25

I tell this story in my book Bad Marriage Advice, about how I went through this phase in my life where I felt super grumpy and like I had no friends and I didn't have anything to share with anyone about anything, and I was just really feeling down and sorry for myself. And I remember talking to my husband about this and he gave me the best advice and he said make yourself interesting by learning about something that interests you that you can share with other people. So the reality is, people love to talk about themselves. So if you can get curious about whoever you're talking to and ask them good questions, that's the best way to connect with another person. But also if you are learning something that you are excited about, sharing that with other people makes you interesting to talk to. So I'm including makes you interesting to talk to. So I'm including friends, family, but also your spouse and recently I have been sharing so much with my husband about the things I'm learning about during the day.

Speaker 0: 8:33

I get really excited to read a chapter of whatever book I'm reading every single day and then I like sharing like what I gleaned from it, what I learned from it. Not only is it interesting for both of us, but also it kind of solidifies, like I have to remember what I read, and so sharing what we're reading about or learning about through podcasts or whatever other means, is another great thing to share with each other at the end or the beginning, whenever you choose to connect of the day, and I'm also hoping that through this episode you will reconnect to weekly date nights. And I'm telling you, my favorite date nights are the ones where my husband and I just go for a walk in our favorite part of Boise and we just talk. And you would think, since we talk every single day, that we would not have as much to talk about on these date nights. But always we do date nights, but always we do.

Speaker 0: 9:29

And one of my favorite topics is trying to dig really deep into how my husband came up with his thoughts or the things that he feels really strongly about, and so I love to ask questions about his childhood or his first experience with something. So let's take sex, for example, because we talked about in last week's episode how one of the most important things that you can do and this is a concept by Emily Nagoski is to go through that garden. Once you are an adult and you're married is to go through that garden and weed out all of the kind of false beliefs or kind of destructive ideas that were planted in that garden so that you can make something really special for you and your spouse to be able to enjoy. And so I love spending time on date night talking about how my husband originated with different ideas about sex or money or relationships or whatever it is. So I'll ask like what was, what's your first memory about anything sexual? And then, what was the very first inkling you ever had that your parents had to have sex in order to create children? Or what did your parents do that you want to make sure that you pass on to our children? Or what was hard for you and what would you want to do different with our children?

Speaker 0: 10:52

These types of discussions are awesome for date nights because you really get to know each other. You're mapping each other's inner worlds and you're like dreaming and planning together. But I completely also understand that if that particular topic or there's a topic that you want to bring up, like maybe money, like where did you come up with your money stories? Or if you're having trouble talking about those more difficult topics, my biggest recommendation is that you find a coach or counselor that you can talk to about these things, because having the right tools or skill sets to be able to have these important conversations is going to bless your marriage so much, because there are ways to talk about topics like sex and money and in-laws and holidays and all of those things that for some people that it's hard to talk about those things and so they just don't. And then they're being very unintentional and haphazard about how they teach their children about it, what they model for their children about it, how they feel about it, and I promise you don't want to look back and think, man, I wish we had spent more time talking to or teaching our kids about really important topics.

Speaker 0: 12:08

So open up those types of things, but go way back, See if you can be like a detective and figure out how your partner came up with different ideas about these topics and what they feel super strongly about today and then really like weed out what's not working for you, in your relationship or in your family and then start following experts. Like my husband listens to the money guys literally all the time, anytime he's not at work or doing something with me or whatever, like when he's showering or working out, or he's listening to the money guys podcast, and I know a lot of the history of how he grew up and how his money ideas were formed and it's something that he's super interested in. And also he's planting flowers and fruits and vegetables in his garden because he likes that view of how to spend your money, how to save your money, how to invest your money all of those things right. So you can do that with any topic. But it's really fun to discuss those things with your spouse and pull out the weeds together, like decide what's a weed and what's not, and then find who has the great seeds of what you want to be planted in that garden and be intentional about it. And so I promise you, if you will get better about emotionally connecting through talking every day, through daily connections and every week through date nights, you are going to create more emotional intimacy in your marriage, which seeps into all the other types of intimacy, and so start asking really good questions.

Speaker 0: 13:54

Now, if you need help with this, there's hundreds of places you can go. There's card decks you can buy. There's apps you can use. There's free downloads that I create for you guys all the time. There's games that you can get at the store that all have interesting questions that you can ask each other to get to know each other better.

Speaker 0: 14:16

Now, these can also be hypotheticals, Like you could ask if you had a thousand dollars that were unaccounted for, how would you spend it? $1,000 that were unaccounted for, how would you spend it? I guarantee that over the years, your answer to that question is going to change. So even if you've had that discussion like, my answer now is going to be totally different than my answer five years ago or maybe even last month. So again, my summary of this episode and my wish for you is that you will, if you're not already, invite your spouse to go for a walk every single day. Start mapping their inner world with really good, insightful questions. Make sure you're getting date night on the calendar and going every single week and having really insightful and interesting conversations on these date nights. I promise it will make a huge difference and the connection, closeness and emotional intimacy you feel with your partner. So thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. I will be back next week with a another really cool topic for us to talk about and until then, happy marriaging.