Dating : How to Reconnect with Your Partner— Using Nothing but Words

First up, I’ll admit that I first got this idea from a podcast. I get a lot of my ideas from podcasts because, at the moment, I use podcasts to fill my ears when I’m doing other things. (Laundry. Decorating. Wrapping Christmas presents).

The podcast’s presenter was explaining how she’d been sent, presumably in the hope of a shout-out, a set of “conversation starter cards” for couples who have been together “a while”. I’m not sure how this “while” is defined — I have a sense that a 2020 spent indoors together might have made even a honeymoon feel quite lengthy — but I definitely understand the concept.

I’ve been with my husband for nearly twenty years. Our most frequent conversation starter is “WHY did you set the alarm for this time, again?” closely followed by “By the way, definitely not my turn to walk the dog.”

I’d definitely say we’re happy, that we’re in a good place, but it’s a very far cry from the days of lying on our backs on the scratchy carpet in his rented flat, circling for hours through tales of our separate experiences and rounding back, repeatedly, to the fringes of that question neither of us could quite bring ourselves to ask at the time: Will you be mine forever, though? Will this conversation go on and on? I want it to.

Because that’s the way it goes. You start a conversation one day, and that conversation waxes and wanes and turns into a life together. I once read an interview with an older actor in which he said “I started a conversation with my wife when I met her in 1973, and we’re still having it.” Yes, I thought. That sounds like a marriage to me.

But ours, at the moment, is not a fascinating conversation. It’s mundane and ordinary. In the early days of the pandemic, we sat sometimes in the garden and tried to talk lightly and easily in the way that we used to, but it’s very difficult to dream of the future (which is what, inevitably, those conversations used often to involve) when no one knows what that future might look like.

So. Conversation starter cards. Something I’d previously have scoffed at, but now I thought they sounded like a great idea. Or maybe not a great idea, but still, an intriguing one. Diverting, at least. I decided to order a set.