What 27 Years Has Taught Me About Staying Curious

A few years ago, three things happened more or less at the same time.

Our kids were growing up and becoming their own people. We moved out of the state we had both grown up in, left behind the life we had built there, and started something new. And I had a health scare that landed me in the hospital.

That last one is the one that changed me.

When I got out, I made a decision. I was going to live intentionally. In everything. My work, my time, the way I spent my days. But specifically, and urgently, my marriage. I did not want to be at the end of my life looking back at a relationship I had taken for granted. I did not want to wonder what we might have been if we had gone deeper, tried more, said the things we had kept to ourselves.

At the time, we had a good, if not great, marriage. We loved each other. But there was a whole dimension of our life together we had barely entered. And I had just gotten a very clear reminder that time is not guaranteed.

So I got curious. About my wife. About what she actually wanted. About what I wanted and had never quite admitted. About what was possible between two people who had been married for over two decades and thought they knew each other.

What followed has been the best years of our marriage.

The Conversations We Had Never Had

One of the things I realized, once I started paying attention, was how much context about each other we were missing.

My wife had told me early on that she did not like to dwell on the past. I respected that. What I did not fully reckon with was the cost of it. Not having the context of how we each got to each other, never talking about how we were raised around sex, what past heartbreak had taught us, what previous relationships had left behind, was a glaring omission. There was a version of my wife I did not fully know. And a version of myself I had never shared with her.

The vehicle that opened those conversations was the Esther Perel Card Game — Where Should We Begin, A Game of Stories. We started bringing it on date nights. The questions are not easy ones. They are designed to get underneath the surface, to the things people carry without quite knowing they are carrying them. Some of what came out of those evenings surprised me. Some of it explained things that had been quietly confusing me for years.

I write more about the specific histories we were each carrying, and what it took to finally bring them into the open, in What I Never Told My Wife. The short version is that two people who love each other can spend decades not telling each other the whole truth. The card game did not fix that overnight. But it opened doors we had kept closed for twenty years, and what was on the other side of those doors was worth the discomfort of walking through them.

Being Willing to Try Something Before Deciding Whether We'd Like It

We were not adventurous in our thirties. We had a narrow definition of what we did together and mostly stayed inside it. I am the adventurer in this marriage. My wife is not. And for a long time I stifled the passionate, erotic side of myself because I did not want to risk her discomfort. That led me inward to a life of pornography, shame and isolation. I write about that in detail in What I Never Told My Wife. What that meant in practice for our intimacy was that I would bring something up, it would touch a nerve or trigger a reaction, and I would let it go. Not forever. Just long enough.

What changed things was learning that context matters. The why behind the ask. When I stopped presenting something new as a fix for what was missing and started framing it as simple curiosity, something I wanted to explore not because anything was broken but because I was interested, her response changed. She could hear it differently. And more often than not, she would agree to try.

What we have now is a whole repertoire of things we both genuinely enjoy, things neither of us would have found if we had not been willing to push through the discomfort of honest conversation. Not every conversation landed cleanly. Some of them took more than one attempt. But the pattern held: bring it up, give it context, let her process, try it together.

That is the real work of curiosity in a long marriage. Not the trying. The talking that makes the trying possible.

The anniversary that started all of it was not perfectly executed. I got the instinct right and the approach wrong. But what it unlocked between us was real, and it sent me looking for better ways to have the conversations that should have come first.

Staying Interested in My Own Desire, Not Just Hers

This one took me a long time to understand. I spent years focused on what my wife wanted and not enough time examining what I actually wanted. When I started paying attention to that, what I found was more specific and more interesting than I expected. And telling her some of it led to experiences we would never have had otherwise.

She has done the same. Things she finally admitted she wanted, things she had carried quietly for years, have surprised me and given us more to work with than we had before. Staying curious about what you actually want is not selfishness. It is what keeps a marriage from running out of material.

Curiosity Does Not Need a Destination

One of the traps in thinking about long-term intimacy is treating it like a problem to solve. What are we missing? What should we be doing differently? What is the end state we are working toward?

Curiosity is not that. It does not need a conclusion. It is the willingness to keep paying attention, keep asking, keep noticing what changes and what stays the same. Some of what we have discovered about each other in the last several years has not led anywhere specific. It has just made us more interested in each other than we were before.

The health scare gave me clarity I did not ask for and would not trade. It is a strange thing to be grateful for. But what it did was remove the comfortable assumption that there would always be more time, more chances, more occasions to go deeper with the person I chose and who chose me.

One of the traps of a long marriage is thinking that something is wrong because you do not have the same spontaneity and spark you had when you first met. I suspect this is where a lot of couples who reach that plateau go looking for that feeling elsewhere, from someone new. That is a danger point. And in my experience, what is sitting underneath it is not incompatibility. It is years of silence. Curiosity that got set aside, conversations that never happened, things that stayed unspoken long enough to feel unspeakable. Most of that is workable. It just requires someone to go first.

Twenty-seven years in and the marriage is more interesting to me now than it was at year ten or year fifteen. That did not happen by accident. It happened because we had a real life scare, and I made the decision that something had to change. I realized that life was too short to play small, and the beautiful woman I had chosen and who had chosen me was worth fighting for. I knew there were things I was hiding and I suspected the same of her, and we had many passionate and sometimes heated conversations where I told her that I wanted and needed to give more to our marriage and I asked her to give the same to me.

That is the part worth protecting.

We put together a free guide called The Five Intimacy Truths Nobody Tells Long Married Couples. It draws on 27 years of real marriage and includes five action steps you can use right now. It is a good place to start.