You can live together for years, love, raise children, run a household, and know exactly how your partner takes their coffee, and still discover that you no longer know what’s really on their mind.
Life fills up with tasks, decisions that need to be made, and conversations that need to end. Gradually, we can know a great deal about our shared life, and less about what is happening now in the inner world of the person living beside us.
Couple closeness needs curiosity. The ability to pause and ask: Who are you now? What are you going through? What has changed in you? And what do I still not know about the person I love?
I’ve gathered here 22 questions for couples who want to pause the management of life for a moment and return to really talking. The questions move through five circles: my relationship with myself, the relationship between us, the couple within the family, the families we came from, and the world in which we live.
You don’t need to answer all of them in one evening. On the contrary. Choose one or two questions. Give them time.
John and Julie Gottman emphasize in their work the importance of ongoing familiarity with the inner world of your partner. Gottman calls this familiarity a Love Map: the ability to know the worries, hopes, pressures, joys, and experiences that make up the world of the person with us. This map is not created once at the beginning of the relationship and remains updated forever. We change. What occupied me five years ago is not necessarily what occupies me today, and what I knew about you at the beginning of the relationship does not exempt me from the need to continue getting to know you.
Open questions create such an invitation. Instead of “Is everything okay?”, which allows an answer of “Yes,” you can ask “What’s been on your mind most lately?” and stay long enough to hear the answer. But the question itself is not the main thing. The main thing is what we do with the answer? Can I listen without rushing to explain myself? Can I hear an experience different from mine without correcting it? Can I be curious even when the answer touches me or stirs discomfort in me? For me, that’s where the connection between couple curiosity and differentiation begins: I don’t need to give up myself to know you, and you don’t need to be like me for me to get close to you.
Before I ask what’s happening between us, it’s worth checking what’s happening inside me. A relationship is made up of two people, and each of us comes to it with desires, fears, boundaries, ways of adapting, and life experiences.
Differentiation begins with the ability to recognize myself within the relationship. What do I feel? What do I want? What matters to me? And what is hard for me to bring to the person I love?
These questions are not looking for who is to blame for what’s happening between us. They invite each of us to bring more of ourselves into the encounter, instead of waiting for only the person in front of us to change.
A relationship can continue for years while the familiarity itself stops being updated. We remember well who the person we fell in love with was, but we don’t always pause to meet the person they have become.
Here I invite you to be interested not only in what your partner does, but in their experience within the relationship and in life in general.
Don’t look for identical answers. One of the traps in relationships is the thought that closeness requires us to experience the relationship in the same way.
You can be very close and see the same relationship from two different perspectives. Listening does not require agreement. It allows me to know a little more how the world looks from where you are standing.
When you become a family, the relationship takes on new roles. There are children to care for, decisions to make, tasks to divide, and a load that doesn’t always leave much room for the two people who were here before all of this.
Family functioning is important, but it cannot replace the couple encounter. It’s worth checking from time to time who we are to each other when we’re not just parents, drivers, cooks, providers, and managers of the family calendar.
These three questions are not asking us to choose between the children and the relationship. They remind us that even within the family that was created, the couple relationship needs a space where we continue to be partners.
None of us comes to a relationship as a blank slate. Long before we met our partner, we already observed relationships and learned something about love, anger, closeness, distance, commitment, asking for help, and boundaries.
Some of these things were told to us in words. Others we simply learned from life at home.
From the perspective of family constellation, I am also interested in the broader systemic context from which each of us comes. Not to determine that the past explains every difficulty in the present, but to look with curiosity at what we learned about relationship and what we choose to do with it today.
The goal is not to judge the families we came from. We can recognize what we received, what was missing, and what was difficult, and at the same time ask: How do we want to live our relationship today?
A relationship does not exist in a vacuum. Culture, gender, work, money, parenting, social networks, and the expectations around us influence the way we think a relationship “should” look.
Real overload can easily turn into a couple argument. A social expectation can feel like a personal desire. So it’s worth broadening the view from time to time and checking what’s happening between us and what’s coming from the world around us.
The last question is not asking us to present the children with a perfect relationship. Children can see that people who love each other are also different from each other, make mistakes, argue, repair, set boundaries, and continue to build connection.
Choose one question from the 22. Each of you gets five minutes to answer it without interruption.
The person listening does not need to give advice, explain themselves, or say how things look from their perspective. Try to listen with one goal: to know something about the world of the person in front of you.
After they finish, ask:
“Is there anything else you’d like me to understand?”
And only when the answer is finished, say in one sentence what you heard:
“What I understand from you is…”
Check if you understood correctly. If not, you can correct and try again. Then switch.
At the end, don’t immediately decide what needs to change in the relationship. Instead, each person completes one sentence:
“Something I’m taking from this conversation about you is…”
Not every couple conversation needs to end with a solution. A conversation can be meaningful also because two people came out of it knowing each other a little more.
We ask lots of questions at the beginning of a relationship. We want to know where you grew up, what you believe in, what you love, what you’re afraid of, and what you dream about. After years together, it’s easy to feel that we already know. But the person living beside us continues to change, and so do we. So curiosity is not only the way we get to know each other at the beginning of love. It is one of the ways we continue to know the person we love over time.
These 22 questions are not a test of your relationship, and there are no answers that indicate you passed or failed. They are an invitation to set aside for a moment what you already know about each other and make room for what can still be discovered. Because deep couple connection is not created from knowing everything about each other. It is also created from the willingness to keep asking, listening, and being surprised.
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For people without a supportive family network.
We will reveal how the lack of a family network challenges and strengthens the couple's relationship, the high prices it exacts from you and your relationship.
Couples therapy will strengthen your sense of security and belonging, so you can be close without losing yourselves along the way.
Online / In-person clinic
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Individual therapy is a safe space where you will rediscover your strengths, build inner confidence, and create a whole and meaningful life for yourself, just as you dream.
Online / In-person clinic
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You are invited to enter a unique space: an interactive conversation with special GPTs I created – a first-of-its-kind tool that looks inward with you in the language and frequency of the systemic constellation.
If there is something unresolved in your relationship, family, or heart – the chat will gently meet you without trying to fix it, inviting a different, slow, precise, and quiet perspective. There is no need to understand, just to see and let it work.
Expert in couples therapy for relationships without a supportive family safety net.
Developer of the Couples Constellation approach: a systemic-emotional therapy that brings the couple’s relational dynamics into contact with unspoken family patterns, alongside practical tools that enable movement, connection, and the creation of a deep partnership.
Let’s start with a brief introductory call, free of charge and commitment.
Sometimes, this small step changes everything.
The sessions take place
online via Zoom / face-to-face in Tivon, according to your choice
