Building Love Maps in Your Marriage

I love those first few weeks when I PCS to a new place. Undaunted by a lack of household goods or limited leave, I load my family up every morning to go out exploring our new home. Driving around the installation aimlessly but full of intention.

We speculate on which park we’ll enjoy walking to the most or which of a town’s kitschy diners we’ll frequent on Sundays after church. Taking it all in, learning the main roads at first, the way to the commissary, the PX, then gradually picking up on the backways and roundabout shortcuts.

By the time your stay is halfway up, you know how to avoid gate traffic and where to go to meet your friends for coffee or lunch. Though no matter how well you’ve become acquainted with it, the town you leave is seldom the same town when your moving truck arrived. The place you have all your socials closes down and is replaced by another restaurant, new boutiques open on Main Street. Of course, just before you leave, you begin discovering fascinating places and activities that have been there all along, but you never knew.

Our marriages are similar. New relationships are intoxicating. Learning about each other, discovering likes, dislikes, dreams, fears. Drinking each other in and basking in your own little world of discovery and exploration with your new paramour.

Reflecting on those early days with relish, most of us have traded our all-consuming infatuation for the steadfast commitment and intimacy we share today. Now we know our partners and are known by them, sometimes a little too well. We know the shortcuts and backroads, but are we keeping up with their changes?

We’re always changing, and it stands to reason our spouse is, too. Like an old, low-tech GPS, we have to take the time to plug-in and update our maps of each other’s inner world. Dr. John Gottman has spent his career studying what couples “do right” in long-lasting marriages.

Dr. Gottman describes building love maps as being intimately familiar with your partner’s inner world. Your love map is his way of talking about that space in your head where you store information about your partner: their life, their history, facts, and feelings. Keep plenty of cognitive space for your marriage to update changes in your loved one’s world. The depth of love and knowledge are correlated. The more you know, the more there is to love, and without being known, there can only be the shallowest kind of love.

Love maps are a way of talking about knowing your partner. Likely, many of us mapped out the main roads early on in our marriages. Through the years, we’ve enhanced our maps to include some shortcuts and delve deeper into the backroads of our partner’s hopes and fears.

But are we up keeping up with the construction?

I’m not the same person that took those vows six years ago. I’ve grown and changed, and my daily life looks drastically different. 

Ask your service member if you have doubts—you want to be working with the most up-to-date information you can. This is especially true during seasons of change or upheaval. Couples who have detailed love maps of each other’s worlds are better prepared to cope with stressful events and conflicts.

In one of his studies, Dr. Gottman recorded marital satisfaction in couples after a significant life event: the birth of their first child. Sixty-seven percent of couples reported a precipitous drop in marital bliss after becoming parents, but 33% did not experience this dissatisfaction in their marriage. Amazingly, half of that 33% experienced improvements in their marriages. For those of you that don’t want to do math while reading this, 16.5% of couples experienced improvements in their marriage after becoming first-time parents.

Dr. Gottman wanted to know what those 16.5% were doing differently.

Can you guess?

The couples whose marriages thrived after entering parenthood had more detailed love maps beforehand and were already in the habit of keeping them up to date.

Being aware of what each other were thinking and feeling during a time of sudden and dramatic change helped these couples go through their transitions together instead of drifting apart. Keeping up with and enhancing your knowledge of each other helps unite you when your lives shift and change where you could otherwise lose sight of each other. 

I cannot overstate the importance of these findings for military spouses. We go through what most people would consider a significant life transition every few years: moving to a new state, enduring a deployment, having a child.

During deployments, constant TDYs, and “irregular” work hours, it can be so easy to fall out of touch with what’s going on in each other’s world. Take the time to ask a few questions of each other and reconnect with each other’s thoughts and feelings.

It matters. It’s the key to feeling like you’re in this together and not ships passing in the night. Know and be known; love and be loved.

I hope anyone reading this has a date night on the books for this February, and what better way to use that time than enhancing your love maps? To assist you, I’ve included Dr. Gottman’s lovely questionnaire to spark those conversations.

Love Map Exercise:

• Name my two closest friends.
• What was I wearing when we first met?
• Name one of my hobbies.
• What stresses am I facing right now?
• Describe in detail what I did today or yesterday.
• What is my fondest unrealized dream?
• What is one of my greatest fears or disaster scenarios?
• What is my favorite way to spend an evening?
• What is one of my favorite ways to be soothed?
• What is my favorite getaway place?
• What are some of the important events coming up in my life? How do I feel about them?
• What are some of my favorite ways to work out?
• Name one of my major rivals or “enemies.”
• What would I consider my ideal job?
• What medical problems do I worry about?
• What was my most embarrassing moment?
• Name one of my favorite novels/movies.
• What is my favorite restaurant?