6 QUESTIONS TO SPARK INTIMACY IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

BY NATE AND KALEY KLEMP

Whether a relationship is just beginning or already spans decades, sometimes we forget to be curious toward one another. No matter how well you know each other, allowing your partner the chance to surprise you is an excellent way of keeping things fresh and in-the-moment. Next time you’re tempted to scroll through your phone instead of catching up after work, try one of these reflective queries—they just might spark a thoughtful conversation and, at the same time, bring you closer together.

About The Authors

Nate Klemp, PhD, and Kaley Klemp are coauthors of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for Happier, Stronger Relationship

1 What’s really going on with you? This is an invitation to take your conversation one level deeper, an invitation for your partner to talk about their challenges, struggles, and victories you may not know about.

2 What’s something that you feel proud of? This question helps you and your partner understand each other’s contributions—at home, at work, or in family life—more clearly and witness your passion for the things you care most about.

3 What thought keeps looping in your head? Most of us have at least one stressful thought swirling in our minds at all times. Sharing these with your partner will not only bring you closer, it will also help you release the grip of these thoughts.

4 What change have you noticed in yourself that I may not have noticed? Maybe you made the “Dryuary” commitment to taking a break from alcohol, or they took up a new hobby. Life moves so fast that it’s easy to miss these changes. By asking, you can extend the invitation to help support each other. in meeting personal and professional responsibilities, and make all manner of social faux pas.

5 What’s something you say you want to do, but you haven’t yet made happen in your life? This question brings with it both a heightened understanding of each other and an opportunity to support each other in beginning to change something.

6 What are the three things about our life together that you’re most grateful for? Shifting your attention to a few things you’re grateful for is a way to experience well-being and happiness—the research is strong and well-documented. If you can turn this question into a regular habit, you may start to notice a shift in the tone of your conversations, from everyday stress to a more well-rounded outlook on your life together.

While the PFC is essential to our social nature, sometimes we let it control us too much. Studies show that rumination, recurrent negative thinking, self-focused thinking, and even obsessive-compulsive disorders are associated with changes in the PFC. The prefrontal cortex on overdrive is not a pretty sight. We think less flexibly, we obsess over minute details, make ourselves sick with worry, turn something over and over endlessly in our head. In such cases, we are trying too hard to stay on script, to anticipate what will happen, to plan and perfect.

This kind of PFC-driven overthinking can at times be a roadblock to creativity. When neuroscientists zap parts of the PFC to reduce its influence (using a noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS), we find that people show a cognitive enhancement as they are better at solving problems or brain teasers, and tend to think more outside the box. With mental training, we can achieve similar results, whether that means coming up with a solution to creative problems at work or finding a way of turning a scientific conference into an impromptu wedding party. Not only are we more creative when the PFC is kept in check, we’re also in a better mood. Studies show that the less we ruminate, the higher our subjective measures of life satisfaction and happiness are.

The Joy of Missing Out

So the question then becomes: How do we keep the PFC in balance? How do we benefit from all its useful aspects—the way it helps us plan, save, and control unhealthy or harmful tendencies—without letting it rule our life, causing overthinking, anxiety, and other problems? In other words, how do we go off-script? How do we say no to FOMO, the fear of missing out, and say yes to JOMO, or the joy of missing out?

Popular antidotes to combat negative overthinking include meditation and mindfulness exercises. Such techniques have in recent years gained in scientific credibility. Two of the people who helped change attitudes toward meditation and mindfulness are the American neuroscientist Richard Davidson, a master in mind-body interactions and a pioneer in the art of reining in the PFC, and the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, a master in finding wonders in solitude and strength in self-introspection. Together they have formed a friendship and collaboration with the Dalai Lama. They have conducted experiments in Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and in other laboratories around the world) in which they used EEG and fMRI to study the brains of Tibetan monks and other students of meditation. Their results show how highly trained practitioners (with over 9,000 hours of lifetime practice on average) can control negative thought processes, accept every feeling as they come in a nonjudgmental way, and modulate the activation of various brain areas, including the PFC—the region which, as Professor Davidson elegantly described, is “absolutely key” in emotion regulation, as the PFC is “a convergence zone for thoughts and feelings.”

Yet it’s not only eminent monks with years of training in meditation who can benefit from such techniques. In 1999, Davidson and his colleagues contacted the CEO of a biotech company and suggested that he teach his employees mindfulness meditation and then assess how it might affect some measures of physical and mental health. Forty-eight employees volunteered to take part in nonjudgmental moment-to-moment → a control group, MBSR volunteers showed a 12% drop in their anxiety symptoms and a shift from right to left PFC activation. Interestingly, the PFC in the right hemisphere of the brain tends to process negative emotions, whereas the left PFC specializes in positive emotions—an indication that the mindfulness training was working.

There are now numerous mindfulness apps and behavioral therapies that can help ruminators become meditators and gain new insights not only into their physical and mental health but also into how their brains function. In time, they can learn to suppress the impulse to obsessively focus on negative past and negative future events, putting the PFC in a more peaceful place. What mindfulness practitioners find is that being in the moment can quite literally clear the mind of unwanted and unnecessary negative thoughts and replace them with more constructive thinking. Such intentional change in mindset will open you up to experiences that may be richer, deeper, and more meaningful than anything you could have ever planned or ever imagined.

Finally, nature has also been shown to have a potent effect on reducing rumination and regulating PFC activity. For instance, a 2015 study performed at Stanford showed

Before that day in Paris, John and I had been falling deeper and deeper in love—but rumination had started to kick in. There was one big biological fact separating us: our ages. John was 60. I was 37. And he worried whether marrying a much younger woman was a good idea. I don’t think he cared about what it looked like, the assumptions some people would make based on their own scripts for a “proper relationship.” I don’t think he was thinking about himself at all. Rather he was worried about me.

If something happened to him, I would be alone and, much worse from John’s perspective, I would be susceptible to loneliness. John knew, perhaps better than anyone on the planet, what loneliness could do to a healthy brain. And he was sensitive to the actuarial reality of our circumstances. If we tied the knot, odds are he would not be around to celebrate my 60th birthday.

“We may be in love, but we haven’t committed yet,” John said. “We’re still on the outside of this. I know, because I’ve studied it, the kind of loneliness that overwhelms a widowed spouse. The idea that you could live with that for decades—I can’t in good conscience put you in this position.”

I’m stubborn. I told him to forget it. I told him that I could never let something as seemingly trivial as age dictate our love. Looking back, I can’t help but think that it wasn’t only our age but also our academic specialties that influenced our positions. I was arguing for the joyful power of love, and he for the destructive power of loneliness.

We decided to take a week away from each other. No phones, no Skype. Some emotional distance. I went exploring caves with a girlfriend in southern France. And he went on vacation to Peru. We both spent our trips going through the motions of having fun, trying to distract ourselves from the fact that we missed each other so much it was hard to breathe. At the end of the week he sent me a photograph of his left hand. He had put a silver band on his ring finger. “I’m yours,” he wrote.

On the day of our wedding, the whole scientific conference metamorphosed into a wedding party. We couldn’t rent a spot on such short notice, so we decided to do the ceremony guerrilla style in a random corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, near our hotel. John asked Dr. Jack Rowe, a professor of public health at Columbia, to give me away. (“But I haven’t even met the bride!” Jack said.) Laura would officiate. The hotel chef whipped up a wedding cake with just a few hours’ notice. The University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank Furstenberg, armed with his iPad, served as our photographer.

As John and I stood there, united in our love, I found myself looking at the people around us, many of whom I had only just met. They were beaming. None had expected to end up attending a wedding, but each played a role in the affair, each felt a sense of taking part in something special. Both our spontaneous wedding ceremony in Paris and our official wedding in Chicago two weeks later remain two of the best moments of my life, but I have to confess, in my deepest heart, I feel like our spontaneous ceremony marked the first day when John and I became man and wife. In holding romantic expectations lightly—our own, and those of the people around us and society generally—we were creating space for all the unusual and marvelous qualities of those moments and, really, of our connection. ●

Excerpted from Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection.

Copyright © 2022 By Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo.

Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.