Goodtalk
Goodtalk

Love maps: questions that keep you up to date on each other

A love map is the picture you carry of your partner's life right now: friends, worries, dreams, and everyday routines. That picture gets out of date fast, because people change, even when they live together. The questions below can help you keep it current.

What is a love map?

The term comes from the American psychologist John Gottman, who has spent many years studying couples in the lab. In his 1999 book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, he describes love maps as the part of your memory where you store what you know about your partner's life: who matters to them, what stresses them out, and what they hope for.

Gottman's idea is that couples who know each other's inner world in detail are better prepared when life changes.

The Four Horsemen, and what we don't know

Gottman is best known for studies that tried to predict divorce from how couples talk during a conflict. That's where the Four Horsemen come from: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. In his studies, a pattern with more negativity than positivity in conflict conversations was linked to later breakups (Gottman & Levenson 1992).

The high accuracy figures that are often quoted should be taken with caution, though. Heyman and Slep showed in 2001 that predictions that haven't been tested on a new group of couples can greatly overstate accuracy. The love map concept itself is a model from Gottman's books and workshops, and we haven't found an independent study that tests it on its own.

The exercise: guess, answer, and ask more

Love maps are about knowing, not about being right. Make it a game, not an exam.

  • One of you reads a question out loud and guesses what the other will answer.
  • The other answers and says what the guess got right and what it missed.
  • Ask one follow-up question before you move on.
  • Switch roles for each question. Five questions are plenty for one evening.

Keep the picture current

A love map is never finished. Come back to some of the questions in six months and see what has changed. That's often where the best conversations happen.

On Goodtalk, you'll find similar questions in the Know Your Partner deck.

Questions for the exercise

  1. Which of your friends have you talked to most in the past month?
  2. What's the first thing you think about when you wake up these days?
  3. What task at work or at home is taking up the most space for you right now?
  4. What plan on your calendar are you looking forward to most?
  5. Who in your family have you been thinking about most lately, and why?
  6. What have you read, watched, or listened to recently that you can't stop thinking about?
  7. What's your favorite meal these days?
  8. If you got the day off tomorrow, what would the day look like?
  9. What are you working on getting better at?
  10. What has worried you recently that you haven't mentioned to me?
  11. Who would you call first if you got bad news?
  12. What's the smallest thing that could make your day better right now?
  13. Where in the world do you daydream about going these days?
  14. What are you proud of from the past year?
  15. Which of your old dreams still matters to you?
  16. What annoys you most in everyday life right now?
  17. What song do you connect with this time in your life?
  18. What has become more important to you since we met?
  19. What topic could you talk about for hours these days?
  20. What does it take for you to fully relax on a Friday night?

Keep playing with the cards

Sources