Create a Love Map to Find Your Best Marriage

From 2002 to 2010, I went to two to three weddings a year. I caught the bouquet once and was a bridesmaid four times. The guest lists heavily overlapped because most of my friends married someone else in our friend group. Everyone knew each other’s families and stories. Then, there’s me and my husband. When we first met, we had no shared friends or history. I didn’t know his parents or where he was from.

That was hard for me at first because I felt a couple’s knowledge of each other created a foundation, and we started from scratch. But as we’ve grown together, we’ve learned about one another. It turns out this practice has a name: building a love map—the process of learning about your spouse. And it’s proven to be key to a healthy relationship. Here’s why and how to build the map that will lead you to your best marriage.

Why do couples need a love map?

The simplest way to understand why a love map matters is to imagine yourself and your husband years from now. Maybe you’re surrounded by great-grandchildren or sitting lakeside in rocking chairs holding hands. What got you to that place? What kept you in love? Commitment and trust definitely helped, but they served as support for what you poured into your relationship. 

At the foundation of your long-lasting marriage was probably friendship.

Relationship expert Dr. John Gottman shares in his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work that his research shows the quality of a married couple’s friendship is the most important predictor of satisfaction with sex, romance, and passion (by 70%!). But friendship isn’t created just by living under the same roof. It comes from knowing each other’s histories, likes, dislikes, dreams, and desires. That’s where the love map comes in. A love map is the mental space spouses create for one another and their knowledge of each other’s inner worlds.

Is it an actual map?

You could crumble up a brown bag, singe the edges, and draw an island with a lone palm tree and big red X, but a love map isn’t quite that literal. Writing something down would be helpful though! 

Here’s how a love map is similar to an actual map: It sets a course to spouses’ inner thoughts. It provides scale by sharing where you’ve been and what you’ve been through. A love map has landmarks—the spots in your lives that are meaningful. It has color to spark interest in one another. And it has signs for turns to avoid.

Most importantly, it’s a map in the sense that it will always help two committed people find their way to each other.

Creating a love map is easy.

It requires only two things: asking questions and telling stories. 

When you first met each other, you probably asked a lot of get-to-know-you questions. Those answers formed the basis of your friendship. Just because you’ve been married for five, 10, or 30 years, you don’t know everything about the other person. Shoot, I don’t know everything about myself, and I’ve been with me for 43 years! And life isn’t lived in a vacuum, so there’s always something new to learn as the world around us changes. 

Here’s a printable list of 76 Conversation Starters for Couples. Gottman suggests asking a range of questions. And he gives a few ideas:

• What was work like today?
• What’s your favorite website?
• What do you want most for our children?
• What’s your biggest stressor right now?
• Who’s your favorite relative?
• What was one of your best childhood experiences?
• What’s your favorite way to relax?

And then there are stories. Stories paint a picture in a way questions don’t. So tell stories, listen to each other’s stories, and reply with more questions. When my husband tells me stories of what it was like when his parents adopted his sister, he’s zooming in on a portion of his life’s map. It’s like seeing all the street signs instead of just the major highways. Just as the details in an actual map make it easier to find where I’m going, learning about my husband through stories and questions has given me a clearer path to his inner world.

So get curious about one another. Could you ask a question a day and see what stories come up? Ask your husband on a scale of one to 10 how well you know each other. Then commit to taking that up one notch. Finding your best marriage through a love map is just one question away. 

What’s a question you could ask your husband to learn something you don’t yet know about him? What’s a question he could ask you?