How curiosity in relationships unlocks the potential for more intimacy and connection
Episode 5
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
The Myth of Pandora and her infamous box
Lewis Carroll’s take on curiosity in Alice in Wonderland
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” Carl Rogers in A Way of Being
Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt
Why is it sometimes so difficult to understand ourselves … what we think, how we feel, why we do what we do? And why is it that, no matter how long we’ve been together in a relationship, it can still be so difficult to understand our partner … why they think what they think, and feel how they feel, and why they do what they do?
Given that we’re often confused or at a loss to understand ourselves—and each other—it might be tempting to conclude that the reason we have such trouble making sense of ourselves and others is because our feelings and our behavior simply doesn’t make sense. The risk of concluding that our thoughts, feelings and behavior don’t make sense, is that we might then also conclude that there’s no value in trying to understand why we do what we do and why we feel what we feel. The danger of resignation is an increasing disinterest in the very core of what makes human life worthwhile, the intimate interpretations that lead us deeper into joy, harmony, and connection.
In this episode, we’re going to be exploring what gets in the way of our ability to understand ourselves and each other, and what gets in the way of deeper intimacy and connection in our relationships … including our relationship with ourselves.
Having a sense of mutual understanding is actually an essential part of feeling connected with another person. Intimacy relies on feeling understood … like the other person gets you and you get them.
Fortunately, when you understand what blocks understanding in relationships, then you can unlock the potential for more intimacy in your relationships.
At Alchemy of Love, we have a simple formula for intimacy and connection in relationships and it’s this: authenticity plus empathy equals connection. What this means is that in order to feel a sense of connection in a relationship, in order to be truly intimate and close with another person, you need to be able to do two things.
First, you need to be authentic—which means you need to be able to be your true self with the other person and let them really see you. Second, you need to be able to empathize with the other person, to have a sense for who they are, to try to see the world through their eyes, to value their perspective even when—maybe especially when—you don’t share that perspective. Of course, being authentic in a relationship depends on knowing yourself. This is because you can’t be your real, true self if you don’t understand yourself at a deep level.
The same is true for empathy. In order to have empathy for another person, you need to understand them at a deep level.
So then, the question becomes: what gets in the way of having this kind of deep understanding — of ourselves and each other — that’s necessary for experiencing intimacy and connection in relationships?
This episode is all about answering that question. To do so, we’re going to take a slight detour into the world of Greek mythology and the story of Pandora. Pandora, as you probably know, is rarely discussed outside the context of her mysterious box. Here’s the short version of her story. Pandora was given a box (technically a jar) and the instructions that, no matter what, she was not to open the box. But … her curiosity gets the better of her. And so, Pandora opens the box, releasing into the world a whole host of previously unknown evils including sickness and death. She closes the lid before the last thing — Hope — is able to escape.
In many ways, the myth of Pandora is echoed in the Biblical story of Eve. Not only are both given the status of being the first mothers, but they both share the affliction of curiosity. Eve, as the story is told, yields to a temptation that becomes the root of suffering in the world. In this way, both stories indicate that curiosity is the root of all evil and the cause of all suffering. In more modern times, we’ve internalized this mistrust of unbridled curiosity, and the possibility that asking too many questions is liable to open a can of worms.
And yet, when it comes to relationships, it turns out that curiosity, this force that led Eve to taste the forbidden fruit and Pandora to open her box, is also the secret sauce behind our formula for connection. It’s the best way to access those deep levels of connection in relationships.
As it turns out, despite the cultural association connecting curiosity and danger, curiosity actually plays a vital role in creating vibrant, fulfilling relationships. Understanding yourself or another person simply isn’t possible without maintaining a spirit of curiosity. In order to really know and understand yourself, you have to approach yourself with curiosity and openness. The same is also true for a partner. In order to understand your partner’s lived experience, to empathize with them, you have to be curious … about their inner world, about what makes them tick, their experiences, and the way they see the world.
In Episode 6, we’ll be talking more about authenticity and why it can feel scary to bring your whole authentic self into your relationships. In this post, we’re going to be examining curiosity’s role in relationships and what makes it challenging to maintain a spirit of curiosity in our relationships. We’ll also explore ways to practice being curious with ourselves and intimate partners.
Here’s our take on curiosity: Despite the fact that this mistrust of curiosity is woven into the fabric of our culture, going back millennia, curiosity is actually a fundamental part of what makes us human. We’re born curious. It’s how we learn. It’s how we make sense of the world.
Curiosity is what creates the magic of childhood, when ordinary things still have the capacity to surprise and delight us. Children are full of wonder and curiosity … about things as small and intimate as their own bodies and also about things as grand and vast as how the world works. Little kids are completely fascinated by things that adults don’t even notice anymore.
I (Angela) can remember when my youngest son was about 7 and he looked at a glass of water that had been sitting on the kitchen countertop for several hours. He said, “Mom, what are the bubbles on the inside of the glass made from?” He asked me if they were bubbles of oxygen or hydrogen, because he’d recently learned that water was made of oxygen and hydrogen. I was struck in that moment by two things: the first was that I had no idea why a glass of water that was left for hours forms bubbles on the inside of the glass.
But the second thing I was struck by in that moment was that even though I’d noticed this phenomenon many times, I’d never actually stopped to wonder about it, to be curious about what the bubbles were made of. And … just in case you’re now wondering what causes bubbles to form in a glass of water that’s left sitting for several hours, thanks to the internet I can tell you that those bubbles are made of nitrogen and oxygen that adhere to microscopic imperfections in the glass.
If you have any young children in your life, or if you remember being a child yourself, you know that the question why?, The Quintessential expression of curiosity, is the question that children ask a lot.
Asking “why” is how we engage with the world around us before we’re told to stop asking so many questions…before schools teach us to value knowing answers, rather than discovering new questions. In school, we’re taught that knowledge and facts are what’s important. Knowing and certainty, always having the right answers, that’s what’s rewarded … while curiosity, we’re told, killed the cat.
In reality, of course, curiosity is all about openness and exploration. With curiosity there’s very little certainty … and things certainly aren’t black and white.
To borrow from Lewis Carroll, the more you pay attention to life, the curiouser and curiouser things get. But because we’re socialized into a value system that prioritizes certainty and answers over questions, it’s very easy to slip into making the mistake of believing that questions have one right answer.
While this might seem like a fairly theoretical point, it actually has a tremendous impact on our adult relationships. Because when we lose our curiosity, when we unthinkingly assume that there is only one right answer to a question, and when we are face to face with another person who sees things very differently than we do, who has an entirely different answer to a question than the answer we have, then … if there can be only one right answer to any question, someone has to be wrong.
This is where judgment enters the picture. Judgment is premised on the idea that things are clear cut and easy to understand, that questions have a right answer and thus a wrong one too. This is why judgment is the opposite of curiosity.
Judgment actually has two meanings. Both of them are relevant to relationships, even though they’re slightly different. One form of judgment is what we just talked about. It refers to the way of approaching situations or dilemmas as though there is one right answer (which means that every other answer is wrong). But judgment is also has to do with moral judgments, judging things to be good or bad.
We mentioned Eve earlier in the episode, and we’re going to bring her back for a moment. Eve, the first woman, was tempted in the Garden of Eden. Being unable to resist her curiosity, she tasted the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Conventional Christian interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures, claim that this is how original sin came into the world, a theory based primarily on the reasoning of Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) and later emphasized in the Protestant Reformation.
The whole premise of original sin is that we as humans are born like apples that have already spoiled. There’s something rotten at our core. Whether or not we as individuals are raised within any particular religion, the notion of original sin has had an immeasurable influence on Western culture. This cultural distrust of our most basic, innate desires is something we internalize as we grow up, it’s in the air we breathe and, sadly, it’s part of the the loss of our wide-eyed innocence as we grow up.
The belief in original sin underlies an assumption that we at Alchemy of Love find very destructive, which is that we’re taught to distrust ourselves, to be suspicious of our purest desires, from an early and impressionable age .
The field of psychology amplifies this distrust of human nature. This trend begins with Freud’s insistence that we must work to dominate and subdue our natural impulses and desires because they’re destructive, selfish, and immoral.
As a result of all these cultural messages about human nature being fundamentally bad, we lose our connection to our own knowledge of our innate goodness. Even worse, most of us end up forgetting our true birth right: the beautiful awareness of being deserving, lovable, and purely good.
In contrast with the Western idea of original sin, many Eastern and particularly Buddhist perspectives see humans as participating in divine goodness.
What all of this means is that those of us who are raised under the influence of Western culture, are taught to mistrust and judge ourselves, instead of being open and curious with ourselves. And we pass judgement on others, too.
If you think about it, this has obvious implications for intimate relationships and here’s what it looks like. Judgment is most likely to rear its head in relationships when there’s a conflict or difference between perspectives, opinions, or preferences.
As we mentioned in the very first episode of the podcast, in the honeymoon stage of relationships, we tend to focus on what we have in common with a new partner. We focus on our similarities. And it’s only once we’re coming out of the honeymoon phase that we start becoming aware of our differences.
This transition period in a relationship is often made rockier if we see differences through the lens of judgment, that is, if we approach differences with the assumption that one person is right and the other is wrong.
If we take this unspoken and incorrect assumption a step further, which most of us do, we start blending the two kinds of judgment. Suddenly, maybe the other person is not only wrong…they’re also bad because they have different preferences or perspectives.
As you can imagine, when judgment is present in a relationship, when differences are perceived through the lens of right-and-wrong, good-or-bad, this creates a major block to closeness and emotional intimacy.
Emotional intimacy requires being open and relaxed. It requires allowing your partner to have a window into your inner world and for you to express interest in seeing into your partner’s inner world. Sharing windows into each other’s inner worlds requires curiosity—the desire to understand each other and to be understood by each other. It also requires feeling safe, trusting that the other person won’t judge you for the ways in which you’re different from them.
If you think back to being a kid, and the curiosity that comes along with being a kid, you might think of the way in which you encountered differences then. For kids, differences aren’t threatening. What’s different is fascinating, intriguing. Attractive, even … in the sense that encountering something different made you want to come closer, to see for yourself what this new and unknown thing was all about.
In adult relationships, intimacy and connection require this childlike approach to differences as something that’s fascinating rather than threatening.
Welcoming differences in a relationship as something that’s not just tolerable but actually desirable, part of what nurtures a relationship’s spark, is really key. This is because no matter how similar you might think you are to a partner in the beginning, differences are inevitable. Of course they are, because you’re two separate people … not the same person in two bodies.
When it comes to your relationship with yourself, in our experience, one of the biggest blocks to developing a deeper relationship with yourself and really getting to know yourself is approaching yourself with judgment. Meeting yourself with judgment and meeting yourself with curiosity are two very different ways of relating to yourself.
When you see yourself through the eyes of judgment, you’re focused on all your perceived flaws, all the ways that you believe that you’re somehow inadequate, all the ways you imagine that you don’t measure up. When you approach yourself with curiosity and openness, something completely different happens.
The easiest way to illustrate this difference is by asking the same exact question, first with a spirit of curiosity, and then from a position of judgment. Take the question, “What on earth is going on with me?” Now, as you read that question, you probably hear it with a tone of judgment. This is because we’re so very used to relating to ourselves from a place of judgment. So, this question automatically sounds judgmental and critical. But … it actually doesn’t have to.
We’ll give you an example of what this looks like in practice. Let’s say a close friend invited you to her birthday party at a restaurant you both love. She sent out the invite three weeks before the party and, of course, you said you’d be there. And then the night comes … and you forget to go. You not only fail to show up, you don’t even realize you’ve missed the party until the next morning.
You cannot believe you forgot your dear friend’s birthday party. And in that moment of disbelief, you ask yourself, “What on earth is going on with me?”
If you ask that question with a tone of judgment, there’s an assumption that the answer will have something to do with what’s wrong with you. The answer will most likely have to do with one or more of your character flaws, ways that you don’t measure up, ways that you’re not good enough. Maybe you’re hopelessly disorganized and that’s why you forgot the party. Maybe you’re unbearably self-absorbed. Maybe you’re just selfish and inconsiderate and you know what, let’s go all the way and say that, on top of everything else, you’re also a terrible friend. It’s an open and shut case and you … are … guilty.
On the other hand, let’s imagine for a moment the exact same scenario from a different perspective. You forget the party until the next morning, when you suddenly remember. You have a wave of disbelief that you missed your friend’s party. And you ask yourself, “What on earth is going on with me?” But this time you ask the question from a place of curiosity … because clearly it’s unusual that you would forget your friend’s party.
Because you’re being curious and not judgmental, you don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that the obvious explanation is your fatal character flaws. Instead, you take a moment to consider what’s going on in your life, what actually led you to completely forget about the party. You think about how stressed you’ve been with work, how you haven’t been sleeping lately. You think about your mother’s recent medical tests and her deteriorating health and all the time you’ve spent accompanying her to doctor’s appointments during work hours, which means that you’ve been spending your evenings catching up on work.
And you realize that you’re actually way more exhausted and stressed than you’d realized. You suddenly see how you’re stretched thin by trying to keep up with everything in your life. You see something about your current situation that you hadn’t seen before. You see that something needs to change … you need to find a way to give yourself more breathing space. You decide you need to make time to get a massage or take up meditation again.
The point is that when you approach yourself with curiosity, you have the opportunity to learn something that you didn’t know before. You gain an understanding about yourself that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
You know yourself better. Judgment — that open and shut case against yourself — blocks your ability to learn anything new. It blocks your ability to really understand yourself or get to know yourself at a deeper level. By contrast, curiosity opens the door to self-discovery and self-awareness.
You may not be surprised to learn that the same thing is true when it comes to the way that you relate to a partner: curiosity allows for understanding, while judgment blocks understanding.
Again, our tendency when we perceive differences between ourselves and a partner is to look at those differences through the lens of judgment and black and white thinking, where the question is—who’s right and who’s wrong?
Just as with the kinds of questions we ask ourselves, one of the easiest places to see the distinction between judgment and curiosity in an intimate relationship is in the questions we ask. Here’s an example of what this sounds like. Let’s say your partner is upset about something that seems, at least on the surface, like something you wouldn’t get so upset about.
A question you might ask is “Why are you upset about this?” When this question is asked in a critical tone, “Why are you upset about this…” carries with it the unspoken assumption that it’s wrong to be upset. Any answer that your partner gave to this question would then be evaluated — by you — to determine whether or not their answer is sufficient to explain their feelings.
With the question asked this way, the intent isn’t to understand your partner better. The question allows you to evaluate their reasons for being upset. In other words, the intent is to judge.
But … the same question, “Why are you upset about this?,” when asked with curiosity, makes it a question geared toward understanding your partner better. This sets the stage for more connection and intimacy. When we ask with curiosity, we’re seeking to understand what’s happening. There’s an implicit assumption with curiosity that when we don’t understand something, it’s because we don’t have all the information we need in order to make sense of the situation.
There’s an assumption that, when we understand more about the situation, we can make sense of why our partner feels the way they feel … even when we ourselves wouldn’t necessarily react that way in a similar situation.
Curiosity within relationships is an expression of respect. Respect literally means to look twice. When we look twice, we go beyond the initial assumptions we might make about a situation.
Respect, taking the time to look twice, is a way of expressing care in a relationship. It means knowing that a casual glance at a situation isn’t enough to truly understand it. Approaching our partner with an attitude of curiosity and respect creates the kind of safety in a relationship that we all need in order to open up and really share from the heart.
Curiosity can truly work magic in relationships. Harville Hendrix, the creator of Imago Relationship Therapy, tells a story about a time early in his marriage just after he’d cowritten a relationship book with his wife Helen. This was the late 1980’s and their book, Getting the Love You Want, had just become a mega-bestseller thanks to an enthusiastic endorsement by Oprah.
Meanwhile, their own marriage was seriously on the rocks. They were on the verge of ending things when they decided to give their own relationship advice a try, to see if it could save their marriage. So they began implementing a new practice of expressing frequent appreciation for each other.
This advice, which you may have come across yourself, is based on the often-cited statistic that happy relationships have 5 positive interactions for every negative interaction. What Harville and Helen found in their own relationship is that increasing positive interactions with each other didn’t move the needle on their relationship at all. This tracks with our own experience with couples, which is that making an effort to say more positive things to each other doesn’t on its own tend to make much difference in a relationship. For Harville and Helen, this practice didn’t deepen their intimacy or improve their relationship.
So here’s where it gets interesting. When they realized that being more positive wasn’t helping, they decided to try something else. They decided to try being more curious with each other. They began asking each other questions in the spirit of curiosity.
And what they discovered was that this made a tremendous difference in their relationship. They got to know each other better. They understood each other better. And as they discovered more about each other, they discovered more that they could love about each other. Their marriage was transformed by paying attention to each other in an entirely new way.
One of our favorite quotes of all time comes from Carl Rogers, who founded the humanist school of psychology in the mid 20th century. He was one of the first psychologist to break ranks with traditional psychology and reject the idea that humans are fundamentally flawed. Instead, he recognized that humans are innately good and that the work of a therapist is to help clients reconnect with their own innate goodness.
Rogers summed up his approach to therapy when he said, “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
WE just love this quote because he captures the beauty of the experience of just appreciating someone as they are … rather than looking at them with a critical eye, as someone who needs to change or improve.
Every sunset is unique, just as we are each unique … and just as each of our relationships is unique. We think about this quote often in our work with people, knowing that when we see others as sunsets, we get the chance to admire each person’s wonderfulness … and we get to reflect that back to them, so they can hopefully see it within themselves.
We have the chance to do that in our relationships with each other too. And every time we look in the mirror.
This is really our wish for you … that you can appreciate yourself in this way, that you can be curious and open with yourself … knowing that as you look deeper within yourself, that you will encounter not character flaws, but more of what makes you special and completely unique.
And if you’re in a relationship, what might happen if you started seeing your partner through the eyes of curiosity? One of the mistaken assumptions that can arise in long-term relationships, especially over the course of years, is that we already know most everything there is to know about our partner. But the really beautiful truth about humans, including the ones we’re closest to, is that we’ll never know another person completely … which means that they can always surprise us.
There’s always more beauty within than what appears on the surface.
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
