Part of a speech I once made has stayed with me for years. I had said that I believe in stories. Not because I am a writer and can hardly escape them, but because stories do something extraordinary.
They put flesh and blood on people we have reduced to routine.
I have a theory. Most marriages do not suffer from lack of love. They suffer from lack of curiosity.
We know each other as husband, wife, provider, cook, complainer, and maybe snorer.
We know habits. We know irritations. We know who leaves the toothpaste uncapped. But do we know the person?
I mean really know.
Do you know what your wife dreamt of when she was sixteen? Do you know what made your husband cry before he was told men should not? Do you know who first broke their heart, who first believed in them, or which song they once listened to while imagining a future that did not yet contain you?
We often live with biographies unopened and then wonder why life has become dull.
I once asked a friend what his wife was like before he met him. He said, “She worked in a bank.”
That was not an answer. That was a job description.
I wanted to know whether she bunked college, whether she once wanted to be an actress or run away to Kashmir. Somewhere after marriage we stop interviewing each other. Courtship had questions. Marriage has instructions. Buy potatoes. Pay electricity. Pick up milk.
Romance often dies under shopping lists.
But revive the questions and something startling happens.
Ask your spouse tonight, “Who was your first crush?” Then sit back and watch expressions change. Faces light up. Forgotten people return. Stories tumble out. Suddenly the person across the table is no longer someone who reminds you to pay taxes. They become flesh and blood again.
A woman once told me she and her husband had become strangers after forty years. I asked her one question, “Do you know what he wanted to be as a child?”
She did not. She asked him that night.
He said he wanted to be a pilot, and told her of a paper plane he once flew across a classroom and how for one glorious moment he thought he could touch the clouds.
She came back the next day and whispered, “I saw him young again.”
Exactly.
Stories make people young again.
The tragedy is not that people change. It is that we stop discovering them.
Love survives through wonder. Through asking, “Tell me something about your life I do not know.”
And then listening.
Because when someone tells you their story, you are doing something holy. You are giving flesh to memory, blood to biography, humanity to habit.
So tonight skip one television serial. Ignore the phone. Turn to the one beside you and ask a story question.
You may discover you have not been living with a role.
But with a person.
And what a lovely thing to discover this, even after all these years…!