The Lost Art of Talking to Your Spouse
How we accidentally kept conversation alive for 34 years
(while watching too much TV)
Somewhere along the way, talking to each other stopped being the default.
Nobody announced it. There was no memo, no breakup, no big fight. It just slid off the table while we were all looking at something glowing. And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: a lot of couples haven’t had a real conversation in years.
They have logistics. “Did you pay the thing.” “What time is the appointment.” But an actual conversation, the kind that wanders and loops back and ends up somewhere neither of you planned? That’s becoming a lost art.
We think about this a lot. Mostly because we accidentally did the opposite.
We got married eight weeks after we met. Six of those weeks were completely platonic, not a hint of romance anywhere in the air. I had joined Linda’s entertainment business, I was helping her run it, and we just talked. Constantly. About the business, the hiring, the shows, the people, about life. Logistics, mostly. So by the time romance finally showed up for the last two weeks, the talking was already a habit. We didn’t fall in love and then learn to talk. We talked our way into love and never stopped. And somewhere in those 34 years, we figured out how to talk to your spouse when the rest of life keeps trying to get in the way.
How to Talk to Your Spouse When the Screen Keeps Winning
First the TV moved in, then it brought friends
The TV was the first roommate nobody invited. Then came the second TV. Then the handheld ones, the little glowing rectangles that fit in your pocket and follow you to the dinner table, the couch, the bed, and yes, the bathroom. (More on the bathroom in a minute. There is a confession coming.)
We didn’t lose conversation in a dramatic exit. We lost it to a slow, polite invasion.
And the worst offender has a name now. The death scroll. That bottomless, thumb-powered trance where twenty minutes vanishes and you couldn’t tell anyone a single thing you just saw. You weren’t relaxing. You weren’t connecting. You were just gone.
And we are not alone in noticing. Pew Research found that one in four married adults say their spouse is regularly distracted by their phone when they are together. One in four.
Two people in the same room, both somewhere else. That’s the modern marriage night for a frightening number of couples.
Why your relationship needs conversation to survive
Take away the relation and you’re left with a ship
Here’s the thing about the word relationship. It does most of the heavy lifting and nobody ever stops to notice.
Pull it apart. Relationship. Take away the relation and you’re left with a ship. A vessel. Two people sharing a hull, pointed the same direction, technically together, not actually connected at all. Just cargo and a destination.
And we wonder why divorce rates climbed?
We’re not going to hit you with a statistic, because you don’t need one. You already know couples who are roommates. You might have been one for a season yourself. When the conversation stops, the relation goes first, and the ship just drifts until somebody finally asks why they’re even aboard.
How to keep conversation alive in a marriage
We never made a rule. We just ran out of screen.
Now we have to be honest here, because we’re not about to pretend we’re marriage gurus who scheduled a daily Connection Hour with a little chime app.
We are not.
But we’ve figured out a few things that actually work. Not rules. Just three patterns we stumbled into.
- Have a hundred tiny conversations instead of one giant one.
If you’ve read our story, you might picture us drifting around the world without a care, all the time in the world to ourselves, breezing through life wherever the wind blows.
Not.
Yes, in 34 years together we’ve been side by side way more than we’ve been apart. But side by side has never meant floating on a cloud. We’ve run our own businesses together. We’ve worked remote jobs together, and separately, but still under the same roof. As of this writing, because our situation is permanently fluid, Linda is working a remote job for a startup and I’m basking in the glory of retirement. (For now. Emphasis on for now.) And we did all of that while traveling full time for the last six years.
That’s a lot of juggling. And that juggling is an ongoing conversation. Where do we want to go next? We are NOT doing that again. I’ve got this client who. Are you playing pickleball in the morning? And the newest one, which is so on-brand for us it hurts:
“Do you think the HOA will let us put up our pickleball nets near the sales models?”
(We bought a home base near our boys. The pickleball negotiations are ongoing. Pray for the HOA.)
Do we death scroll? Absolutely. I personally spend more time in the bathroom than any grown man reasonably should, and I want to be clear it’s not a digestive issue. It’s a scrolling venue.
Do we watch too much TV? No doubt. Living room and bedroom. We’re a proud two-screen household. (It’s a very nice TV. We regret nothing.)
But here’s the part that matters. We don’t let any of it stop the conversation. Except the bathroom part.
We talk through the show. It’s a quiet competition to call who did it before the show gives it up, and I win more than my fair share. (I won’t mention that I win mostly while Linda is asleep. She doesn’t need to know that. Neither do you, technically.)
Which brings us to the fact that Linda falls asleep, with some regularity.
“What happened? I missed that.” “Did you fall asleep again?” “…Just a little bit.”
And that’s perfectly fine. We don’t even rewind. We just turn the whole thing off and start it over next time, like it never happened.
We just kept ending up in the same space with nothing left to scroll, and the conversation filled in around us like water finding its level. Turns out that’s the cure nobody sells you, because you can’t bottle it and you can’t app it. It’s just time and attention. Which, conveniently, are the two things every glowing rectangle is built to steal.
Hell yeah. We’re doing that.
- Fill the dead air.
For six years we did a lot of driving. The kind that eats an entire afternoon and half your will to live. Those are the dreaming and scheming hours. Captive audience, nowhere to be, nothing to do but talk about the next thing and the thing after that.
A genuinely alarming number of our best decisions were made at 70ish miles an hour with a gas station coffee going cold in the cup holder.
Not every quiet moment needs a screen to fill it. Sometimes boredom is just an unopened conversation.
- Get curious about their day, even the boring parts.
I write in the room right next to Linda’s office. So I overhear her on work calls. I’m not eavesdropping. (I’m absolutely eavesdropping. The walls are thin and I’m nosy.) And later I’ll ask her about whatever I heard, because it’s genuinely interesting to me. I like knowing what she does. I like that she’s freakishly good at it.
And what does she get to be interested in on my end? My grueling schedule of not having a job?
No. I write full time now. And she reads all of it. Every post. The whole book I’m about to put out. We have full, sprawling conversations about a lot of it, which is a strange and wonderful thing to be able to say after 34 years.
She’s also the keeper of our memory, because mine is a sieve. I can ask her, “what happened seven years ago, over there, when we were doing that thing,” and most of the time she’ll fire back, “we were doing such and such, and you got yourself into so and so.” Default setting. No buffering.
And when she’s up to her ears in work, she’ll haul her laptop out to the couch, and I’ll leave her alone until I get bored. Then I announce, “it’s my turn.” And she says, “okay, give me ten minutes.” Which I then time like a running coach with a stopwatch. (The ten minutes is rarely ten minutes. I’ve made my peace with this.)
Interest in your partner is a romantic gesture. Most women would say it’s sexy. Most guys don’t know that. Now you do.
After all of it, we still love each other. We still like each other, which is the rarer and harder one. And we’re each other’s favorites.
We tell each other that a lot.
None of that came from a system, or a book, or a chime app. It came from talking. Endlessly, pointlessly, happily talking about “stuff.”
How to Talk to Your Spouse: The Unglamorous Version That Actually Works
Choosing the conversation over the scroll
This is the unglamorous version of designing your life on purpose. It might also be the truest one.
You can chase a hundred big reinventions and still end up a stranger to the person you married. Or you can do the small, very sexy work of turning back toward each other. Choosing the conversation over the scroll. Not by banning the phone, because clearly we haven’t, and we’re not going to lie to you. Just by not letting it have the last word.
You don’t need a Connection Hour. You need to tell your person the boring thing that happened today, the one you’d normally keep to yourself because it’s not interesting enough. That’s the whole muscle. Conversation isn’t built on the big talks. It’s built on a thousand tiny boring ones that quietly add up to knowing somebody all the way through.
That’s the difference between a default life and a chosen one. It’s what Intention looks like before it ever looks like a boat, a passport, or a leap. It looks like two people, one of them possibly asleep, talking about nothing, which somehow turns out to be everything.
And it’s the exact thing the Declaration of Intendependence™ is built on. You can’t choose a life together if you’ve stopped talking to each other. The conversation is the keel. Everything else gets built on top of it. That’s why learning how to talk to your spouse isn’t a communication tip. It’s a life design decision.
With love and laughter,
Matt & Linda
No 2 The Quo
Before We Had the Framework, We Had the Stories
We didn’t start No 2 The Quo with a tidy little life design model and a color-coded spreadsheet.
Shocking, I know.
We started with a few lived decisions. Big ones. Messy ones. The kind where you say, “This is probably fine,” while quietly wondering if you have lost your entire mind.
These three stories explain how we got here before we had the words Declaration of Intendependence™ to describe what we were doing.
These are the origin stories behind No 2 The Quo.
👉 Why We Said No 2 The Quo After the Kids Left Home
👉 It Took Two Years to “Suddenly” Change Our Lives
👉 Yes, We Really Did Pack Our Whole Life Into a Car and Leave
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