Love, Curiosity, Moments, and the Danger of Becoming Strangers Inside a Marriage
By Francis E. Madojemu
Perhaps one of the most frightening things that can happen in a marriage is not that you stop loving the person.
It is that you continue loving someone you have stopped knowing.
You still share a home.
You still call each other husband and wife.
You still know the birthdays, the family stories, the foods they like, the things that irritate them.
You may still provide.
Still care.
Still pray.
Still say, sincerely, “I love you.”
But somewhere along the way, the questions stopped.
And while the questions stopped, the person kept changing.
“I Have No Idea What Her Goals Are”
I recently watched a remarkable piece of footage from a Tony Robbins seminar.
A man called Neil is struggling in his marriage. Divorce appears to be a real possibility.
One of the recurring conflicts concerns Neil’s band.
He works long hours, but he also plays guitar. His wife, Andrea, doesn’t like the amount of time the band takes away from the family and would apparently prefer that he stopped.
At first glance, this looks like a fairly familiar marital dispute:
Work.
Family.
Personal interests.
Time.
Priorities.
But Robbins asks Neil a deceptively simple question:
What does playing guitar feel like?
Neil changes.
It is “astonishing,” he says.
Eventually he describes the experience as feeling “like being a god.”
Robbins immediately sees the problem differently.
The band isn’t merely a hobby.
Something happens to Neil there.
He experiences significance. Aliveness. Creativity. Identity.
Then Robbins turns the conversation around.
Instead of continuing to examine what Andrea is preventing Neil from having, he asks Neil to imagine the marriage from Andrea’s side.
How significant does she feel to him?
Neil estimates about three out of ten.
How loved does she feel?
Again, about three.
How much variety, surprise and playfulness does he bring into her life?
Perhaps five.
How much are they growing together?
None.
Then Robbins asks about Andrea herself.
She paints.
Neil clearly admires her creativity. He encourages her. He tells her that her work is good enough to exhibit.
Then comes the question that stopped me:
What are her goals?
Neil answers:
“I’ve no idea. I’ve no idea what her goals are.”
There it was.
Perhaps the band was never the real problem.
A man could still love his wife and no longer know what she wanted her life to become.
And that raises a much more uncomfortable question for the rest of us:
Do I still know the person I married?
Love Is Not the Same as Felt Love
Neil says that he loves Andrea.
There is no particular reason in the conversation to assume that he is lying.
He works hard. He apparently provides. He encourages her artistic ability. He has remained with his family.
And yet when Robbins asks him to imagine how loved Andrea actually feels, Neil’s answer is about three out of ten.
That distinction matters enormously.
There is a difference between:
loving someone
and
that person experiencing themselves as loved by you.
My intentions live inside me.
My spouse experiences my behaviour.
I can therefore be absolutely sincere about what I feel and still remain surprisingly unaware of what life with me feels like to the person I love.
Relationship researchers use a helpful concept here: perceived partner responsiveness.
The language is more technical than romantic, but the idea is wonderfully human.
Does my partner experience me as someone who:
understands them, validates what matters to them, and cares for them?
Research in the interpersonal-process tradition describes perceived partner responsiveness in precisely these terms—understanding, validation and care—and connects it strongly with intimacy and relationship quality. Research on perceived partner responsiveness and intimacy
So the question is not merely:
Do I care?
There is another question:
Does the person beside me experience me as caring?
That is a harder question.
Covey’s Emotional Bank Account
Stephen R. Covey gave us one of the simplest and most enduring metaphors for understanding relationships: the Emotional Bank Account.
Relationships accumulate deposits and withdrawals.
Keeping commitments makes deposits.
Kindness makes deposits.
Listening makes deposits.
Loyalty makes deposits.
Apologising sincerely after getting something wrong makes a deposit.
Neglect makes withdrawals.
Broken promises make withdrawals.
Disrespect makes withdrawals.
Repeatedly failing to notice what matters to another person makes withdrawals.
FranklinCovey continues to place the Emotional Bank Account within the “Public Victory” of the 7 Habits, alongside Habit 5:
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.
Its own description of Habit 5 emphasises empathic listening before seeking to be understood. FranklinCovey — The 7 Habits and Habit 5
The metaphor becomes particularly powerful when we realise that enormous effort does not automatically mean an enormous deposit.
I may be depositing in a currency that matters greatly to me but very little to you.
A husband may say:
But I work extremely hard.
A wife may say:
But I do everything for this family.
Both statements may be completely true.
And both people may still feel emotionally impoverished.
That takes us directly into Covey’s great interpersonal movement:
Seek first to understand.
That is almost exactly what Robbins forces Neil to do.
Neil arrives with his own case:
This is what the band means to me.
Robbins effectively asks:
What does being married to you feel like to Andrea?
That change of question changes everything.
The Map May Be Out of Date
John Gottman’s relationship work gives us another wonderful metaphor: Love Maps.
The Gottman Institute describes Love Maps as our detailed knowledge of a partner’s inner world—not merely favourite foods and preferences, but hopes, dreams, vulnerabilities and expectations for the future. The Gottman Method — Love Maps
But here is the part that particularly interests me:
the map has to be updated.
Gottman material explicitly describes Love Maps as an “ongoing and ever-evolving” understanding of a partner as they move through time. Gottman — Updating Love Maps
Because people change.
The woman you married at 25 is not simply the same woman at 55 with thirty additional birthdays.
The man you married before children may have been changed by fatherhood.
Success changes us.
Failure changes us.
Children change us.
Illness changes us.
Bereavement changes us.
Faith changes us.
Work changes us.
Ageing changes us.
Disappointment changes us.
Dreams themselves change.
The problem may therefore not be that you never knew your spouse.
Perhaps you knew them extraordinarily well.
Twenty years ago.
The person continued changing.
The map did not.
And perhaps this is one of the subtle dangers of familiarity:
We stop asking because we think we already know.
Courtship is filled with questions.
What do you like?
Where do you want to go?
What are you afraid of?
What do you dream about?
Tell me about your childhood.
What makes you happy?
What kind of life do you want?
Then familiarity arrives.
I know her.
I know him.
I already know what she’s going to say.
And curiosity quietly dies.
But the person doesn’t stop becoming merely because we stopped asking.
Perhaps one of the disciplines of lifelong love is therefore refusing to assume that yesterday’s answer is still today’s answer.
Familiarity Can Become the Enemy of Curiosity
There is something deeply attractive about curiosity.
Curiosity says:
There is still something about you I have not discovered.
After five years.
After twenty.
After forty.
That may be one of the great safeguards against taking another human being for granted.
Because the opposite of taking someone for granted may not simply be gratitude.
It may also be curiosity.
I am still interested in you.
I am still listening.
I am still watching.
I haven’t reduced you to the version of you that exists in my head.
There is still more of you for me to discover.
And Scripture gives this an unexpectedly powerful dimension.
In 1 Peter 3:7, husbands are instructed to live with their wives “according to knowledge”—often rendered with understanding or in an understanding way—and to give them honour as fellow heirs of the grace of life.
Notice the connection:
knowledge and honour.
The purpose of knowing another person is not control.
It is honour.
And Peter goes so far as to connect a husband’s conduct toward his wife with his prayers.
Our spirituality and our treatment of the person beside us cannot simply be separated into different compartments.
There is something spiritually serious about learning to live attentively with another human being.
Providing Is Not the Same as Cherishing
Ephesians 5 uses another beautiful word.
It speaks about nourishing and cherishing.
That is richer than provision.
Provision asks:
What do you need to survive?
Cherishing asks:
What helps you flourish?
I can pay bills from a distance.
Cherishing requires something more intimate.
Warmth.
Attention.
Tenderness.
Care.
The deliberate promotion of another person’s wellbeing.
That returns us again to Neil and Andrea.
He apparently sees her artistic ability.
He tells her she is good.
But he cannot tell Robbins what she actually wants her life to become.
There is a considerable difference between telling someone:
“You’re talented.”
and being able to say:
“I know what you’re trying to become, and I want to help you become it.”
Perhaps that is one of love’s great privileges.
Growing While Married Is Not Necessarily Growing Together
This brings us back to the band.
It would be easy to make Neil’s guitar the villain.
I don’t think it is.
Research into what psychologists call self-expansion suggests that people benefit relationally when couples share novel, interesting and challenging experiences.
In a classic series of survey and experimental studies, Arthur Aron and colleagues found that shared participation in novel and arousing activities was associated with improved experienced relationship quality. Aron et al. — Shared novel activities and relationship quality
More recent work continues to find relationships between self-expanding experiences and relationship satisfaction and commitment, while a 2026 review by Arthur Aron and Jennifer Tomlinson surveys the broader evidence for shared self-expansion as a pathway to relationship quality and wellbeing. Aron & Tomlinson — Self-Expansion Activities With a Partner
That suggests an important distinction:
You can grow while married without growing together.
Think about Neil again.
The band apparently gives him creativity.
Challenge.
Community.
Identity.
Competence.
Excitement.
Andrea, meanwhile, is also creative.
She paints.
Perhaps the tragedy isn’t that Neil has a creative life and Andrea wants him to stop.
Perhaps two creative people have somehow stopped participating in each other’s becoming.
He’s playing guitar.
She’s painting.
But they are no longer creating much of a life together.
The deeper question therefore isn’t simply:
Will you let me keep my band?
or:
Will you give up your band for me?
It is:
How do we construct a life in which both of us continue becoming—and continue becoming together?
KNOW ME • GROW WITH ME
That gave me two important dimensions of enduring intimacy.
KNOW ME
Don’t stop discovering my inner world.
GROW WITH ME
Don’t let all our becoming happen separately.
But then I remembered something from another area I have been thinking and writing about.
Moments.
And I realised there was a third dimension.
REMEMBER WITH ME
Let’s create a shared life worth remembering.
The Deposits We Remember
Chip and Dan Heath, in The Power of Moments, explore why certain experiences rise above the ordinary flow of life and remain with us.
They identify four recurring elements in memorable positive moments:
Elevation. Insight. Pride. Connection.
Their work is explicitly concerned not merely with recognising such moments but with how we can intentionally create more experiences that matter. Chip & Dan Heath — The Power of Moments
This matters enormously in marriage and family life.
Because an Emotional Bank Account does not contain only acts of service.
It also contains memories.
And some memories become disproportionately large deposits.
I have been reminding myself, my wife and our grown children about the importance of moments in family life.
Not because every moment must be spectacular.
Quite the opposite.
Sometimes the moment is simply:
We were together.
Christmas 2016
I remember December 2016.
Interestingly, I cannot now immediately reconstruct every circumstance that led to it.
I had been travelling. There were medical and other matters around that period. One of our sons was at university. Through a combination of circumstances, our family found ourselves together in London just before Christmas.
We stayed somewhere in East London—something between a hotel and serviced accommodation, as I remember it, where we could prepare food. There was a supermarket downstairs.
Nothing particularly spectacular.
Sometimes we were all sitting around on our laptops doing our various crazy things.
But we were together.
And I remember it.
Christmas Day approached.
Throughout my ministry life, I had always been in church for Christmas.
I began thinking that perhaps I should fly back to Nigeria.
Church was there.
Responsibilities were there.
Surely that was where I was supposed to be.
But I had a check in my spirit.
I called my friend, Dr Rye Omoruyi, and talked it through with him.
His counsel was essentially that there was no value I could put on this opportunity to be with my family.
Stay.
I did.
For the first time I could remember, I wasn’t in my church on Christmas Day.
And Dr Omoruyi was right.
Seven years later, here is the extraordinary thing:
I cannot remember many of the things that seemed urgent around that period.
But I remember being together.
I remember the moment.
And perhaps that tells us something about life.
Some Moments Have a Shelf Life
There is a temptation to assume:
We’ll do it another time.
Another Christmas.
Another holiday.
Another dinner.
Another conversation.
Another visit.
But another Christmas will contain older parents.
Older children.
Different circumstances.
Different pressures.
Sometimes different people.
The precise configuration of our family in December 2019 will never exist again.
That doesn’t make later configurations worse.
It simply makes that one unrepeatable.
Some moments have a shelf life.
If we fail to recognise them while they are available, they cannot simply be recreated later.
This becomes especially poignant when I think about my own father.
I lost him when I was young.
I don’t remember most things.
I cannot give you an inventory of gifts he bought me.
I don’t remember every ordinary day.
But I remember scenes.
I remember moments.
And perhaps that raises one of the great questions of family life:
What will survive us in the memory of the people we love?
Probably not most of what kept us busy.
Probably not most of what seemed urgent.
But a journey.
A conversation.
A family joke.
A meal.
An unexpected appearance.
A father saying, “I’m proud of you.”
A mother sitting beside a frightened child.
A Christmas in London.
These things can survive for decades.
They become relational capital.
“Do You Remember When…?”
Perhaps those four words are evidence of accumulated relational wealth.
Do you remember when…?
Families develop their own treasury of stories.
This is not entirely unlike the biblical importance of memorial.
When Israel crossed the Jordan, stones were taken from the river as a memorial. The expectation in Joshua 4 was that children would eventually ask what those stones meant.
And the story would be told again.
Passover institutionalised remembered deliverance.
At the heart of Communion are Christ’s words:
“Do this in remembrance of me.”
Human beings do not merely experience events.
We attach meaning to remembered events.
Families need their own stones from the Jordan.
Photographs.
Traditions.
Songs.
Journeys.
Meals.
Places.
Celebrations.
Stories.
Not as empty rituals.
As containers of shared meaning.
Turning Toward the Possibility of a Moment
Gottman’s work on bids for connection adds another layer.
A bid can be tiny.
“Come and look at this.”
“Listen to this.”
“Do you remember…?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Let’s go somewhere.”
The other person can turn toward the bid, turn away, or turn against it.
Gottman describes these repeated small interactions as deposits in an Emotional Bank Account of their own. Gottman — Investing in the Emotional Bank Account
Not every bid becomes a defining memory.
Of course not.
But sometimes hidden inside what looks like an interruption is the possibility of a moment.
And if we are perpetually too busy, we may not merely miss an activity.
We may miss the memory that activity might have created.
Tony Robbins actually touches this in his conversation with Neil.
When he asks Neil to imagine Andrea’s experience of the marriage, he asks how much variety, surprise and playfulness Neil brings home.
That matters.
A relationship cannot live entirely on administration.
Bills.
School runs.
Work.
Medication.
Church.
Shopping.
Repairs.
Deadlines.
Schedules.
Those things constitute life.
But occasionally life needs to rise above its own administration.
Covenant and Curiosity
This has changed how I think about covenant.
Romance says:
I love who I have discovered.
Covenant says something more enduring:
I will remain present while you continue becoming someone I have not yet fully discovered.
Commitment and curiosity therefore belong together.
Commitment says: “I am staying.”
Curiosity says: “I am still learning you.”
Commitment without curiosity can eventually become mere endurance.
Curiosity without commitment may disappear when discovery becomes difficult.
But together they create the possibility of enduring intimacy.
This is why marital permanence and marital intimacy are not exactly the same thing.
Two people can occupy:
the same house,
the same bedroom,
the same bank account,
the same church,
the same family photographs,
and increasingly inhabit different worlds.
Same house.
Different dreams.
Same children.
Different fears.
Same anniversary.
Different futures.
Parallel lives.
Perhaps relationships do not always collapse because love suddenly disappears.
Sometimes there is simply drift.
The questions stop.
The bids are missed.
The account is depleted.
The maps become outdated.
Growth happens elsewhere.
Few new memories are made.
And eventually two good people discover that although they have remained beside one another, they have become strangers.
Before You Ask, “Do I Still Love You?”
This is where I think Tony Robbins’ intervention was wiser than some of the social-media commentary built around it.
Robbins challenged Neil, before walking away, to bring extraordinary attention, focus, caring and love into the relationship and then determine honestly whether the marriage could work.
The narrator of the viral video goes considerably further, presenting this almost as a formula: give someone everything they want for a month or two and they will eventually reciprocate.
The source provides no research or statistics substantiating that promise.
And the relationship literature does not establish a formula in which ninety days of maximum giving guarantees reconciliation.
What it does give us is substantial evidence that responsiveness, understanding, shared experience and patterns of interaction matter to relationship quality. Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, for example, has evidence from randomized trials and meta-analyses showing improvements in relationship satisfaction, although the literature also warrants appropriate caution about study size, publication bias and durability of effects. Meta-analysis of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy
Love is not manipulation.
Covenant is not appeasement.
Understanding another person does not mean accepting every demand.
And none of these principles should ever be used to tell someone to endure violence, abuse, coercion or danger.
But Robbins’ underlying challenge remains valuable:
Before concluding that the relationship cannot work, have I actually brought my most attentive, understanding and loving self into it?
Perhaps some relationships don’t need better negotiation first.
Perhaps they need replenishment.
It is difficult to negotiate generously from relational bankruptcy.
Interview the Person You Married
So perhaps there is something worth doing before another anniversary passes.
Interview the person you married.
Not because your marriage is failing.
Because years have happened.
Put the phones away.
Sit somewhere.
And become curious again.
Ask:
Who are you becoming?
What are you carrying that I don’t know about?
What gives you life now?
What drains you?
What are you afraid our future might become?
What do you hope it could become?
What dream have you quietly abandoned?
Where do you feel understood by me?
Where don’t you?
What would you love for us to discover together?
What moment between us do you remember most fondly?
What kind of moments should we be creating now?
And perhaps the bravest question of all:
Is there anything about the person you have become that I have failed to notice?
Then listen.
Don’t evaluate.
Don’t correct the history.
Don’t explain yourself too quickly.
Don’t defend.
Listen.
Seek first to understand.
Update the map.
KNOW ME • GROW WITH ME • REMEMBER WITH ME
Perhaps these are three dimensions of lifelong intimacy.
KNOW ME
Remain curious about my inner world.
Don’t love only the person you remember.
GROW WITH ME
Participate in who I am becoming.
Don’t let all our important development happen separately.
REMEMBER WITH ME
Create and recognise moments that become part of our shared story.
A marriage that only remembers can become nostalgic.
A marriage in which people only grow individually can become two parallel journeys.
And a marriage in which people know one another but create little shared life can become strangely clinical.
We need all three.
Know me.
Grow with me.
Remember with me.
Do I Still Know You?
I keep returning to Neil’s sentence:
“I’ve no idea what her goals are.”
Maybe that was the real crisis.
Not the guitar.
Not the band.
Not even the argument.
Perhaps somewhere in the ordinary business of being married, two people had stopped discovering one another.
And perhaps that is why the question before:
“Do I still love you?”
should sometimes be:
“Do I still know you?”
Because love cannot remain fully attentive to a person it has stopped discovering.
Covenant says:
I am still here.
Curiosity says:
And I am still looking.
And perhaps somewhere between those two sentences—over years of deposits and withdrawals, questions and answers, growth and disappointment, Christmases and ordinary Tuesdays—a marriage becomes more than something that merely survived.
It becomes a life that two people can look back upon and say:
We knew one another. We became together. And, by the grace of God, we made some moments worth remembering.
Sources & Attribution
Tony Robbins — seminar intervention with “Neil.” The original video excerpt supplied for this article is used as a case study. Robbins’ coaching observations are not presented here as peer-reviewed psychological findings.
Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Emotional Bank Account; Habit 5, “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.” FranklinCovey — 7 Habits framework
John and Julie Gottman / The Gottman Institute. Love Maps, bids for connection, turning toward, Emotional Bank Account and shared meaning. The Gottman Method
Reis, Shaver and subsequent relationship researchers. Interpersonal Process Model of Intimacy and perceived partner responsiveness—particularly understanding, validation and care. Research overview and empirical application
Arthur Aron, Christina Norman, Elaine Aron, Colin McKenna & Richard Heyman. “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78(2), 2000, 273–284. PubMed record and abstract
Arthur Aron & Jennifer M. Tomlinson. “Self-Expansion Activities with a Partner as One Path to Well-Being,” Behavioral Sciences, 2026. PubMed record and abstract
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. Rathgeber et al., meta-analysis of EFCT and behavioural couples therapy; Beasley & Ager, systematic review/meta-analysis of EFCT. Rathgeber et al. meta-analysis
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. The framework of elevation, insight, pride and connection. The Power of Moments — Heath Brothers
Biblical texts: Genesis 2; Joshua 4; Philippians 2:3–5; Ephesians 5:25–33; 1 Peter 3:7; 1 Corinthians 13; Luke 22:19.
Research note: This article deliberately distinguishes Tony Robbins’ coaching framework and the social-media narrator’s interpretation from findings supported by published relationship research. The personal reflections and the formulations “Know Me • Grow With Me • Remember With Me,” “Some moments have a shelf life,” and the covenant/curiosity synthesis are the author’s reflections arising from these sources.
