LEVEL 7 / Master · Connection & Intimacy
The Long Game
For anyone who knows their partner’s order by heart and has not checked since the honeymoon.
Case file
June and Walt held their forty-first anniversary dinner in the back room of a restaurant, with eleven relatives and two speeches. When the dessert menus came, June waved Walt’s away.
“He’ll have the crème caramel. He’s had it since our honeymoon.”
Their granddaughter, who is seven and under oath at all times, asked Grandpa whether he even liked it.
Walt studied the tablecloth. He said he had liked it on the honeymoon, and had lost his taste for it around the time of their second apartment. He had not wanted to make a fuss.
Somebody passed him a menu. He read it like a lease. He ordered the apple pie. June watched him eat it with the look of a woman being introduced to a guest at her own party.
LESSON 1 · FREE PREVIEW
Check the date on the file
Somewhere in your head is a file on your partner. It says how they take their coffee, which mug is theirs, that they pick the raisins out of everything and sleep with one foot outside the blanket. Most of it was written in the first few years, when you were paying very close attention, and it has not been checked much since.
The file is why you can buy their shampoo without calling, and tell a host what they will not eat. It is also why, somewhere along the way, you stopped asking the person.
Meanwhile the person has gone on changing, the way people do, without sending notice. Nobody comes down to breakfast and announces that they are done with spicy food. And a polite partner will eat the crème caramel for decades. Their silence was never a renewal.
The remedy costs nothing. Ask questions, including the ones you are certain you can answer. Ask while you are both doing something else, such as drying dishes or walking to the mailbox, because a question put across a table with eye contact feels like the start of bad news.
Some of the answers will be news. Let them stand. “But you love it” is the file talking, and the file does not get a vote. You are allowed to be surprised. June was. The Faculty invites you to consider what your own crème caramel might be. It is probably something you buy every week.
LESSON 2 · FREE PREVIEW
Let them be bad at the cello
LESSON 3 · FREE PREVIEW
File your own corrections
The Registrar rulesYou do not know your partner by heart. You know who they were the last time you asked, so ask again.
LESSON 4 · FREE PREVIEW
The days without speeches
LESSON 5 · FREE PREVIEW
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