After 40 years, we’ve stopped talking. Help?

Dear Bess: After 40 years together, my husband and I have run out of things to talk about. Is this the end?

Let me ask you something before I answer your question.

When was the last time you sat in a room with your husband and felt, not uncomfortable exactly, but aware of the silence? When did you first notice that dinner had started to pass without much conversation? That you had both developed very efficient systems for being in the same house without really being in it together?

I ask because the answer matters. There is a silence that is the end of something. And there is a silence that is the deepest form of something else entirely. They can feel remarkably similar from the inside, and telling them apart requires a kind of honest attention that is uncomfortable to sit with.

The silence of long love

Forty years. Let us just sit with that for a moment. Forty years of shared breakfasts and disagreements and children and money worries and inside jokes and the particular shorthand that develops between two people who have been paying attention to each other for decades. You have had thousands of conversations. Tens of thousands. You have processed most of what there is to process about each other.

Of course the conversation has quietened. Some of it is simply that there is less left to say – not because you have become strangers, but because you have become so familiar that the usual machinery of conversation is no longer needed to feel close. The researcher John Gottman, who has spent fifty years studying what makes marriages work, notes that long-term couples often communicate enormous amounts of information in very few words, or none at all. The silence is not emptiness. It is compression.

That said.

When silence becomes distance

I would be doing you a disservice if I simply told you that comfortable silence is always fine and left it there. Because sometimes it is not fine. Sometimes the quiet is not the stillness of deep familiarity but the stillness of two people who have stopped trying. Who have each retreated to their own corners – the television, the garden, the phone – and stopped making the small daily investments that keep a relationship alive.

The difference, in my experience, is whether the silence is warm or cold. Whether you can sit in it together and still feel connected, or whether you sit in it and feel, as you put it, like something has run out.

Which one is yours? I suspect you already know. The fact that you wrote to me suggests the silence is troubling you – and that is worth paying attention to.

What to do with forty years

There is a particular challenge in long marriages that nobody talks about much: you know each other so well that you stop being curious. You think you know what he will say before he says it. You think you know what he thinks about everything. You have, over four decades, quietly stopped asking.

The remedy is embarrassingly simple and genuinely difficult: ask anyway.

Not the logistical questions – those are fine, those keep a household running. The other ones. What has he been thinking about lately that he hasn’t told you? What does he wish he’d done differently? What is he afraid of? What makes him quietly happy that he has never said aloud?

You might find he has nothing to say. Or you might find, as many couples do when they try this, that forty years of shared life has not exhausted the person – only the surface of them.

Is this the end?

Probably not. But it may be the beginning of a different chapter that requires a little more intention than the last forty years did. Shared routines that have sustained a marriage through the busy years can quietly become ruts in retirement. New experiences – a class, a trip, a project, anything that puts you both in the position of being beginners together – have a remarkable capacity to reopen conversation.

You have forty years of history with this man. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot to work with.

Start by asking him something you genuinely don’t know the answer to.

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