The assumptions you married: On love, loyalty, and the beliefs we never thought to compare
- +The question you’re not supposed to ask
- +Sometimes the question is as simple as ‘Do you love me?’
- +The number nobody is supposed to ask for
- +Who do you save — And what does that actually mean?
- +If you had to save between your youngest son and me, who would you save?
- +The good man who is still learning to see clearly
A lot of long marriages become efficient but intellectually lazy. You stop asking because you think you already know. You stop questioning because familiarity feels like understanding. You build a map of the other person early, somewhere in the first decade, maybe the second — and then you navigate by that map for the rest of your life, never stopping to check whether the territory has shifted.
A lot of long marriages become efficient but intellectually lazy.
I have never been able to do that.
Not in my marriage. Not in my friendships. Not in any relationship I have chosen to take seriously.
I ARE constantly. It is less a methodology than an instinct — the only way I know how to love people honestly. Awareness. Interrogate. Reframe. Surface what is sitting beneath the obvious. Name what the room has been quietly avoiding. Follow the thread until it tells the truth.
My husband has learned to recognise when I am doing it. Sometimes he calls it a trick question. It never is.
The question you’re not supposed to ask
Sometimes the question is as simple as ‘Do you love me?’
Asked not from doubt. Asked in the middle of an extraordinary season — just to hear it said. Recently, his response was a laugh. Then, after thirty years, after everything, why would you even ask that?
Because if you do, you should be able to say it. Quickly. Without the laugh arriving before the answer.
We see it differently. He believes love is demonstrated, accumulated, and visible in every decision he has made across three decades. I believe that if it lives in you, it should also be able to leave your mouth — especially when everything is good and the stakes are low. That is not insecurity. That is a love language that deserves to be spoken, not just enacted.
I raise it here not for myself — I know what I know, unshakeably. But I think about the woman reading this who asked the same question and received the same laugh and has no such foundation beneath her feet. What crack does it open, quietly, that neither of them names?
That is why the question matters. Not because love is in doubt. Because love, unexpressed, leaves too much room for doubt to move in.
Thirty years. One walk. Rooms we didn’t know were still there.
This Easter, we walked on Good Friday: no agenda, no destination, the kind of unhurried conversation that only becomes possible when the world slows down long enough to make room for it. What began as a stroll became one of the most honest excavations we have done in years. We talked about beauty. About love. About who gets saved and who gets left. About what society does to strong women. About divorce.
Thirty years. One walk. Rooms I did not know we still had left to open.
The number nobody is supposed to ask for
He ranked a woman I found stunning as a 6. I was quietly startled — not because her beauty needed his validation, but because it told me something about his lens. A lens I had never fully examined. So I asked the question every woman wants answered and no woman is supposed to ask.
I nearly fell over — not in tears, in laughter. Because I told him, calmly and without a trace of negotiation, that he was mistaken. I am a 10. A solid, non-debatable 10. Not because I am without complexity. Because I know who I am, and I am not accepting a discount from anyone — including the man who chose me.
He immediately felt he had walked into a trap. He hadn’t. I pushed further: What would make me a 10? And who, in your world, is a 10?
What emerged was more interesting than any number. The benchmark we unconsciously borrow from culture, from media, and from a world not designed with our women in mind shapes everything: how we see the women closest to us, how we value them, and how we speak about them when we think it doesn’t matter.
I redirected the frame. ‘Look within our world,’ I told him. Our daughters. Our sisters. Our friends. Our mothers. Because the standard we reach for without thinking determines what we consider ordinary when we should consider extraordinary.
What became clear was that our lenses, though similar in theory, had drifted in practice without either of us noticing. I had been assuming alignment on so many things by default — each of us looking at the same people through different windows, neither stopping to compare what we actually saw.
That is not a crisis. That is what AIR is for.
Who do you save — And what does that actually mean?
Later on Easter Monday, I asked him a different question.
I had already asked who he loved most in the world. He said, without hesitation, you and the children. That was his heart, unguarded. But I wanted to go deeper. So I asked the question beneath the question.
If you had to save between your youngest son and me, who would you save?
He said he would save our son. He is younger. He has his whole life ahead of him.
What I discovered in his answer was not a ranking of love — it was something more instructive. He had shifted, without either of us realising it, from the emotional question into a values-based one. Protect the younger life. Preserve the future. Trust the stronger partner to hold the bigger picture.
Most loved and most urgent responsibilities in a crisis are not the same thing. I had been conflating them.
His first answer settled the emotional question: you and the children. That was his heart. The rescue scenario moved him into duty and stewardship. What I had interpreted as a hierarchy of love was actually a philosophy of sacrifice.
Knowing the difference matters.
But I pressed further. His instinct, I told him, is always to fold the children into everything — holidays, birthdays, quiet moments that might otherwise be ours alone. I have always operated from a particular belief: husband and wife first. Not because the children matter less, but because marriage is the foundation on which the children stand. For him, the unit is different. It is a family as one whole, everyone held together, everyone is to protect.
Thirty years. Two completely different operating systems, running in parallel, largely unexamined.
The good man who is still learning to see clearly
About the particular burden carried by strong women — how even the men who love us, who champion us, who would call themselves allies without hesitation, carry biases they did not choose and have never been asked to examine. Biases shaped by environment, by culture, and by the water they have been swimming in so long, they no longer notice it is wet.
