This makes the importance of conversation noticeable to me. Whenever we drop below a certain level of talking, friction accumulates. We get more stuck in our ways, we get stressed and don’t have time to maintain the shared context necessary to understand each other.

Having talked an ungodly amount early on, there are reserves of shared language and trust. I sit down on the edge of the bed, where Johanna lies with the sleeping toddler. And after an hour, we are in the loop.

This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse.

It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold.

For me, this is Johanna. We first met when she was 21 and I was 22 and later became a couple. What is me in me has unfolded primarily in her company. This has been a mutual unfolding; we spoke each other into being.

W.H. Auden, the British poet, praised metrical rules because they “forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of Self.”

Looking at it like this, like a loop, one way to think about improving a relationship is to ask, how can we increase the cycle speed?

Can we learn more about each other sooner? Can we act on that knowledge faster? We have a long way to go and limited time.

Can we remove bottlenecks along the loop?

Often, modern houses make this harder. They force you to live inside a preplanned, static vision. Unresponsive to your evolution, they alienate.

There is a corollary for relationships. Some relationships are hard, or even impossible, to change. As an individual, you grow—but your father won’t acknowledge that change or adapt to it, and the... See more