What We're Practicing
Every January, people make resolutions: I will exercise more, sleep better, drink less, finally read the books I keep buying. There is something genuine and good in this impulse — the desire to align more closely with who you want to be, to close the gap between your intentions and your life.
But I have been thinking about what gets left out of the resolution framework. And about a couple I worked with some years ago who came in not quite in crisis — nothing had broken — but carrying that low-grade disappointment that comes when people who love each other keep arriving in the same painful places despite wanting, genuinely, to arrive somewhere different.
"We need to get better at coming back," she said, somewhere in our early sessions.
She meant: back to each other. After the argument. After the silence. After the weeks that had somehow passed without a real conversation between them. She wasn't describing grand gestures or dramatic change. She was describing practice — the repeated, humble, daily act of returning.
I've held that distinction ever since.
A resolution is outcome-oriented. It has a finish line. You either reach it or you don't, and when you don't — as most of us don't, somewhere around mid-February — there is a quiet failure that attaches itself to the original hope, making it seem naive for having existed at all.
A practice is different. A practice doesn't have a finish line because it isn't trying to arrive anywhere. It is trying to become better at something — and better at something is not a state you achieve and then rest in. It is something you keep doing, deliberately, imperfectly, again. Bill Evans — widely considered one of the most influential pianists in jazz history — told the journalist Gene Lees, well into his career: "It's just that I've played such a quantity of piano. Three hours a day in childhood, six hours a day in college, and at least six hours now." Not striving toward perfection, exactly. Something more continuous and interior than that — becoming more fully himself through the playing.
Relationships, I think, are more like this than we usually talk about. We tend to frame them as things we either have or don't have, succeed at or fail at. But the couples I've worked with who have built something genuinely durable and alive are not the ones who avoided difficulty or resolved every conflict cleanly. They are the ones who got good at returning. Who learned how to repair after rupture, to reach toward each other after withdrawal, to say I missed us without needing to assign blame for where they went.
That is a practice. And January, with its instinct toward intention and renewal, seems like a reasonable time to ask: what are we practicing this year?
I want to offer a few possibilities — not a checklist or obligations, but invitations. Take what resonates and leave the rest.
The practice of the non-functional conversation.
The family therapist Bill Doherty — whose work on couples I deeply admire — has observed that most of the conversations partners have are logistical and everyday, and that the deeper ones become less frequent during certain seasons of life. I find that quietly reassuring, because I think a lot of couples carry some shame about it, as if the prevalence of logistics represents a failure of intimacy.
It doesn't. There is a particular joy — warm and a little underrated — in having a partner who functions well with you. The person who says, over morning coffee, what should we have for dinner tonight? I can stop at the store on the way home — or who offers help before you've asked for it. The smooth, practiced choreography of a shared life is its own form of intimacy.
But sometimes when all of that is running well — when the household hums and the logistics are handled — the deeper conversations quietly slip. Not because anyone stopped caring, but because the machine of daily life doesn't require them. They have to be chosen. That is what makes them a practice.
There’s a different kind of conversation that goes beneath the logistics into each person's interior life. What have you been thinking about lately? What are you afraid of? What do you want that you haven't said? These conversations require slowing down and some tolerance for not knowing exactly where they're going. They can feel unfamiliar if it's been a while. They tend to be worth it.
The practice of early repair.
Most couples have a rupture cycle — a pattern of how they argue, distance, and eventually find their way back. For many, repair happens when the pain gets big enough to force it. The practice I'm describing is different: learning to recognize the rupture early, before it has calcified, and having something — a gesture, a phrase, a signal agreed on together — that says I don't want to be here with you. I want to be over there with you. The repair doesn't have to be complete. It just has to begin.
The practice of not-knowing your partner.
Long relationships develop a particular habit of mind: we believe we already know what our partner thinks, feels, needs, and will say. Sometimes we're right. But people change — slowly, continuously, often in ways they haven't yet put into words — and the assumption that we have each other fully mapped can be quietly corrosive. The practice here is approaching your partner with some genuine curiosity. Not performing interest, but actually wondering: what is this person like right now, in this season of their life? What have I stopped asking about?
Practice requires intention. You have to keep choosing it because that is the nature of practice to be chosen, again and again, including and especially when you don't feel like it.
The couple I mentioned at the beginning — the ones who needed to get better at coming back to each other — did get better. Not because they resolved everything between them, but because they kept choosing to return. They got quieter in their arguments, quicker in their repairs, more curious about each other. They built something together, not by deciding to arrive somewhere different, but by practicing the return, over and over, until it became the shape of their relationship.
That seems like something worth practicing.
