I consider myself a curious person. In fact, much of what I am curious about in the context of my therapist-role, is you. Why you are who you are, what makes you you, how you experienced something and why that might have served you well… or not. In fact, I am often talking about what it means to be curious. Not peppering someone with questions and barely waiting for the answer. That’s not it at all. For many of us, it takes listening, paying attention, some agency over your own intuitive skills, a willingness to follow someone else’s direction, someone else’s energy, their vibe, a willingness to guess about something and a willingness to be wrong. When a client walks in, whether for the first time or the hundredth, I don’t assume I know where we’re starting. But I’m also not sitting back waiting either. Most people want to feel understood, not interpreted. I’m curious. Actively curious. I’m noticing if you seem light or kind of heavy, if you are tentatively sitting or sitting back. If you are still in the “I am tired and don’t know where to start” mind or you said “fine” but meant something else entirely.
This isn’t something I only notice as a therapist. In my experience, clinically and personally, it’s not always about asking questions. It’s paying attention without assuming we already understand who someone is right now, even if we’ve known them for twenty years. Even if you think you do.
Between my social worker book club and some of your suggestions, I have been reading a couple of books that have me thinking more about curiosity and relationships, not just between partners, but all of our relationships. One of them is Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. I got it for my son to read, and it is not a relationship book. But honestly, as I read through it, I could not help but see how so much of this applies to our relationships. Taleb argues that humans are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty and randomness, so we rush to create explanations that make people and events feel more predictable than they really are. We do this in relationships constantly. A few of Taleb’s ideas kept pulling me back to relationships that I kept thinking about in terms of the work we do in my office:
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- Narrative Fallacy– our tendency to create stories that make people and events feel more explainable and predictable after the fact. We do this in relationships constantly. Wethink we see our partner clearly but often we’re seeing our history with them.
- Black Swan– a high-impact, unpredictable event that feels obvious in hindsight. We don’t see betrayal, disconnection, or divorce coming, and then might say “In hindsight,I knew it all along.”
- Silent Evidence– we only see what survived; the failures are invisible. Just like social media shows us the highlight reels, our own memory does the same- we edit out what we chose to ignore.
- Ludic Fallacy– Taleb also warns against treating complicated human relationships as if they are predictable or rule-based. They aren’t. We might decide we know what someone meant, what they intended, or what a relationship “should” look like before we stay curious long enough to understand what is actually happening in front of us. “He didn’t text back because he doesn’t care.” “She’s quiet because she’s mad.”
Other books I recently read also support that when we stop being curious about people and start relating to who we decided they are, we can create discord, misunderstandings, and even disconnection, sometimes without even noticing it happening. For example, Robert Johnson’s We and Stephen Mitchell’s Can Love Last? are both about romantic love, but what they’re really describing is projection. We often fall for an idea of someone., and then we wonder why we feel disconnected and disappointed.
A few things both books kept bringing me back to as David, Ellen and I see it in our sessions with couples and individuals:
- We might love a version of someone more than the actual person, and we don’t always know we’re doing it.
- Familiarity can replace curiosity. The longer we know someone, the more certain we become (and we may be wrong!).
- Sustaining real intimacy requires tolerating who someone actually is, including the parts that disappoint us or surprise us.
- Real love- the kind that lasts- often begins when the fantasy fades and we choose the person anyway. Both books suggest that lasting relationships require tolerating the tension between fantasy and reality, security and desire, intimacy and separateness.
Curiosity keeps you open to who someone actually is right now, not who they were, not who you need them to be, and not who you decided they are after you got hurt. And when we can’t change other people, the only thing we can really change is how we interact, react and show up to them.
Alan Downs wrote The Velvet Rage specifically about the experience of gay men, but I found myself thinking about how many of the relationship patterns he describes show up everywhere. The need for validation, the pressure to perform, the fear of rejection, confusing attention for intimacy, struggling to tolerate imperfection… these are human struggles, and they pull us away from genuine curiosity about other people and ourselves.
Curiosity requires something some of us resist: humility- the willingness to not already know.
But most of us get pulled out of curiosity pretty quickly. If I’ve already decided who you are, I stop asking. If I need to appear perfect, I stop being honest. If every feeling becomes an immediate reaction, I stop listening. If I’m only chasing validation or chemistry, I may never actually know you. And if I can’t tolerate disappointment, yours or mine, I’ll start controlling, withdrawing, or telling myself a story that lets me off the hook.
Downs writes about this directly. Talk to the person, not about them. Don’t act on every feeling. Let go of the need to appear perfect, it pushes people away more than imperfection ever does. When conflict happens, look at your own role first. Slow down enough to actually know someone before you decide what they mean to you. And learn the difference between validating someone and enabling what isn’t working.
These aren’t advanced therapy concepts. Most of us just never learned how to do relationships this way.
What happens in my office is that people get to practice this, sometimes for the first time! Not because I have the answers, but because our relationship itself becomes part of the work. Clients learn what it feels like to be curious about themselves instead of just reacting to themselves. Some people have not experienced that consistently. Not growing up, not in friendships, and sometimes not even in their closest relationships. Therapy is not a substitute for real life. But it can become a place where people start noticing their patterns more clearly, tolerate themselves more honestly, and stay open instead of immediately shutting down, defending, assuming, or withdrawing. And eventually, they bring that back into their lives. To their partners. Their kids. Their colleagues. The people they’ve known for twenty years and stopped being curious about.
Maybe you’re reading this and perhaps recognizing one of these patterns in yourself. Maybe you’re thinking about someone specific- a partner, a friend, a kid who stopped talking to you the way they used to. Maybe you’re realizing you’ve been certain about someone for so long that you genuinely can’t remember the last time you were curious about them.
If any of this is resonating, I’d love to hear from you. And if you’re ready to start getting curious- about yourself, about the people you love, about what you might have stopped looking for – that’s exactly what we do… start feeling better… today.
P.S. When you are deciding if yu are curious, are you also “fair”? Look for my article When Rules Aren’t Enough: Why Trust and Respect Build Behavior Better Than Consequences in the August issue of the North Shore City Lifestyle magazine to read more (or check out my media pages and social media videos for other insights I have provided recently on polyvagal theory, grief, cringe culture, cry masking…and even Love Island!)
