You and your partner don't really talk anymore. Is that normal, and how do you start again?

It's 9pm and you're both on the couch, both on your phones

Nobody is angry. That is almost the strange part. Dinner was fine. You talked about the dentist and whose turn it is to get milk.

Then you sat down and the screens came out. Your partner laughed at something. You didn't ask what. They didn't say.

You can't remember the last time you talked about anything that wasn't a task. And a quiet voice asks whether this is just what happens, or whether you are slowly becoming roommates.

Why "we should talk more" doesn't work

The usual advice is a date night, or a big talk about the relationship. Both have the same problem. They ask for a lot of energy at the exact moment you have none.

A big talk can also feel like a test. If one of you says "we need to talk," the other one's shoulders go up an inch. Now you are not reconnecting. You are bracing.

Most closeness is not built in big talks. It is built in small moments, many times a day. Those are the moments that slipped away.

The small reaches you may be missing

Picture this scene from the book. Nadia is drying a pan and sees a man walking a cat on a leash outside. "Chris, come look," she says. Chris is on his laptop and says "mm" without looking up. Nadia watches the cat turn the corner by herself. She doesn't mention it again.

The psychologist John Gottman calls that a bid. A small reach for attention. "Come look" really means "be with me for a second." The cat doesn't matter. The answer does.

In a study of about fifty newlywed couples who spent a day in a lab apartment, couples who brushed off each other's bids at dinner tended to have rougher arguments later. It was one lab and a small group, and nobody can say which way it runs. But the habit costs nothing to try. A look and three words are enough. "Ha, where?"

When you are truly busy, a quick answer still counts:

Hold that thought, I want to hear it in five minutes.

Then ask in five minutes.

Your picture of each other has gone out of date

There is a second reason couples go quiet. You stop knowing what's new.

In one scene, Harold tells a neighbor his biggest worry is his brother's knee surgery. Bev, married to him for over forty years, nearly drops her watering can. She knew about the knee. She had no idea he had been lying awake over it.

Gottman calls this a love map: your picture of your partner's inner world right now. It goes out of date because people don't announce their inner changes. So the fix is a question about now. Try one tonight:

What's the biggest stress in your life right now?

Guess the answer first, in your head. If you miss, that is the most useful result. Say "tell me a little about that," and listen.

Good news is a door, too

The third habit is about good things. When your partner shares good news, the urge is often to point at the practical problem. "Won't that eat your whole Saturday?" It is well meant. It also lets the air out.

Shelly Gable and her colleagues found that people felt better after sharing good news, and the boost was bigger when the listener responded with real interest. So ask one curious question first. "Wait, really? Who asked you?" The Saturday problem can wait until Sunday.

A note we put on every page: if the quiet in your home comes from fear, this is not a communication problem. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is free at 800-799-7233.

When the quiet isn't peaceful

There are two kinds of quiet. One is drift: nobody is upset, there is just nothing new being said. The habits above are for that.

The other kind comes from fights. You stop bringing things up because it always goes badly. One of you goes silent, turns away or picks up a phone in the middle of a hard talk. John Gottman called this stonewalling. It is one of four habits, with criticism, contempt and defensiveness, that showed up more in couples who later split up in his long studies with Robert Levenson.

The book is careful here. That research does not prove these habits cause breakups, and every couple uses some of them some of the time. It is about patterns over many talks. The book's fix for stonewalling is to say what is happening and take a real break, then come back:

I'm shutting down. I need a break, and I'll come back to this.

If the silence is mostly this kind, start with our page on how to take a break when a fight gets too heated.

How to bring it up without a big talk

You don't need to say "we need to talk." That line puts shoulders up. Pick a calm moment, not a bad day, and make the ask small. The book's sample lines leave out what's wrong and promise nothing:

I found a short thing we could try. It's twenty minutes, once a week, just us. Want to try one and see?

The book calls this a checkup, not a repair. In a large randomized study it cites, couples offered a brief, low-pressure relationship checkup became closer and less distressed than couples who waited. Then put the phones face down for those twenty minutes. That is one of the book's ground rules.

Three sessions for couples who went quiet

This is the problem The 20-Minute Couples Workbook was written for. The first sessions have no conflict in them at all. They are about knowing each other again.

Session 2, Love Maps, is a guessing game about each other's current life, with a page to write down what you learned.

Session 3, Turning Toward, has each of you list your own bids and how you would like them answered, so your partner stops missing them by accident.

Session 4, When Good Things Happen, practices answering good news with real interest.

And 52 Questions for the Kitchen Table gives you one easy question for every week of the year. Our page of questions to ask your partner to reconnect shares a few of them.