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There's a version of my husband his friends get. There's a version his brother gets. The version I get goes straight to the couch and pulls out his phone. I'm 36. We've been together since I was 24. Two kids, a dog, a mortgage in a Denver suburb, both of us work. Eleven years married this November. I'm going to tell you about Saturday night because I think a lot of women will recognize it. We went to his friend Mike's place for a backyard thing. Burgers, a fire pit, four other couples. We do this maybe six times a year. I always end up next to Mike's wife, Jenna, who I like but don't know that well. About an hour in, my husband started telling a story. I was half-listening because I was talking to Jenna about her kid's tonsils. And then I heard the table get loud. He was telling a story about a road trip he took with Mike in 2011. Before me. They got pulled over in Kansas, and there's a whole thing about a state trooper, and a cooler in the trunk, and a dog they almost adopted at a rest stop. The way he told it, it was funny. He did the trooper's voice. He had the timing of a guy who's told this story before, to a crowd, and gotten the laugh. Everyone was laughing. The wives, the husbands, Mike, Jenna. I laughed too. I had to. But underneath the laugh I felt something hot rise up the back of my neck. I had never heard that story. In eleven years, with two kids, sitting next to him in the car for thousands of hours, having dinner across from him almost every night, I had never heard that story. Not because it was a secret. It wasn't a secret. He just hadn't told me. It didn't make the cut. Whatever decides what he tells at a barbecue and what he tells his wife had filed that one under barbecue. I sat with that for the rest of the night. The hot feeling didn't go away. In the car on the way home, I tried to be casual. I said, "I didn't know about the Kansas trip." He shrugged and said, "yeah, that was forever ago. Just guy stuff." Then he turned up the radio and we drove home. We got home at 10:47. I remember because I was so wound up I checked the clock. He paid the sitter. He went straight to the couch. He pulled out his phone. Within four minutes of walking through our front door, the man who'd been the most animated guy at the table forty-five minutes earlier was gone. Replaced by the man I live with. Who scrolls. Who answers in syllables. Who is here, fully, except for the part of him I actually want. I stood in the kitchen drinking a glass of water and I thought something I had never thought out loud before. He is capable of being interesting. I just don't get that version anymore. That's a hard sentence to write about your husband. I want you to know I love him. I'm not leaving. He's a good dad, he works hard, he's not cheating, he's not cold. He kisses me on the forehead before he leaves for work. He texts me from the grocery store to ask which yogurt. But somewhere around year five or six, the version of him that tells the Kansas story stopped coming home. He kept that version for Mike. For his brother. For his coworkers at the lunch table. For the group chat with his college friends. I get the home version. Efficient. Tired. Loving in a low-power way. On the couch by 8:45. I tried the obvious stuff for the next three weeks. I tried asking him questions like the Instagram therapists tell you to ask. "What's the best thing that happened to you this week?" "What's something you've been thinking about?" He answered them politely, the way you'd answer a survey at the dentist. Every single time I asked, I felt like an interviewer. He felt like a reluctant subject. The questions made everything worse, because now there was a thing I was doing and a thing he was tolerating. That's when I realized this was not a "ask better questions" problem. It was something else, and I didn't have a name for it yet. I was at my regular salon getting my color done a couple of weeks later. My stylist, Becca, has been doing my hair for nine years. I told her about the barbecue, the Kansas story I'd never heard, the car ride home, and the way he went straight to the couch the second we walked in. She was painting foils and she stopped for a second. She said, "Yeah. My husband does the same thing. He's hilarious at his bowling league. He comes home and he's a houseplant." She said it like it was funny. Neither of us laughed. I sat there with the foils in my hair, staring at the mirror, and I started working it out. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk to me. It was something more specific than that. He had filed me as the place he comes to stop being "on." Home was where he got to recover from performing for everyone else. And somewhere along the way "off" had become "absent." And the harder I asked him to turn back on for me, the more I was confirming his own setup. Home was the place he was trying to recover from being on. Every question I asked him at home was a question that kept him there. My questions were proving him right. That was the problem nobody had been able to explain to me. And it meant the solution couldn't be "talk more." It had to be something that took both of us out of those roles. Then he stops being the husband getting interviewed and I stop being the wife doing the interviewing. We needed a third thing in the room. A reason to talk that wasn't a request from me. A friend of mine from college, Liz, had been telling me for a couple of months about a card game her and her husband had been doing at night. I'd been half-listening because I assumed it was one of those things. Like the love languages quiz. Like the gratitude journal her sister gave us for our wedding that's still in a drawer somewhere. I texted her from the salon. I said, "Liz, what is the thing you keep talking about with the cards." She sent me a link. It's called Connecting. It's a card deck, 160 cards, but the part Liz kept telling me about is that it's not a one-night thing. It's a 30-day arc. Night one is a fast game. Some cards are dares, some are questions, first one to twenty points wins, takes under two minutes to start. Then over the next four weeks the cards open up. Some are about you, some are about him, and some go back to the early years and ask things you haven't talked about in a decade. The part that got me was Liz said the first night took them four minutes to start playing. Her husband Brian is the same kind of guy. Sweet, present, goes silent at home. She said by week two he was telling her stories about high school she had never heard. That was the line. Stories she had never heard. After fifteen years. I ordered it that afternoon. It came on Wednesday. I left it on the kitchen island. He picked it up. He said, "what's this." I said, "it's a card game for couples. Don't roll your eyes." He laughed. He said okay, fine, after the kids go down. Here's what happened on night one. I'm going to be honest about this because I want you to know I didn't think a card game was going to do anything. We sat down at the kitchen island. I drew the first card. It asked him what his favorite story from his twenties was. He thought for a second, took a sip of his beer, and told me a story I had never heard. About a job he had in Austin in 2009 before he moved back to Denver. There was a chef who used to throw chicken at him. He was animated. He did the chef's voice. He laughed at his own punchline. And I sat there on the kitchen stool watching the same man who told the Kansas story at Mike's barbecue tell me a story he hadn't told anyone. Because the card was asking him. I wasn't. He wasn't refusing his wife. He was playing a game. Some nights it didn't go anywhere. Some nights we played for ten minutes and went to bed. Other nights it was 11:30 before either of us looked at the clock. But the man at Mike's barbecue started showing up in our kitchen. Two or three times a week. And then more. By night thirty, the barbecue version and the home version were starting to be the same guy. He's still tired. He still goes to the couch some nights and scrolls. But three weeks in, he was telling me about a guy at his work I'd never heard of in six years of him working there. If any of this sounds familiar, here's where I'd start: https://tryconnecting.com/products/connecting P.S. The version of him that tells the Kansas story isn't gone. He's giving it to other people. Every weekend he tells a story at a barbecue or a poker night or a work lunch and you don't hear about it is another weekend that line gets thicker, and the longer it stays that way the more it feels like the marriage you signed up for. Put something on the kitchen island before another Saturday night ends with you in the passenger seat wondering who that guy was.