Want to Feel Closer to Your Partner? Try This in Bed Tonight
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My wife and I, like most people, look for ways to dull the world’s sorrows and sharpen its joys. We make music. We make food. We make love. We walk. We hike. We bike. We scroll Instagram. We watch TV. But one of the most enduring, and successful practices that we have fostered as a couple happens to be one of the simplest: We read—out loud, and together.
Over the past decade, Liz and I have read exactly twenty-one books aloud, which I know because I am the type of writer-reader-book nerd who gains immense pleasure in tracking such details. While we occasionally read at the beach, in a park, on a mountain, in a tent, ninety-nine percent of our reading happens at night, in bed, passing a book back and forth, trading off one page at a time. The practice has had a subtle yet profound effect on our sleep, our mental health, our attention spans, and our marriage.
While I realize that reading aloud with your partner might sound a bit odd, or lifted from the pages of a preachy, unhelpful self-help book (“The 7 Must-Do Eccentric Habits of Highly Successful Couples”), let me be upfront: First, it’s not like we claim to have all the answers because we read to each other. We have every problem and issue common to any relationship. Secondly, reading aloud together is surprisingly easy. In fact, it’s one of the oldest, most natural practices that we human beings can enjoy. When people think of reading out loud, we generally imagine reading to children, whether as part of a bedtime routine, or in the classroom. (As a fourth-grade teacher, the “read aloud” portion of the day is my favorite.) But out-loud storytelling is one of humankind’s oldest forms of entertainment, for children and adults alike. Our ancestors did not experience The Odyssey or The Epic of Gilgamesh by themselves, silently turning papyrus leaves in a café. Storytelling, for much of history, has been a collective experience, listening and envisioning together, all picturing similar—but not identical—versions of the same narrative.
Liz and I read our first book together in 2012, when our bed was a mattress on the floor of an apartment that we shared with friends. The Teachings of Don Juan, by the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, follows the author’s dive into the mystical world of shamanism in the deserts of Mexico. Our twenty-first book, finished last spring in our new bed in our first home, could not have been more different: Hidden Sins, a romance thriller by the politician and activist Stacey Abrams. In between, while living in four states, working a half-dozen jobs, and moving across the country more times than we can count, we have read two YA trilogies (The Hunger Games and Shadow and Bone), a slew of thrillers (Gone Girl, The Woman in the Window, The Other Woman), an excellent memoir (Crazy Brave), some fantasy novels (The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Six of Crows), more Carlos Castaneda books, one sci-fi-romance mashup (Landline), and a comedy thriller (Skinny Dip). Twenty-one books, page by page, word by word, night after night after night.
We choose our read-alouds with great care. At only a few pages a night, Liz and I may live with any given book for many months, or longer. We can always ditch a book, of course, but this happens less than expected, partially because bad books—like bad movies—can be fun to experience out loud and collectively. Over the years, we’ve only given up on a few novels. I write and read mostly literary fiction, but literary fiction, with its layered backstories, leaps in time, descriptive prose, and character interiority, does not always lend itself for bite-sized chunks late at night. Some great novels (The Satanic Verses, to take one example that I am hereby warning you against as a read-aloud) become impenetrable when swapping pages.
For opposite reasons, some books are too terrible to read aloud. We were giddy to start the Fifty Shades trilogy, but couldn’t make it past the first half of book one. Truly awful writing, it turns out, evolves entire new phylums of awfulness when spoken aloud. It was funny at first. We knew it would be bad. Bad was what we wanted. But not that bad.
Even when we do pick a winner, after trading a few pages back and forth, one of us often starts drifting off. Moments like these are when reading aloud with your partner becomes a wonderful opportunity to practice your improvisation skills. This happened often during the Hunger Games books. As soon as I sensed Liz falling asleep, I could begin editing in real time, turning Catching Fire into Fifty Shades:
“Katniss,” Peeta whispered. “Take off your pants.”
“Jeez,” I gulped. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Peeta grabbed my butt. “Stop talking and start stripping.”
It should come as a surprise to exactly nobody that we are a scrolling, swiping society which moves much faster than our biological evolution ever intended. Liz and I have found that reading aloud, even two pages a night, works as a potent antidote to the speed of contemporary life. After a long day apart, we are together, in bed, off our phones, legs entwined beneath the covers. We’re done talking about today. We’re not discussing tomorrow—not the frozen blueberries we need from the store, not the car that needs snow tires. We are together, on the cusp of traveling through the same imagined world for a few slow pages. We have to collaborate to remember what happened the night before. We have to pause for punctuation and effect. We must think three or four times before leaping headfirst into the pronunciation and meaning of words like “febrile,” “imprecations,” or “gamine” (all of which appear within the first fifty pages of Hidden Sins). Reading aloud forces us to decelerate nightly, but I’m happy to report that it also works to slow down longer stretches of time; it took us a full year to read Shadow and Bone. Alone, I probably would’ve finished all three books in one or two months. I’m glad I didn’t.
Maybe nobody’s read aloud to you since your mother or father helped put you to sleep. Maybe you haven’t read aloud to anyone since you were that mother or father, your baby now grown up. It’s not too late to start again. None of us can tell what sorrows or misfortunes await. What we can do is choose a great book with our partner. Something with solid plot, good pacing. Genre doesn’t matter. Read the first page. Pass the book. Read another page. Repeat, for the chapter, the book, the trilogy. For the week, the year. For life.
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