This is from a book I'm writing. It isn't finished.
I'm showing it to you because you just did the thing I'm trying to put into words.
In my late twenties, I started dating Annie. I was excited for my friend Pete to meet her over a long weekend visiting him in his Manhattan apartment. I was head over heels in love with Annie and daydreamed about how Pete would dazzle her with the kind of conversations I knew he could have. But after spending only an hour together, Pete insisted Annie and I leave to visit an art show 20 blocks uptown. My insides twisted into nervous knots. We put on our coats and Pete asked Annie to step into the hallway. I trembled with embarrassment, imagining how I would explain to Annie that Pete did not approve of her.
But Pete wasn't sending us away for his benefit, he was doing it for mine.
Pete put his hands on my shoulders and looked in my eyes. “Vance, when you go to the exhibit, don't look at the art. Look at her looking at the art. It is with those eyes that she will see you.”
Pete gave me a completely different way to approach how I spent time with Annie. Instead of feeling pressure to say something knowledgeable or insightful about what I saw, I could ask Annie questions about what she found interesting, what drew her to certain pieces, what she thought about color and materials. What a person observes shows you the lens that they see everything through. My questions could reveal the way her mind processed information. And that is what makes a person unique.
Annie was drawn to meticulous artwork that took a great deal of time to create. She didn't like broadstroke paintings or large, attention grabbing sculptures. She was drawn to the art that demonstrated an extreme level of care about the details. I knew then that this woman would support me doing deep work that took a long time to complete.
Getting there didn't require cleverness or quick wit, it just required my curiosity. I could have asked “interesting” questions and coasted on the normal flow of a date, but Pete pushed me to ask questions that revealed patterns in how she was thinking. Who she really was.
A year later, Annie and I were married.