The Quiet House: How BestSelf Deeper Talk Got Us Talking After Supper

The television was doing all the talking at our house. Supper at six thirty, plates on our knees, the news on, and Hal and I maybe saying four sentences between the blessing and the dishwasher. Not angry sentences. Just the weather and whether the yard needed mowing. After thirty one years you would think that would feel normal. It felt like a room with the furniture moved out.

Our daughter moved out in September of last year. Our son had been gone a good while before that. The house got quiet in a way I was not expecting, and I noticed we were good at talking about the kids, the bills and the schedule, and not much else.

Before that, our daughter gave us one of those little question decks from a gift shop. We used it up in a few weeks. The questions never got past the surface. That is how the BestSelf Co. Deeper Talk deck ended up on my sideboard in January.

So in January I ordered it. The BestSelf Co. Deeper Talk deck is a box of 170 cards in six categories: Courage, Beliefs, Life Lessons, Self-Awareness, Dreams, and Exposed. The listing says two to ten players and ages seventeen and up, which for our purposes means two people, a round oak table, and the dishes already cleared. It weighs 7.36 ounces and lives on the sideboard beside the table. It sat there a week before I worked up the nerve to open it.

Hal is sixty, works maintenance at the hospital, and would rather be dragged behind a truck than sit through anything that smells like a feelings exercise. The first two Sundays he refused. Not mean about it. He said he was tired and turned the ballgame on. The third Sunday he sat down and listened while I drew. By about the sixth week he was answering without me having to ask him twice, and I stopped pretending I was not watching for that.

By about the sixth week he was answering without me having to ask him twice.

The routine is not complicated. Sunday after supper, dishes done, around seven thirty, one or two cards. That runs about twenty minutes, sometimes longer if an answer grows legs and we forget to draw again. We take turns. The box says two to ten players, but two is what we have got, and two works fine.

Not every card lands. Some of them land heavy, and we skip those. That is not a rule printed in the box. It is just what we decided early, and neither of us has to explain why. We have used roughly half the deck in ten months, which tells you we are not burning through it. Life Lessons gets Hal talking about his daddy. Beliefs gets us both a little quieter and a lot more honest. Exposed I approach with caution.

Here is the part I did not expect. The Sunday cards leaked. Midweek, driving to the grocery store, Hal will bring up something he said on a Sunday and add to it. I have gotten more out of him in a grocery store aisle than in a whole season of the news. That never happened before. Thirty one years and the man had to be asked a direct question to volunteer anything.

I want to be clear about what this is not. It is not counseling. Hal and I have never sat with a counselor and I am not about to start handing out advice like I have. It is not a fix for a marriage in trouble. Ours was not in trouble. It was quiet, and the quiet had gotten comfortable, and neither of us had noticed how comfortable.

The BestSelf Co. deck is not the only thing at our table. Tuesday we play Jaipur, the two-player trading game, and he beats me more often than not. Friday we land planes in Sky Team, the one game where we are on the same side. Every other Saturday we scratch a date card, which was our daughter's anniversary gift to us, and the one rule is that you do the date you scratch. Monday and Wednesday are nothing at all. But Sunday is the one that changed the week, because it is the one that got us saying things out loud that we had not said in years.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to start on a Sunday, not a Friday. Friday still has too much week left in it. I would tell you to leave the box out where you can see it, because a deck in a drawer is a deck you never open. I would tell you that the first night will be awkward and that the awkward passes. And I would tell you to let the other person skip a card without asking why, because that one courtesy does more for the evening than any question in the box. Hal and I are thirty one years in and we are still finding out things. If you want the longer version of how this has held up, I wrote that out separately. But the short one is this. A quiet house does not break itself, and nobody is going to come knock on your door about it. You buy the BestSelf Co. deck, or you buy something else, or you plan a Tuesday. Just do not let the quiet set.