S3E02: Partnership Building: How Evangelicalism Stifles Curiosity

This summer, we’re exploring the seven characteristics to healthy relationships, through John Gottman’s Sound Marital House theory of relationships. Gottman suggests that curiosity is the root of a strong foundation for a relationship.

Curiosity, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is the strong desire to know or learn something.

In this episode, we talk about how EMPish (Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal) communities discourage curiosity, and the ways that people can learn and practice curiosity in your relationship. We discuss:

• Cognitive Room (11:40): Julia summarizes, “The Gottman’s suggested that the more facts that a person had about their partner, the more likely they were to understand their partner's psychological or emotional world. They noted that cognitive room is also an ongoing process. This makes sense because the things that a person likes, wants, or needs at any given moment is likely to change throughout the lifespan like sexuality and given other circumstances. Couples who are able to update the other about the cognitive room are much more likely to have a positive relationship.”

• Culture Inhibited Curiosity (16:00): Julia continues, “This whole culture [EMPish Christianity] inhibited curiosity. So if grace was the only way out of an otherwise terrible world, success happens by knowing a ton of facts about God and retrieving and saying those facts perfectly.” There was no room for curiosity, only room for answers that matched exactly what the authorities say. After all, in EMPish communities, when we ask questions, we may question God, and, of course, that is blasphemous.

• Curiosity within Religion (23:00-24:00): Jeremiah muses, “I’m thinking about this binary that's happening in religious circles, religion versus science. Science provides this decision-making process that informs curiosity. You identify a question, you develop a hypothesis, you form a process to test that hypothesis, and you observe what the results are. Now, this process can get hijacked by our own biases. Sometimes we're looking for specific things and we can miss out on more pertinent information. But this binary also assumes that religion is inherently a non-curious process.” Julia responds: “I think curiosity requires a more mystical approach to religion, which I certainly did not receive in my growing up contexts. The mystical approach assumes that life is about discovering how the world works and allowing yourself to be surprised. Curiosity requires us to see the best in people, and every person has the capacity to teach me something new, both about myself and about the world around me.”

• Performing Gender (28:15): Jeremiah reflects, “The strong desire to perform gender roles shuts down any dialogue in an interaction. Performing gender roles is specifically an individual task. I do my thing. You do your thing. And any conversation about how the other person is performing gender roles can really quickly move into criticisms, sexist ones at that. I would argue that this was one of the biggest ways that I contributed to the demise of my marriage.” Julia responds:  “Performing gender roles gives a person very few options for how they choose to live their lives.” 

• Focusing on the Destination, not the Journey (33:00): Julia shares about our relationship, “So many questions that weren't rooted in deciding whether or not you were going to be my future husband, but were rooted purely in the desire to get to know you. My genuine curiosity about getting to know my ex as a full human being was undergirded with the expectation that I needed to know as soon as possible whether this person would be my future husband” Julia talks about how her curiosity being limited in her marriage was due to the fact that she was focused on getting to know if her ex-husband would be suited to fulfill his gendered role instead of getting to know him, while with Jeremiah she focused her curiosity on getting to know him, not getting to know if he was going to be a good husband.

• Missing Out (42:00): Jeremiah reminisces about a high school crush, “Now we built this connection online. Hello, AOL Instant Messenger, but there was also a fair amount of sexual tension when we were in the same space. There are all sorts of reasons that I didn't actually ask her out. I didn't have a lot of self-confidence. Oh, I was afraid that she would say no. I didn't perceive myself to be particularly confident, and I thought that she was way cooler than I was. But a major factor was that I was a Christian and she wasn’t.” Religion taught him not to be curious about what lies outside the binds of Christianity. 

Next week, we’ll continue with our curiosity through Gottman’s Love Maps. But until then,

Let’s heal together!