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Shikha Sharma
In the first year of our marriage, my husband and I had a game we played on long drives.
We called it "someday." One person would say "someday I want to..." and the other would say "yes, and..." and we'd build on it until the idea got completely ridiculous or we arrived wherever we were going. Someday I want to live in a house with a garden. Yes, and we'll grow tomatoes. Yes, and we'll have a dog who eats the tomatoes. Yes, and we'll be furious about it but also secretly find it funny.
It was a nothing game. We never wrote any of it down. Most of it was never going to happen. But we did it on every long drive for about two years and I loved it completely.
I cannot tell you exactly when we stopped. That's the thing. There was no last time we played it that felt like a last time. We just gradually stopped and didn't notice until we were on a long drive recently and I realised we'd been listening to a podcast for forty minutes and hadn't said anything to each other at all.
Not because anything was wrong. Just because the habit had quietly left without saying goodbye.
How It Happens
The early phase of a relationship is, among other things, a sustained exercise in shared imagination. You're constantly talking about the future because the future is where everything good is going to happen. You haven't built anything yet so you build it in conversation. The flat you'll live in, the trips you'll take, the life you're going to make together. It's exciting and it costs nothing and you can do it indefinitely.
Then you actually build the life. You get the flat. You take some of the trips. You get the jobs and the routines and the responsibilities. The future stops being an empty canvas and starts being a managed calendar.
And somewhere in that transition, the dreaming quietly stops.
My friend Ananya told me she realised it had happened when she and her husband sat down to plan a holiday and the entire conversation was logistical. Dates, budget, who would watch the dog. No "what if we just kept going and didn't come back for a month." No "what if we tried somewhere we've never considered." Just, which dates work and what can we afford.
"It was efficient," she told me. "It was also kind of depressing."
She wasn't depressed about the holiday. She was depressed about what the conversation represented. They'd stopped imagining together. They were managing together now, which is necessary, but it's not the same thing.
What Gets Lost
When couples stop talking about their dreams, they don't just lose the dreams. They lose a specific kind of conversation that is, I think, one of the more important ones.
The dreaming conversation is the one where you find out who the other person is still becoming. What they still want. What they're still hoping for. It's the conversation that keeps you updated on each other's inner lives in a way that the logistical conversations don't.
If you only ever talk about what needs to happen, you stop finding out about what's wanted. And two people who only manage their life together, without ever imagining it together, can end up feeling like business partners rather than partners.
My colleague Priya and her husband had what she described as an accidentally important conversation last year. They were sitting with evening chai and Sunfeast Marie Light, the kind of unhurried Saturday where nothing was scheduled and neither of them had anywhere to be, and she asked him what he'd do if he could do anything for a year with no consequences. No money concerns, no career implications, just what would he actually do.
He thought about it for a long time. Then he said he'd want to learn to make furniture. Properly, with his hands, from wood.
She had been married to this man for seven years. She had not known this about him. He hadn't known it about himself until she asked. The question had surfaced something that had been sitting quietly underneath the daily management of their shared life.
They talked for two hours. She told him things she wanted that she hadn't said out loud in years. He told her things she hadn't known. They didn't resolve anything or make any plans. But the conversation itself felt, she said, like a door they'd forgotten was there, opening again.
Why We Stop
Part of it is time. There genuinely is less of it as life gets more full. The long drives that used to produce the "someday" game are now full of podcasts because you're both tired and sometimes you just need to not be on.
Part of it is that dreaming out loud requires a specific kind of vulnerability. You're saying what you want, which means you might not get it, which means the wanting itself is exposed. Early in relationships, the wanting feels exciting. Later, when life has made some of the wanting feel impractical or naive, saying it out loud gets harder.
And part of it is just habit. You stop because you stop, and then not stopping requires deliberately choosing to start again.
How to Start Again
It doesn't require a grand conversation or a formal relationship check-in. It just requires one question, asked genuinely, when neither of you is in the middle of something else.
What's something you still want that we haven't talked about in a while?
Or: if we could do one thing differently in the next year, what would it be?
Or, if you had a long drive coming up: someday I want to...
My husband and I tried the game again last month. On a drive to visit family. I started it. He looked at me with mild suspicion, because I hadn't initiated it in at least two years, and then he played along.
Someday I want to go somewhere we've never been and have no plan when we get there. Yes, and we'll figure it out as we go. Yes, and we'll definitely fight about something on day two. Yes, and it'll be fine by day three. Yes, and we'll talk about it for years after.
We drove the rest of the way to my in-laws' place talking about a trip we'll probably take, half of it probably won't go according to plan, and we'll both love it anyway.
It felt like us again. The us that used to build things in conversation on long drives before we got busy building things in real life.
Both are good. You need both.
