Making Relationships Work: Love Maps
Written by: Kye Ewing
October 6, 2023
Many people who come to therapy are looking for ways to improve their relationships. At Champaign Counseling, we have several therapists who are trained to use Gottman Method Couples Therapy, which is an approach to therapy that focuses on building closeness and improving communication, even within conflict. Some of their principles can be applied more widely, though, including what they call “Love Maps.” Love Maps are a basic way of getting to know someone and in the case of longer-term relationships, a way of finding out new things about someone or discovering that things may have changed since you last talked about them. While love maps were developed for married couples, they can be used to build closeness in any relationship, like getting to know a new friend!
The idea with Love Maps is that you can ask open-ended questions as a way of getting to know someone better. If you want to make a game of it, you can see if you can answer the question for the other person, but if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine - think of it as a chance to learn something new! Here are a few examples to give you an idea of possible topics:
What are your current hobbies?
Who is your favorite musical artist or group currently?
What is your biggest unachieved dream?
What stresses are you facing currently or in the near future?
What is your favorite way to spend an evening?
What is one of your favorite childhood experiences?
What are you looking forward to most right now?
As you can tell, Love Maps can cover a wide range of topics, not just topics related to romantic relationships. And you can see that these are not questions with one answer that will be true for someone’s whole life - the answers can change and give us new opportunities to get to know someone who we’ve known for a long time even better! The basic idea is to get to know and feel known by someone else, which increases a sense of closeness in any relationship.
If you’d like to learn more about the Gottmans and the Gottman Method, the link to their site is below, as well as a link to find their app, which includes sections on Love Maps as well as other tools for improving relationships. If you think you could use support in improving important relationships in your life, contact us to get connected with one of our trained therapists by calling 217-203-2008 or sending a message to info@champaigncounseling.com!
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