The Deck That Made Us Ask Each Other Something New

It was a Sunday night in February, the kind where the rain had been tapping the kitchen window since noon. Glen and I had finished dinner and were doing what we do most Sundays now: sitting at the table with a deck of The AND Long Term Couples Edition cards between us. We have been married 31 years, and I will tell you honestly that for a long stretch of them, our conversations had shrunk down to logistics. Who was picking up what, whose mother we were visiting, whether the water heater could wait another month. Then around year 24, with the kids out of the house, we looked at each other one night and realized we mostly talked about the calendar. That is when we started our Sunday-evening check-in, and that is when the question decks came in.

I am not a therapist and I do not play one in this article. I am a retired middle-school librarian who spent 31 years learning how to be married to a land surveyor, and I have read a lot of books and tried a lot of tools with Glen. Some of them felt like homework. Some of them felt like a performance. The AND cards felt different from the first night, and I have been trying to figure out why ever since.

The deck is simple: 199 cards, each with a question or a prompt, made for couples who have been together long enough that the easy questions are used up. The AND brand calls it the Long Term Couples Edition, and the name fits. These are not the questions you ask on a first date. They are the questions you ask when you already know the answer to 'where did you grow up' and you are ready for something harder.

That Sunday night, Glen drew a card and read it out loud. The question was about a moment he had never told me about, something from his first year of surveying, before we met. He read it, laughed a little, and then went quiet. I have learned over the years that Glen's quiet means he is deciding whether to tell the truth. So I waited. And then he told me the story.

He read the card, laughed a little, and then went quiet. I have learned that Glen's quiet means he is deciding whether to tell the truth.

The story was not dramatic. It was about a night he spent alone in a motel in eastern Oregon, early in his career, when a job had gone wrong and he was sure he would be fired. He did not call anyone. He just sat on the edge of the bed and worked out what he would do next. He kept it to himself for thirty years because, in his words, 'it was not the kind of thing you bring up at dinner.'

I have thought about that sentence a lot since. How many of those moments has he carried alone? How many have I carried alone? The AND cards did not fix that night in the motel, and they did not unlock some hidden trauma. What they did was give us a reason to sit still long enough for a story like that to come out. The card was the excuse. The quiet was the gift.

We have used the deck maybe twice a week for the last few months, not every night. Some cards land easy and we are laughing in a minute. Some cards land hard and we sit with them. The AND brand does not promise that every question will be comfortable, and I think that is the point. A deck that only asked easy questions would not have gotten us to that motel in eastern Oregon.

The cards are sturdy, the box is small enough to live on the kitchen counter, and the questions are written in plain language. No jargon, no therapy-speak, no prompts that feel like they were written by someone who has never been married. Some of the questions we have answered a dozen times in different ways. Some of them we have never answered twice. That mix is what keeps us coming back.

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

If you and your person have been together a long time and you are tired of talking about the water heater, I would tell you this: the deck is worth trying, but the deck is not the point. The point is the sitting still. The point is the quiet after the question. The AND cards gave us a reason to stop and actually hear each other again, and that is a gift I did not know we needed.

I would also tell you to be patient. The first night we used the deck, Glen rolled his eyes and said it felt like a school assignment. I almost put it away. But we agreed to try it for a month, and somewhere around the third week, the eye-rolling stopped. Now he is the one who asks if we are doing cards on Sunday.

And I would tell you this, because it matters: a deck of cards cannot fix a marriage, and I would never tell you it could. If you are in a place where you are hurting, or unsafe, or dealing with something serious, please talk to a licensed professional. The AND cards are for the rest of us, the ones who just forgot how to ask each other something new.