the things we quietly stopped doing

Eight years this summer. I sat down to write our agreement out again for a friend who asked, opened the document, and realised we have not looked at it since 2022.

That started me making a list of the things we used to do religiously and simply stopped doing. Nobody decided any of it. It just eroded.

The written agreement. Four years unopened. I could not tell you what is in the second half of it.

The safety call. It used to be a phone call at an agreed time with two phrases. Then it became a text. Then it became a text sometimes. I could not tell you the last time I sent one.

The video call before meeting anybody new. We stopped because it started to feel like a formality and slightly insulting to ask.

The long debrief. It used to be hours. It is now roughly two questions in the kitchen and then we go to bed. Neither of us minds and I am not sure either of us noticed it happening.

Telling each other everything. This is the one I am least comfortable writing down. There are small things I have not mentioned, not because I am hiding them but because they did not seem worth the airtime. I suspect he has a few of his own.

The pre-arranged finish time. Gone entirely.

Reading it back, some of that looks like a couple who know what they are doing and have shed the training wheels. Some of it looks like exactly the sort of erosion I would warn a new couple about.

So which is it? For anyone six, eight, ten years in: what did you let go of, and did any of it come back and bite you?

Ten years here and I would split your list into two piles rather than judging it as one. The rules that govern the two of you are allowed to lapse, because they were scaffolding for a building that is now standing. Nobody needs a written debrief protocol in year eight. The rules that govern strangers are a different category entirely, and those do not get to lapse, because the risk they were written for has not aged at all. Your safety call and your video call are both in the second pile. I would put those back this week and let everything else stay where it has settled.

we dropped the video call around year four for exactly the reason you did, it felt like a formality and we were embarrassed to ask. then we met someone who was not who his photos said he was, and the evening ended in about nine minutes with everyone being very polite. no harm done in the end but the whole drive home was me realising a ten minute call would have caught it. put it back.

I am going to be the dissenting voice. All of that is maturity and none of it is drift. You have done this a hundred times, you know what you are doing, and treating year eight like year one is its own kind of anxiety. Competent people stop doing the beginner drills. That is what competence is.

The middle way we landed on is embarrassingly simple. We re-read our agreement every January. It takes twenty minutes, we do it with a cup of tea, and most years we change one line. What it actually does is not enforcement, it is that we notice what has quietly changed and get to decide whether we meant it. Two of the things on your list would have been caught by that and you would have kept them on purpose or dropped them on purpose, which is the whole difference.

The single half of an arrangement, and I want to answer the last post rather than the original. Couples who have stopped screening are extremely noticeable from where I sit, and not in a flattering way. When nobody asks me anything, when there is no call, when the limits arrive as a shrug, I do not read that as experience. I read it as two people who have got comfortable, and the ones who get comfortable are the ones who have a bad year eventually. The couples I have the most respect for are the ones who have been doing this for a decade and still ask.