Rising Above the Mundane
Why Your Relationship Needs More Strawberry the Donkey
By Dr Neil Wilkie, Duo Coaching
This morning, Gwen and I lay in bed and sang a song about a donkey called Strawberry.
Strawberry is real. She lives at the Sidmouth Donkey Sanctuary, and we sponsor her. We visited her a month ago, and ever since, she has been quietly resident in our thoughts — a small, strawberry-coloured presence who occasionally inspires impromptu morning ballads. The song has no agenda, no audience, and no particular merit as a piece of music. It is simply ours.
Here is the link to our song! https://suno.com/s/9SzjelsSHvLItX64
After we had finished singing, Gwen turned to me and asked, half-laughing, “Are we weird?”
It is a question I think a lot of couples quietly ask themselves, though usually about the opposite problem. Not are we too strange, but when did we stop being strange together? When did the conversations narrow down to logistics? When did the silly songs disappear?
The slow drift into the mundane
In my work with couples, I have noticed a pattern that creeps in almost imperceptibly. Two people who once stayed up half the night talking about everything and nothing find themselves, ten or fifteen years later, exchanging information rather than experience.
Did you put the bins out? What time is the dentist? Who’s picking up the kids? Have we paid the gas bill?
None of this is wrong. Households need running. Children need collecting. Bins, sadly, need putting out. But when this becomes the entire texture of a relationship — when the conversational range shrinks to scheduling and admin — something quietly begins to die. The relationship is still functional. It is no longer alive.
One of the questions I ask early in my work with couples is deceptively simple: When did you last have fun together?
The pause that often follows is more revealing than any answer.
Fun is not a luxury — it is structural
Fun is one of the six elements of the Relationship Paradigm I have developed through years of clinical work, alongside Communication, Connection, Commitment, Growth, and Trust. People sometimes assume Fun is the soft one — the optional extra once the serious work is done. They have it the wrong way round.
Fun is structural. It is the lubrication that allows the harder elements to function. Couples who play together communicate more openly, recover from conflict more quickly, and weather difficulty with greater resilience. Without play, even the strongest commitment begins to feel like an obligation rather than a choice.
And the doorway to fun, more often than not, is silliness.
Embracing the inner child
Somewhere in adulthood, most of us learn to suppress the child within. We become serious, sensible, professional, competent. These are useful qualities. They pay the mortgage and run the meetings. But they are not the whole of us, and a relationship lived entirely in the register of competence is a thin one.
The work I give couples is sometimes startlingly simple. Jump in a puddle. Make up a song about something you both love. Have a conversation in silly voices over breakfast. Build something pointless out of Lego. Dance badly in the kitchen. Sponsor a donkey, perhaps, and sing her a tune.
The point is not the activity. The point is the permission — the mutual agreement that this small territory of your life together is allowed to be unguarded, unpolished, and entirely free of purpose. It is in these moments that the inner child gets to come out and play, and the relationship rediscovers its own particular flavour.
Surreal conversations as relational nourishment
There is a special kind of conversation that long-term partners can have which is impossible with anyone else in the world. It is built on shared references, in-jokes, half-finished sentences, and the freedom of knowing you will not be judged. These conversations meander. They are often surreal. They go nowhere useful and accomplish nothing measurable, and they are quite possibly the single most nourishing thing two people can do together.
If you find yourselves only ever talking about logistics, try this: tomorrow morning, before the day’s machinery begins, ask each other something deliberately useless. What would our donkey be called? If we lived in a lighthouse, who would do what? What’s the most ridiculous thing you can remember from primary school?
You may feel self-conscious for the first thirty seconds. Then something begins to lift.
A small invitation
So, are Gwen and I weird? Possibly. But I would gently suggest that the weirdness of singing about a sponsored donkey at dawn is not the problem in modern life. The problem is the millions of couples who have forgotten how to be weird together — who have allowed the mundane to colonise the entire territory of their relationship.
Rise above it. Sing the silly song. Have the surreal conversation. Let the inner child out for an hour. Your relationship will thank you, and so, quite possibly, will Strawberry.
Dr Neil Wilkie is a relationship therapist, author, and founder of the Duo Coaching Framework. He works with couples in person and online, and writes about relationships at duocoaching.com.