KLEMP INSIGHTS
NEWSLETTER

Has this ever happened to you? 

You just spent all morning making breakfast, unloading the dishwasher, and packing lunches for the kids. Your partner, meanwhile, just strolled in from a morning workout, seemingly oblivious to all your hard work.

Or you just spent ten hours working your face off so that you and your partner can afford the vacations, the house, and the cost of day care. Your partner, meanwhile, just arrived home from a long walk with a friend and a spacious...

Relationships are complicated.

Circumstances are unique.

Every couple has their own idiosyncratic way of handling money.

These ideas have led us to steer clear of talking about today's topic in past newsletters.

But after years of witnessing couples struggle with money and after the emergence of new research, we felt compelled to talk about this third rail of relationships: the decision to share or split financial accounts.

Our perspective?

Sharing accounts is perhaps the most...

People without self-awareness have crappy relationships.

It’s that simple.

How do we know? We’ve interviewed and coached hundreds of people, and this basic axiom of relationships holds…Every…Single…Time. 

So powerful is self-awareness that, when it’s missing, anything else you might do to improve your relationship is destined to fail.

You could read all those inspiring posts on Instagram. You could read all the marriage books (which we love...

What we're about to tell you may be hard to hear.

So take a breath.

See if you can get curious.

OK, ready?

Here goes.

One of the biggest barriers to a happier relationship is this: you haven't updated your model of love since high school. 

You remember high school love. It's when desire struck like a lightning bolt of dopamine, when you had endless hours of free time, when you could make the spur-of-the moment decision to cut class to hang out together at the mall without...

School is in session. All those glorious summer vacations have come to an end. The days are getting shorter.

And most companies and organizations (consciously or unconsciously) view the time from now until Thanksgiving as the last remaining productive days of 2023.

The post-Labor Day fall sprint has begun.

As this sprint begins, we think it's worth remembering one of the most essential principles of managing energy. It's an idea that comes from Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, the...

Here’s a fun question for your next date night: “Do we feel rich?"

Notice that the question here isn’t, “are we rich?" That’s a much less interesting question, one you can easily answer with a quick Google search.

"Do you feel rich?" is a better question because it turns out to have almost nothing to do with the dollars in your bank account.

We first learned this in our interviews with couples for The 80/80 Marriage.

One couple decided that they...

We call it the pleasure guilt cycle.

And we’re guessing that you take a ride on this merry-go-round of indulgence and self-loathing most days. We certainly do. 

The pleasure guilt cycle is what happens when two conflicting mental messages collide. 

The first comes from the suffocatingly helpful zeitgeist of modern wellness influencer culture. It goes something like this: 

• “You shouldn’t eat the bacon. Haven’t you read the studies on the links...

Why do you feel stuck? Here’s the answer served up by our modern world: your partner. 

Just think about the way conversations with friends go down. When was the last time you were out with a group of women talking about their husbands over drinks and heard the line, “I think my real issue with Steve is that I need to do a little bit more introspective work on myself. I need to figure out how I am creating this dynamic?” 

Is that what you heard? Or did you...

Have you ever argued with your partner about something so trivial, so utterly stupid, that, looking back, it seems like you might have gone temporarily insane?

Examples include but are not limited to fighting about: 

• Whether the toilet paper wraps over or under
• The number of avocados to buy for the guac
• The ideal thermostat setting
• Who is going to get out of bed to turn off the bedroom light
• Who slept worse last night

These aren’t symptoms of relationship dysfunction....

Here’s the first thing the world tells us about relationship success: find a unicorn.

Find your Mr. or Mrs. Right. Find that rom-com-worthy, diamond-in-the-rough guy or gal.

What happens then? Magic. 

Once you find this unicorn partner, they will make everything okay. They will shower you with love and affection.

Unicorns, after all, aren’t like the rest of those other losers out there. They’re always turned on and in the mood. They cook and do all the dishes for fun....