KLEMP INSIGHTS
NEWSLETTER

Happy New Year!

If you’re like us, you’re beginning to think about new intentions, resolutions, and habits for 2024.

So we wanted to use this newsletter as a subtle nudge, a reminder to think not only about your individual habits but also about your habits as a couple for 2024.

Your relationship, after all, rests on a vast system of often unconscious habits. It’s a system perfectly designed to create both the good and bad in your life together.

Bad habits create conflict, distrust, hurt f...

Ah, the holidays.

It's a time of celebration, reflection, and merry-making.

But let's be real here. It can also be a time of soul-crippling stress.

Why?

Because in addition to all the fun stuff, you may still have presents to buy, packages to wrap, work projects to complete, social logistics to coordinate, kids to take care of (all day), family gatherings to attend, and a now late stack of holiday cards that still need stamps.

Heck, Covid may even make a holiday cameo in your house lik...

We live in an age of hyper connection. 

We can text our partner at all hours of the day and night. We can track their every move using Google Location Sharing. We can even FaceTime them when we’re thousands of miles away. 

So why is it so hard for modern couples to stay connected?

Researchers at UCLA have an answer. They followed around thirty modern couples, observing them like anthropologists as they ate, got the kids ready for school, and navigated the logistics of an ordinary day.

The...

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 afternoon where th...

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 import...

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 so long as 80/80 is one of them :). 

You coul...

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 leaving your...

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 idea of osc...

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 were tired of grinding away at their corpo...

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 between processed meats and cardiovascular ...