KLEMP INSIGHTS
NEWSLETTER

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....

When we interviewed couples, we heard tragic stories of divorce, constant conflict, and affairs.

But we also heard about a milder, more insidious, force pulling most couples apart.

The smartphone.

Think you don't have a problem with your phone? Think again. 

Most research estimates that fifty percent of us admit to experiencing a full-on behavioral addiction to our phones. And while we might touch our partner lovingly several times a day, we touch our phones an average of ...

Along with summer comes a parenting and relationship paradox.

Less structure means more space. Time for spontaneous fun. Picnics. Trips to the pool. 

But less structure may also mean that your priorities fade away. 

And for couples with kids, this often means that even though you have more time for fun, you have less time for each other. 

Here are two ways to approach this challenge:

1. The "let's just wing it" strategy. This isn't really a strategy at all. It's just...

If you're reading this newsletter, chances are that (1) you've heard of the marshmallow test and (2) you've set your life up around passing it with flying colors. 

Nice work!

The marshmallow test, of course, comes from a classic 1972 experiment  conducted at Stanford University. Children were given the choice between eating one marshmallow now or getting two marshmallows if they were willing to wait for 15 minutes (all while staring at the marshmallow in front of them). ...