Just the other day, twenty years into our relationship, we stumbled upon a shocking new insight about values.
We’ve always understood the power of getting clear on your values as a couple. In The 80/80 Marriage, for instance, we argue that it doesn’t matter whether you value wealth, adventure, philanthropy, or stability. What matters is that you and your partner both feel aware of and aligned with these values.
So what new values insight surprised us?
The power of a...
It’s 6pm on Friday night. It's been a long week. You sit at the table for family dinner. You’re ready to leave work and the chaos of the week behind -- to relax and, finally, connect with your family.
But, somehow, your mind didn’t get the memo. No, the voice in your head sounds more like a heavily-caffeinated line manager, barking out orders like, “You forgot to send that email, didn't you?" “When are you going to book the reservations for the summer...
Today, we want to tackle a difficult topic -- burnout.
During the insanity of the last couple years, many of us have experienced at least some degree of this uniquely modern condition.
What is burnout? It's a reaction to our work or life situation characterized by three primary features:
There’s something strange about conflicts in marriage.
Modern couples could fight about thousands of different things. Life these days, after all, is messy, complicated, and full of an endless stream of logistical challenges, to-dos, and parenting dilemmas.
And yet, when it comes to what we actually fight about, most of us have a pretty short list. The same three to five recycled conflicts just keep popping up, again and again.
For us, it's three things: balancing time spent with each...
This week, we wanted to highlight a few of our favorite recent articles on marriage and relationships.
Up first, The Joys (and Challenges) of Sex After 70. The New York Times took a deep dive into the sex lives of older couples. When interviewing them, they stumbled upon an unexpected and hopeful insight: for some couples, sex in the final decades can be the best they've ever had.
Up next, Can MDMA Save a Marriage? As scientists expand their research on psychedelic compounds like...
In the dance that is marriage, we encounter a daily, moment-to-moment, choice. We can lean in towards each other up and dance like pros. Or we can lean away, awkwardly embraced, clutching each others shoulders like thirteen year olds at a middle school dance.
In every moment, in other words, we can either lean in or lean away.
Of course, the consequences of leaning away go beyond mimicking the fumbling awkwardness of a teenage romance. In long-term intimate relationships, they can...
Inspired by Oliver Burkeman's recent book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, we've been rethinking our relationship to time in relationships.
One of his most provocative insights arises from the title itself: Four Thousand Weeks.
That's the number of weeks we have to live, assuming that we're fortunate enough to make it to around 80 years old.
This means that, if you're in your forties, you have somewhere around two thousand more weeks, fifteen hundred if you're in your...
Spring is finally here.
If you're like us, you might be cleaning out your closet, sweeping the garage, or tossing out old files from your office.
There's something cathartic about spring clean up. And yet we think this ritual shouldn’t be limited to your home, garden, or storage room.
As you transition out of the snow, cold, and long nights of winter, what would it look like to also spring clean your relationship?
Here are our three favorite tools.
Sex and marriage might just be two of the most contradictory activities we humans engage in.
Sex is all about freedom, pleasure, and spontaneity. It thrives on breaking routines, novelty, risk, and experimentation.
Then there's marriage. Place that word next to sex, and it feels heavy, almost boring. Marriage, after all, is about commitment. It demands safety, hard work, and steady routines. It's less about spontaneity, more about predictability and structure.
Perhaps this is why one...
Several years ago, we noticed a strange pattern in our lives together. With marathon to-do lists, overflowing inboxes, and the constant demands of raising a small human being, we spent much of life trying to achieve "completion."
Completion might be getting to inbox zero. Or it might be finally planning out all of our daughter's summer camps. Or it might be that ecstatic feeling of having a house that's perfectly clean and in order.
What’s the problem with completion? The problem, we...
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