Articles on the
80/80 Marriage

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...

We're sorry to be the ones to bring you this news. But this is a hard truth you need to hear.

There is a vast, worldwide, conspiracy afoot against you and your partner ever going on another date night.

Your kids are in on it. They'll do just about anything to interrupt that dinner out you had planned for a Thursday night. They'll get in trouble at school. They’ll break their arm. They’ll get a stomach flu. They might even orchestrate a massive fight between siblings at the...

No, that’s not a typo.

We are actually writing a newsletter applying The 19th century German philosopher Karl Marx‘s philosophy of history to modern marriage.

Why on earth would we do such a thing? In spite of all the political baggage his "Manifesto of the Communist Party" brings, we believe that hidden deep within his theory of history lies an apolitical but profound insight about the challenges modern couples face.

At the risk of reducing the extreme complexity of Marx's...

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...

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...

The management scientist Edward Deming once said, "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets."

Now, Deming was talking about large organizations and companies. But his insight applies perfectly to relationships for two reasons.

First, his words offer an important reminder. The results you and your partner are getting -- both good and bad -- aren't happening by random chance. They're created by an underlying system of habits, perfectly designed to give you those...

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...

Originally published in Inc. Magazine.

Does this sound familiar?

You've just finished a long day, full of emails, Zoom calls, deadlines, and to-dos. You're now making the shift from work mode to family mode. But, for some reason, you just can't seem to turn it off.

You keep thinking about that meeting, that call you need to make, or all the things you weren't able to get to. You're living in yesterday, tomorrow, and five years from now, finding it impossible to slow down and be here now.

If...

Spring 1997.

Dave Matthews Band was peaking in popularity. The Backstreet Boys were just arriving on the scene. And the two of us were finishing our senior year of high school.

In a bold collective act of defiance, the two of us, along with four hundred or so of our peers, participated in the time-honored tradition of “Senior Ditch Day." Instead of going to school, we loaded onto buses and watched an afternoon Colorado Rockies baseball game. 

It was our way of saying,...

Ah, 2021.

One year ago, we thought this would be the year of -- well -- everything going back to normal.

That's not exactly what happened. And, if anything, we're learning that the 'new normal' can be summed up in a single word: uncertainty.

Whether our kids will be at school in person in a week -- uncertain.

Whether Covid will ever disappear and fade into a bad memory -- uncertain.

If you're like just about everyone we know, all of this uncertainty may have taken a toll on your...