How to Stop Fighting About Money

24:55that anyone more than us getting engaged, this was the biggest gesture he's ever made towards me because of what those loans represented to me. Yes. Because of what they represented to me, because the loans to me, they were not just a deficit in my life. I was the deficit. And so him, his willingness to do that was just the ultimate gesture. It was a game changer, I think, for what we're getting to here in the conversation, which is, you know, how did we go from having, so she went from giving me this foundation, I guess in turn, I was able to remove shame and let her feel or allow her to feel like everything she was doing mattered in terms of her contribution to what we were building together.

25:42And that was a huge breakthrough. It also gave me the space to rebuild a mindset that said, you are in control of your life. you are in control of your career. And you certainly deserve to have a say in our financial decisions in this family. And it's wild how easy it is to lose that when you're buried in your own shame. Remember how I said we didn't really have a lot of optionality when we first embarked on our journey together? I ended up getting more optionality as the business grew. And up until that moment, I don't know if you necessarily felt like you had many options as well until you know, that moment there.

26:21And that's when things got a lot more fun and exciting as our family grew. And we did some things that fill us with joy and happiness. But, you know, that doesn't go on forever. And we'll talk about how, you know, these cycles of growth ultimately lead you to making other decisions you need to consider before you can get into the next phase of growth. I really have a lot of sympathy for couples and young adults in their 20s and feeling like every decision is a linear one that leads you further down a path and that there's no way off the path. And that's not really how life feels. Like when you look back, like I just turned 42 months ago.

27:05Happy birthday. Thanks. Welcome to the club. No, but man, if I could look back and just tell her that this path you're on is not forever, that you do have choices. There are detours from the path. There are forks in the road. And there's seasons in your life. It's not just I got myself into this legal career like you made your bed, lie down in it for the rest of your life, which is truly I think how a lot of people feel. And I just, if I could tell anyone anything, it's that. It's that we live our life in seasons. and there will be another one. Right. And what you do in your 20s is not indicative of anything.

27:44I hated my mid-20s. I did not like 24, 5, or 6. I felt like it was puberty all over again, except your body's not changing. Like you're not really respected by people older than you. Like the adults really don't think you're an adult. And you're definitely not a kid or a child anymore. So you're really just kind of lost in this awkward moment in time. That's the way that I felt about it. So for all the mid-20s somethings out there who feel that way, it seems to be normal. You're like old enough to be an adult, but you're not yet old enough to be taken seriously by adults. Yeah. Yeah. Not a girl, not yet a woman.

28:28Sorry, I had to say that. I don't know if you'll edit that, but 100%. I think you lack context for the grand scheme of your life and for the things that are actually important. And it's no fault of your own because these institutions like higher education are optimizing you to build and grind and grow and to continue to better yourself. And like no one's telling you that you are bettering yourself by being a part of a community, by being a good friend, by being a good partner and being a good daughter and a good sister. No one's telling you that. They're telling you that your value is connected to what you produce.

29:07That's what you are taught up to that point. So you lack context. You're also at a point where the very institutions we plug ourselves into, whether it be corporate institutions or educational institutions, the time in which those frameworks were built are further and further, if not more than ever, disconnected from the realities of today. Right. from the motivations of the demographics that are stepping into power, that are stepping into money, right? That's Gen X and millennials. We still see this lingering effect of stuff that was made at the turn of a century. And by the way, not the, not 99 into 2000, like 1899 into 1900, you know, these are very out of touch and often unrelatable things that are trying to connect to generations that simply don't operate that way.

29:58And we see those effects, I think, playing out in real time. And we see it particularly in the conversation around money, the gender tropes that exist around money, who does what in the household, who's meant to believe that their earning power is their self-worth and their contribution to families and the family unit. These are systemic things that we luckily are breaking away from, but the difficulty factor is super high, especially when those in power are unwilling to relent it or pass the baton onto those who are ready, willing, and able to do it. And that's a very much commentary of moment in time, and we try and tie that into money, right, and our relationship with it.

30:44all of these powers and structures play a role in how we think about money and arguably make it more challenging. And even to put a modern twist on this, the information that we consume, sure, like we're watching 1950s films where like, you know, again, it's very much gendered, but we also see it in social media and what we consume and the pressures that come with how to compete against not only your friends, your neighbors, and sometimes even your loved ones, like that's not correct, right? That's not going to help us create fairness in our relationship. That's not going to help us be the team and do the teamwork that's required to get to the goals that we share together to honor the values that don't necessarily come from our parents, but the values that we created ourselves.

31:36That's the opportunity is for us to say, hey, here's what served me very well in my pathway into our relationship. And here's what has not. And here's what's not. Let's drop the things that don't. Let's bring the ones from your life and my life that do and create, when you say create a life together, that's what you're doing is finding the blend of values that drive your relationship and life forward so that you can find happiness and fulfillment and fairness. and somehow money is at the core of all of this and we really enjoyed exploring that.

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34:53When I hear you talk about that area of your life, your mid to late 20s, that not a girl, not yet a woman phase, what I hear from you is a lot of mutual teamwork. I hear a lot of mutual support. Heather, you built this base while he was building out that book of business, right? So you provided that support, the stability so that Doug could be an entrepreneur and take some risks. Doug, you had the confidence to say, hey, I feel confident about money and I feel confident that we're going to be okay. And I want you to know that we're in it together and I'm going to co-sign for this loan. I hear a lot of back and forth mutual support.

35:34And yet I also know that there are many other couples out there where that feeling of mutuality is not necessarily always there. And there are probably couples who are listening to this who feel as though they are in a situation that is asymmetric. They feel as though they have a partner who's maybe withholding certain information from them. I mean, it could be as nefarious as lying or it could be as oblivious as they just don't think to include them in certain information. Or they just don't know how to talk about it because money was never talked about in their household growing up. And they just don't know how to have the conversation.

36:15Or share their feelings around something. You know, tuck it under the rug. It's very common, especially when we're talking about ambition, right? Let's say we're talking about ambition. We believe that couples should have somewhat of a collective ambition. My win is your win. Your win is my win. This is the opposite of a bean counting, keeping a scorecard type of thing where we say, well, you got to do X, Y, Z. Now I'm going to like from a retaliatory standpoint, do X, Y, Z because that keeps us even. Fair is not always even. And again, this goes back to this idea of seasons in your life. There may be a season where more of our family needs, attentions, funds, and support needed to go to Doug to build that because that's what it required.

37:04Like that was the season that he was in. But you also have to recognize that there's two sides to this coin, right? Because an investment, whether we're talking about a financial investment or a time investment, an investment in one thing is inherently a sacrifice in something else. And in the context of a relationship, that means that to invest in Doug's career, to invest in this firm, there were opportunities that maybe I did not go for. There were things that I had to do to support him that required a sacrifice of my time and energy in service of what our goal was for him. Now, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

37:44So long as you're one, recognizing it, acknowledging it, and talking about it, there does come a point where that's all well and good for a season, but you deserve a season as well. Seasons change. It did for us. Ultimately, after building this foundation and getting our financial house in order and prospering by watching the business that was being built flourish, we got to a point, particularly through the pandemic, where the scale tilted so far the other way. We put ourselves in a position where I was out earning Heather three or four to one while she was arguably working three jobs. She was being a lawyer full time.

38:27She has always been my co-pilot and co-founder for the most part for this business that we built. Moonlighting us Doug's business consultant at night. Yeah, yeah. No major decisions were being made by simply me. It always be a conversation between the two of us. And that takes emotion and that takes energy to help guide me. I think the majority of the cards were our family. Yeah, without a doubt during that time, as we were marooned in our cruise ship to nowhere during those very strange years of COVID, Heather was in overdrive on all the things that were needed to do to occupy and capture the attention of our kids.

39:02I definitely could have done better here, but I was just thrilled. I was on the come up on all the areas in which I had been building. And it takes a lot to, one, recognize that there are feelings like resentment coming into play here. Heather found out she was plateauing and really not liking that. And again, just what was fair seemed really unfair at the time. And ultimately, you know, as someone who loves you dearly, she sat me down and said, this isn't working. And the last thing in the world I want to hear is that the person I love most in this world is unhappy. And the word resentment, by the way, should be taken very seriously because if you want to find a – That's when people ask what was the turning point and you say something like it was the sock on the steps for the 100th day in a row.

39:53Yeah, I walked over clean laundry instead of bringing it up. Anything could be the sock. Yeah. The sock was just one small piece of the – Yeah, it was just that last. Of the resentment that had been building for several years. It was the last straw and it broke and we sat down and she explained to me, and what I wanted to just finish the thought on resentment, it's the most corrosive substance to our relationship. And for me, that was extraordinarily scary to say, oh, we cannot and will not go down that road. And it prompted the conversation of what changes needed to take place in order to find ourselves back into fairness.

40:30Also, it's important to note that during this time, the one thing Heather didn't have to deal with was the household finances. We were very much in tune with the ins and outs of our financial lives. And I found and she found herself floating further and further away from that because she was busy doing a million other things. And that was the thing that she didn't need to do. Which many mothers find themselves when when you look and you do like a Monday morning quarterback situation. When women who step away from being involved in their household finances, when that happens, it should not surprise anyone that it happens in the years when they're small children now entering your life.

41:11Because for women who are carrying the lion's share of the household responsibilities, the actual labor, the physical labor, the emotional labor, and all the invisible labor that oftentimes falls mostly on women, the household finances may feel like the one thing you are not responsible for. And it's not something that you can just say like, oh, they just decided they didn't want to be involved anymore. That's not it. It's when you're drowning in everything else. And this feels like the only thing that's safe because you know that they're going to do it. Yeah, I mean, that's how that happened.

41:46And it's crazy because that's it's a compound fracture because you find yourself giving up power when you do that by just attaching yourself from the financial welfare of the household. It is, again, corrosive and in multi layers here. So what we did is figured out what that next pathway forward was going to look like. And ultimately, it resulted in us working together, something we had always wanted to do. And working on this project, Money Together, which after some trial and error of what ultimately our first months and years of working together would look like, Like we went to the thing that we knew as a team we did really well, which was create some thought leadership and get behind a mission that we really believe in.

42:32And here we are two and a half, three years later since joining or two and a half years since starting this. And we're still married. We're still married. Right. And your kids were three and one when the pandemic began? 11 months. Yeah. Four. Yeah. Something like that. Actually, I remember to this day that Ruby, our younger daughter, on the day of lockdown, March 13th, 2020, I'll never forget, pulled herself up on the coffee table for the first time. And I said, oh, great. She's mobile. Great. She only has four rooms that she can navigate for the foreseeable future. That was obviously a great demarcation.

43:13Pandemic parents of young children share a collective trauma. That is really hard to understand if you did not go through it. Tell me more about that. There's so much. I don't even know where to begin unpacking it. I'll start with the emotional side of it. It was terrifying. It was a terrifying thought. One, what happens if I fall ill in a way that, you know, in the early year of COVID, early months of COVID, it wasn't just, am I going to have a fever? this was, do I have my affairs in order if one of us falls ill? I remember standing in the grocery store that last trip and saying, I better run out and get something.

43:54And it was like a run on the market kind of thing. And everyone was grabbing diapers. And I had this thought of, am I going to be able to get diapers? Am I going to be able to get formula? She was still taking formula. And everyone was like, don't come anywhere near me. And everyone was standing far away. fighting. I carry these memories with me because it was this just extreme version of parenting that was just so consequential. Every decision felt so consequential. And it already does when you're a young parent, you're already feel like everything you do could break them. And you're trying to form your own identity as a parent and your own values and your own risk management protocols of what makes sense for you.

44:39And then everything was just dialed up to 100. And every decision felt just so incredibly consequential to the safety and health and survival almost of your family. That's just the emotional side of it. Then there's the side of it like I'm a young parent who's trying to perform at a high voltage job where I'm managing, you know, six, seven figure lawsuits, eight figure lawsuits remotely with a team remotely that I used to see in person three days a week. And frankly, I was one of the only young parents on my team that had multiple children at home. And while everyone was trying to be understanding and trying to say, you know, okay, well, so you can't make it on this call because your child is melting down and needs to be fed lunch and they're normally at school during those hours or with a caregiver.

45:26People try to be as supportive as they can, but there's a difference between tolerance and support. And there is a bit of a gray area in between there. And I mean, you know, this went on for so long and had such an impact on my energy, an impact on my morale, an impact on my ability to just keep showing up every day like the exhaustion was so deep that, of course, I wasn't doing a great job at my job. I was doing literally everything. This wasn't a four-month thing. I remember at the beginning, we're all like, well, we'll see you in June. Maybe we'll be able to all get together in June. They said two weeks to stop the spread.

46:01Right, right, right. I took them seriously. I did too. I thought it was going to be two weeks. It really did just extend those years that I refer to as the Bermuda Triangle of my career from the time that I had my first daughter through most of COVID, really. Because it just felt like I don't even know where this is going because I don't know, one, whether I can withstand any more of this. Two, people are perceiving me differently. I feel like I'm being perceived as unreliable, even though I'm doing literally everything I can. But I'm the only one who's in this situation. So of course, they're not going to turn to me at a time of need.

46:33And also what you're dealing with at home to try and balance out the load between the two of us and find something. There was no way to even do it because we were both just so reactionary to what was happening because every day was like a new day. You always thought like maybe the next month will be the month that things return to normal. But everything was tentative. Nothing felt permanent enough to build systems around. It was just such a difficult time. I try and find silver linings in these very once-in-a-lifetime, enough with the once-in-a-lifetime events in our lifetime. The silver lining, I guess, for us is that an extreme experience that we went through also uncovered and revealed what it is that we needed to do in order to move forward in our lives and get to the next act and stage of what we ultimately— It galvanized our priorities.

47:21Yeah. Yeah, it really did. So in any extreme situation, if you can survive it and walk away from it, you have to look for the lessons that improve your life and make you cherish or value the things that maybe you didn't previously to that and maybe put yourself in a new direction. We clearly did put ourselves in a whole new direction. When you choose to do things like that and you put in the work, and it's been a lot of work, you inevitably get to find yourself into reaping season, right? So those are the seeds you sow during that time. And now hopefully you get to enjoy and the spoils and the rewards that come from working that hard.

47:59And you take that win. You deserve that win when you were smart enough and caring enough to listen to each other to figure out how you would continue to walk down life's path together. And you will find yourself continuously doing this. life and money. These are things that you don't win at life and you don't necessarily win at money. You have the luxury of continuing to do it and play that and hopefully find the next adventure you're going to go on, hopefully with someone you love and your partner, if that's who you're with. It sounds as though throughout all of this, even in the hard parts, there was excellent communication between the two of you.

48:43When the pandemic unfolded and you are at your wits end and feeling resentment, you had a good enough relationship that you could say, I am feeling resentment. And what that requires is a self-awareness to understand what you yourself are experiencing. And then beyond the self-awareness, the trust in the communication to say, all right, I'm feeling some resentment. I'm feeling unhappiness. And then, Doug, you had to be receptive to that and say, okay, I hear what you're saying, and I'm going to take that seriously, and I'm going to actually not just pay lip service to it, but really take action on it.

49:24And so for all of those things to be true, the self-awareness followed by the saying, received by the hearing, and then followed up with doing. That's like four things. And I think for a lot of couples, one of those four steps breaks down. Sure. It did for us. Absolutely. It did for us. I mean, look, we can paint the picture of how it all worked out now. But again, it's one of those things where no, we were not communicating well during COVID. In fact, I think a misconception people have is that you're not communicating. But the truth is, and many couples therapists told us this, you're always communicating.

50:04You just may not be saying things the way that you want to be saying. You may not be getting your point across. So I was communicating by huffing and puffing around the house and by yelling at everybody and by stomping around and throwing laundry bins everywhere. But still doing all the work, right? Right. But I was not communicating that I felt overloaded, that I felt like I was invisible. That's what I'm saying. That's why I was unable to pick up on it because despite the huffing and puffing and all of that, you know, oh, laundry was still getting done. Kids are still getting fed. I guess everything is okay over here.

50:38I used to hate this saying that he would have, which is like, it just gets done. And to me, that's the most passive. You still hate that. I hate that saying. I still hate it because I don't believe that it just gets done. You do it. It doesn't, it's also like grammatically, like he says it just gets done. I'm like, yes, because someone chooses to do it. Right. There's also this very interesting idea about like power and you think that the person who's the loudest in the room has all the power and that that is not true oftentimes it's the person who feels powerless that is the loudest and it's the person carrying the power that can just go on with their yeah right well when i or the proverbial you says it just gets done and one person is doing more of the doing that is the reaction you will get but if both people have found fairness and again that's not equal.

51:30There are things I'm never going to do 50-50 with Heather, and there are things she's never going to do 50-50 with me. But when there's fairness and you say, well, it gets done, it's like, yeah, it does because we get it done. And as much as my heart says it just gets done, in that moment, it took, you know, it was not received as that. And objectively, that's true because of the unfairness that existed. One of the biggest hurdles that gets in people's way is not just the way they're communicating, but when they're communicating. And we were very, very guilty of this. So Doug would come up like we always found a way to get into these very consequential decisions at the worst possible time.

52:11Like especially this like started during COVID, but like really, I guess we've always kind of - It's when we would come up for air, which would be at very different times. I would come up for air before dinner, after that four o 'clock meeting, and she would come up for air at like 11 p.m. after the day was done, done, done. So we both thought that those respective times were the best time for us to talk about these consequential decisions or the important thing that needed to be communicated. I'm going to be much more specific than that. Do it. It is not a good time to talk about money while you're feeding your kids dinner and getting them bathed for bedtime.

52:45And while you're exhausted at the end, everyone's exhausted and there's probably somebody crying and you both just finished your work day. That is not going to set the stage for a constructive conversation around money, your goals, around your needs, you're both not at ease. You're both kind of in still either you're coming down from a stressful day. It's a bad environment. It's just a bad environment. So, so much about time and place really, really matter. That's only one of the reasons why we like the idea of a money date and why that's so important. And for us, that's not something that has to happen every week, because I think when you set the bar too high, you're setting yourself up to fail and not everybody has time every week to sit down and like check in on these points, especially when you're just getting started.

53:27But if you set aside time once a quarter, let's say, and you set aside time in a forum that you both are really comfortable in or that you both can even, dare I say, look forward to. Like for Doug and I, we love to go for walks. We've always, I think this is like a COVID thing that we started. Actually, no, I would say it goes back to the city. We always used to walk at night in the city too. Yeah, well before that. We were like, we're big walkers. We would just go out at night after dinner and we'd walk. Yeah, no shortage of studies on how amazing a walk is for your brain. But we've always been walkers.

53:57We walk through important conversations. That's just always been something that we do. But now also we'd go out for a cocktail. We'd like to sit at the bar, at a restaurant, downtown. Yeah, start to unpack things. We'd get a babysitter. Like these were things that we looked forward to doing together. And we knew that the purpose of us going out doing this thing that we like to do together was exclusively to talk about these topics that night. And eventually we started saving those conversations for those moments instead of like, hey, I know you're really eager to talk to me about how we did this month because you just put together like the spreadsheet and you're like really excited you just finished.

54:32It's just my ADHD, baby. Right, but I'm like, first of all, there's either like a show I wanna watch on TV where I'm like, no, this is not the time and I'm gonna brush him off and he's gonna feel slighted and we're not gonna get anything done. But now I would say to him, hey, that's awesome that you did that. Do we have that date on the calendar for a week from now? I'm really excited to talk about this. We're going to go through all of it then. Here's some tips, viewers, for when you're going on your money date, how to begin without feeling like someone doesn't want to be there. And it's important to know that there are some really good ways to go about this and some terrible ways to go about this.

55:07Guys, try not to sit down with spreadsheets and tables and numbers when you could easily start the conversation with goals, things that you both are looking forward to. I will have a much easier time talking to Heather about anything in our financial lives if it's tied to something we both care about or are excited for. That was very important for us. At the beginning, when we started doing these conversations in much more of a structured sense, it was very important for me to not just dive right in to those numbers and to the technical. We wanted to start with the positive because I'm a bit of like a negative Nancy, and I kind of need that positive reinforcement, like here's all the great things.

55:46That's the second one is don't go with the things that need improvement off the bat. No one wants to start a conversation with what's negative. They want to start with what you're doing right. And you'll notice that all of this is just simple little tweaks, right? Just turn the thing you were going to do, turn it upside down. What would that look like? Yeah. Start with positives. Hey, look how great we did this month with this. High five, take a shot, take a sip, whatever. And that's going to be a much better on ramp into it. Well, we do have to talk about the things that need improvement. Yeah, cool.

56:14Well, we booked some wins. Where's the L? Here's the L. Okay. We're now more motivated to talk about that. So I think these are just two really great examples, not only time and place, but how you start the conversation. They make a perfect mix to setting the stage for productive sessions. And then the other part I'd tell you is be patient here. You know, if you're setting up quarterly dates, that's only four times a year. This is a practice. You know, anything you want to get good at requires practice. And this type of work compounds. So four money dates, great. Over two years, eight, I'm just counting by four now.

56:50You know, three or 12. You start to - How many in four years? Oh, 16, I think. He's not sure. I'm unsure. Let me check with my ninth grader. They're doing multiplication now. But these are the things that compound over time. And just appreciate the fact that, you know, if you're doing this quarterly, you only get so many cracks at this. So please, please make them count. And that's why it's so critical to have kind of best strategies or best practices in going into these things. And don't expect the world out of your first date. I know how hard, we had more questions at the end of it than we had answers.

57:21And then there were slightly less questions. And now we know what the same questions are gonna be every time or which areas we need to focus on as we approach money date number 24 or whatever it is. I counted by four again. Well, the advice about starting with wins, it reminds me of how a lot of team meetings are structured in the workplace. You might have a weekly team meeting, like a Monday morning all-hands meeting that begins with, all right, what were our big wins from last week? And everyone in the all-hands meeting celebrates the big team wins before you go into, all right, what are we working on this week?

57:55What are the goals? Overarching big picture. What are the goals for the next five days? It is a meeting. It is a meeting. You know what's so interesting? There are so many positive, constructive communication tools that you can take from your workplace and bring into your household at home. But like people don't do it. You know why? Because it's the same reason that my daughter would cry when she gets home from preschool every day because she saved all of her negative energy for me. Like, you know, that's what they always say. Well, she saved it all for you. She was, oh, she's such a delight at school.

58:23And then she comes home and she would yell at everyone and cry and like throw herself on the ground. It's like funny, but it's not because it's the same exact thing. It's like, why do we accuse and yell and deflect and whatever against one another when we do have the communication tools, many of us. Like we spoke about in a chapter in the book about couples who are both really committed to their careers working through a hard career decision that might require one person to make a sacrifice. You have to give those decisions the time they need. But also you could map it out and do the pros and cons the same way you would with a decision in the workplace.

58:55You could use a decision tree. You can work through it. Like you have the tools. Many people have the tools, but it's a lot easier to just be your hardest on the person that you love the most because you're the most comfortable and your guard is down. Which reminds me what you maybe in that instance should do instead of, you know, yes, you are hardest and you hurt the ones you love, right? We all know that expression. But so much of this is also knowing how your partner learns and meeting them where they're at. Oh, yeah. We had a couple that was struggling to conduct a money meeting and get on the same page.

59:28And yes, it started with here are the numbers. Like they had to talk about the numbers at one point. And even in getting to them in the most constructive way possible, it just wasn't clicking what was on the paper or on the screen. And it was getting a whiteboard and drawing it. And I use this as an example to show that people like to learn and do things in a certain way. And if you are going to approach your partner with the way that you get it done, and we, believe it or not, talk about how we approach things all the time. We are oil and water with how we approach stuff. We work incredibly differently.

1:00:04Yeah, it's very frustrating at times. It just gets done. But no, the point here is if you can meet your partner where they're at and find out and have the perspective, put yourself in their shoes for a minute. Like, yeah, I know Heather doesn't want to start the conversation with X. I know my partner works best if we're, again, having a cocktail. Like this is the activity we like to do. Just pay particular focus. Take a minute to think about not yourself, but how your partner learns. And they should be doing the same. And watch what happens at that point. You will have constructive, meaningful conversations at the right time, in the right place, getting to the right conclusions.

1:00:43In addition to a money date, do you also do – do you have a date or a structure around planning for domestic activities? Well, I don't think there is a better system out there than Eve Rodsky's Fair Play and the cards there. She breaks down I think it's more than 100 household tasks and responsibilities into micro cards. and then you can divide them up. And I think for us, it's a very helpful exercise, but we don't stick to things like that, like the gospel at this point, because we don't really need to anymore. One of the most important concepts, and actually this was also from Fair Play, and this was one of Yvrosky's amazing - You're going to say owning the activity, aren't you?

1:01:23Do you want to say it? No, go for it. No, you're on a roll here. No, one of the most important things about how you do divide up household responsibilities is to make sure that you own that activity. And so it's this idea of conceptualize, plan, and execute. And I think many women feel frustrated with this idea when their spouse comes to them and says, how can I help? Just tell me what to do and I'll do it. And that to me is like, oh my God, there's nothing more infuriating than that because then you've just added yourself into the roster of my children standing in front of me with me being like, get your shoes on, take out the trash and you put your coat away.

1:02:00Yeah, but I'm actually going to do it. Right. But the mental load is maybe heavier than half of the physical responsibilities that we all have. So for someone to really own an activity from start to finish is the most valuable thing that they can do. So I'll give you a great example from our own lives. Our older daughter, Hazel, is on a competitive swim team. And there's like a million emails and it starts off season. You get the emails, time trials, bathing suits. You know, it's a million different signups meets. I said to Doug, I want nothing to do with swim. I don't want to go to practice. I don't want to read the emails because there's so many of them and they're confusing.

1:02:41I don't want to buy anything for swim. All I want to do is do what the dads do at a lot of the activities. I want to show up. Put a chair down. And put a chair down. And watch. And cheer Hazel on. Say less, fam. Swim dad. Swim dad is here. So that's how swim dad was born. And I think the important thing, too, is like he doesn't get it right 100 percent of the time, but I don't get it right 100 percent of the time either. I can't get on him, though, and I can't step in and fix it and try and do it for him. If he forgets something, I tell him that he forgot and that he's got to do it. Yeah. You know what I mean?

1:03:14I feel bad I forgot because I've taken true ownership over this entire thing. It's not something I want to hear is that I miss something, you know, especially when you're dialed into it. You know what's crazy is that him becoming swim dad started off this effect into other things where like he realized I can take ownership over something from start to finish. I'm not just I'm not a man kept man child who needs to be told what to do and where to be all the time that actually I don't need to wait for Heather to say like if she's still upstairs working and it's six o 'clock at night and the kids need dinner, I'm going to make dinner.

1:03:47Well, I think the point is it builds upon itself, right? It creates better behaviors and habits in all areas of your participation in your family and in your life. And that's a really good thing. And I think it's also very important to point out here. I'm probably not going to stop the question of, you know, what can I do to help? But when you are taking big pieces off the plate and you're lightening the mental load and these things that are clearly being thrusted upon you more so than they're me, it allows for there to be more forgiveness and slack for the inevitable times. I will say, how can I help?

1:04:22What can I do here? Just tell me what to do. I just don't want people to feel like this all magically goes away. It comes back to the idea of practice and building the habits and behaviors. These are things you are playing long. Your whole relationship is a long game, right? And I took that lesson from building businesses, from looking at our related, this is something that we are going, and particularly with money. It's one of the longest games. You have to deal with it forever. You don't get to opt out, right? You're not going off the grid in Montana and opting out of money. You still need money to buy supplies to do that.

1:05:00And even if you were, yeah. Yeah, you still need - Even that has cost to it. Yeah, you literally can't do it. And unless you're trying to nuke your relationship and that's the worst outcome, I think, of any situation here, you don't get to opt out of these things. You have to figure out ways to make them work. And that gets back to fairness. There is no perfect here, right? There's never going to be, sorry, honey, there's not going to be a day where I'm not bothering you about that. But as long as she knows I am continuing to show the types of actions that make our lives more fair, it's okay. I'll be given that grace as opposed to, could you just once take care of this from beginning to end?

1:05:44That's what that sounds like. It's not good.

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1:07:29One thing that strikes me, both of you have developed quite a lot of wisdom around what makes a relationship work. You know, when you talk about how resentment is like poison for a relationship or when you talk about the importance of fairness as a guiding value. One thing that strikes me though is you met as freshmen in college, so you have not had a string of failed adult relationships. Most of my friends have told me that their biggest relationship lessons have come from the failures. They've come from the painful breakups that they had at the age of 23 and then at 27 and then at 31 and then at 36.

1:08:14Without a string of failures, how have you been able to form that level of wisdom? I do think we've had a string of failures. Right. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think it takes... We've had a string of failures. Yeah, I don't think it takes... We failed each other on numerous occasions early in our relationship. And I think that by growing into adults together, we were unfair to each other on numerous occasions. We made tons of mistakes. I tell people all the time that I feel like we lived the life cycle of some marriages before we even got married because of how close we got to this not working out.

1:08:47Yeah, there's really in our relationship. So I don't ever intend. And look, our book is not a memoir. So I wish it was. Tell it to my editor. You know what I mean? This is now our memoir. No, no, no. No, but it's important because I think with the focus on money and on these topics, we have to keep it focused on these topics. However, to be very clear, we were messy AF. And the fact that our relationship survived into adulthood took an insane amount of work, rebuilding, trust. We had to get to know each other. There was heartbreak. We had to get to know each other all over again on more than one occasion.

1:09:25And when I moved up to New York, it was very much a see you later situation. So this was not all sunshine and roses. And I think nothing is, though, like, right. I mean, that's the point is that we kind of move through these seasons of our lives. And so we've definitely shared different seasons of our lives together. I think the thing here is that, you know, we got into financial infidelity as part of a chapter. It's called the chapter on lying. And the psychologists that we talked to, we asked a question of, how do you know when it's game over and it's time to move on? They told us that when one person is not willing to do the work in the relationship to get it back on track or to fix whatever damage took place, that's about as accurate as it gets.

1:10:12And in all the instances where we had our struggles and moments that we would consider losses and not wins, we have yet to find ourselves in a position where one of us was unwilling to put in the work to move it on. So I don't think you necessarily need to see our relationship crumble to extract the lessons that life will inevitably give you. There is no successful entrepreneur. There is no successful marriage. There is nothing that has resulted in success that hasn't come from a bunch of failures. I should also add, and this is Doug and I both are now products of divorce at this point in our life.

1:10:56I think we both at various times in our life felt like we were each other's family. This isn't just he's not just a guy that I'm dating. We had to fill some pretty. We filled holes in each other's lives. Maybe holes that were too big for somebody our age to be filling. Yeah, not sure it was necessarily fair for us to be in that position, but life gets to choose those things. But I think it's an important point to further Doug's point, which is that there are lots of ways to rupture and repair relationships. And I don't necessarily think that people who have had five horror stories of past boyfriends have more context than the people who have been through some pretty hard stuff together and have still found a way through.

1:11:44Your story is your story. That's why we share so many other people's stories as well, not just our own. I would never hold us out as the, you know, shining example of people who have always gotten it right. No, I would. I would. I think if anything, I mean, and I, that's how I choose to hold myself out in the world too, is that I'm not, I'm messy. I get it wrong all the time. I don't say the right thing. You have to, I'm a little unkempt and it is what it is. And I think that that is why we're able to have real conversations and also connect with real people because they see pieces of themselves in these stories and in these, not just ours, but others, because yeah, like there's a million different ways to get to the desired result.

1:12:27And there's a million different experiences that get people to where they want to be. Doug, your parents were married for 36 years before they got divorced. Something like that, yeah. And you were in your 20s at the time. No, 30s. You were in your 30s at the time. How did that land with you? I mean, it must have been a huge shock. The good side of that is I was a mature adult with a kid and had a family of my own. So my perspective, unlike Heather at the tender age of 13 or 14, when her parents got divorced, I understood more of how the world worked and how relationships work. But putting that aside, it still really rocks you to your core.

1:13:06I took a lot of pride in that while watching my friend's parents get divorced. I mean, you know, boomers really went for the whole 50-50 split here on who stayed together and who left. That's very different from their parents who, if you hated your spouse, you still stayed together. just what it was. Yeah, it took an emotional toll for sure. I thought one of the core pillars of my life, which was my parents being together, despite knowing for many, many years they were unhappy, and I thought they would, yeah, there were probably times in which I thought this thing's cooked, right? This is over, but they kept going.

1:13:41But to see it finally fall apart in the way that it did made me question a lot of things about my childhood, about what I thought family was supposed to be. But again, you take these struggles, you take these moments, and thank God I had Heather there, who, by the way, because of her experience through this, was maybe one of the most supportive things I had in my life. Not just because she was my wife and she was there for me, because she had the experience and arguably had it worse. That's what's so crazy is that - She could tell me, hey, here's what you're going to. I get it. That meant the world.

1:14:20He helped me through so much, like a decade and a half earlier. Yeah. And I was able to do the same for him, but in a totally different context. Yeah. It gave us one more thing that we now have in common. Not necessarily the thing you want to have in common, but we're able to look at what had happened in our respective lives and draw lessons from it, be able to share feelings around it and tap into areas that maybe we weren't talking about enough. You know, there'll be a moment where I'm like, man, I really wish my dad was able to see whatever it may be that I've done or be able to communicate or I wish I had my parents together for this moment, whatever it may be.

1:15:09And it sounds cliche, but it's true, right? And she'd be like, yeah, yeah. Let me tell you why you feel that way. Let me tell you what I do to get through that. You know what? Forget all that. Let's grab the girls and go out to dinner. Within 30 minutes, I ain't thinking about that anymore. Look at what I have in front of me, and that's awesome. Earlier, you talked about how through your relationship, you've been through some tumultuous ups and downs. And what that means is that you've both had to practice forgiveness over the years, forgiveness of each other, forgiveness of yourselves. Yes. How do you do that?

1:15:45It's not easy. It's not easy. And I think that we can only do so much for one another. I think one of the most important things you can do, though, is to understand how deep something is cutting your partner. I think you need to understand how big of a deal this is, whatever the thing is. Like, know how big that cloud is that's over them. Then you can tailor your support to meet them in that moment. And yeah, you may not be able to do it alone. This is why we call upon the help of so many professionals. I go to therapy. Doug goes to therapy. There are reasons why professionals exist to help you through these difficult moments in your life.

1:16:27We can only forgive each other so much if you don't forgive yourself. And I've needed help with that over time, not just in terms of whatever was going on with us, but in terms of even just the student loan debt. The shame I carried for the decisions that I made was really, really deep. I've doubled down on this, by the way. Forgiving yourself, I think, is sometimes harder than forgiving. By the way, baby, I forgive you. No, I think forgiving yourself for the things that you believe you've done to yourself or the way that you've put certain types of feelings on you. They could be things that you've inherited and you don't – sometimes you don't even know where it's coming from.

1:17:04And Heather's point about you rely on other professionals. You rely on the support systems in your life to get there. And to the point about knowing where your partner's at, when you know somebody so well, you can recognize them falling back into patterns. Like there are things – I am always going to be hard on myself. That's who I am. I set incredibly high expectations of myself. Professionally, personally, physically, as a woman, I set high expectations of myself. And they're not fair. Some of them are not always fair. We talk about it all the time. When Doug catches me in a moment of kind of like spiraling into one of these things on myself, he's like, hey, hey, you're doing that thing that you do.

1:17:48And I see where this is going. And you are losing the joy in this moment that we're in. You know how hard it is when you're launching a book out into the world, not to get all meta. But the pressure because this is something that I care about so incredibly deeply. Like this project, this book, Doug has a firm. Yes, it's our firm. Yes, we did a lot of this together. And I do embrace the we and everything like this. But this project is very personal to me. It's very important. And it's really, really easy for me to slide into some very negative patterns of like expectations being outsized from reality on what I want for myself.

1:18:29And I rely on him to check me in those moments too. So like, yes, therapists, yes, family and supportive people who love you and most of all your partner to kind of give you that check and to say, have you called your therapist about this? Because I think you probably should. I can tell you one thing, even when Heather checks me on stuff that are habits or my own spiraling, if you want to call it that, is nobody really likes to hear it. So it takes a lot of bravery and it takes a lot of confidence and it takes a lot of knowing your partner. And trust. And trust that, hey, I'm going to say something that's really not going to make you feel good.

1:19:08But the reason for that is it's right. And then you need to have the trust in your partner to say, I really didn't like to hear that. But I know that they wouldn't be saying it if it wasn't true or if their perception of this wasn't like I would say I observe you're doing this thing that you used to do. And I know that it's not going to be productive for us. I'm just telling you what I see. And there has to be enough trust on both ends of him saying, well, for her to say this, she hasn't said something like that to me for a while. She's not trying to hurt my feelings. And after I say it, I hide behind the couch and throw a little chocolates at her from the distance until it all goes away.

1:19:47Just kidding. But it's true. It's true. There has to be enough trust to really not only check each other but to fall back on each other when you do fall into those old patterns. because there's a reason that you were that way. Like healing again, just like your career isn't linear, healing isn't linear too. Like you, these things are embodied. Like these are like, some of these feelings I have are like one step away from genetic. Yeah, well, you know, that's why we say the self-work is the hardest work because again, hearing things that, you know, aren't your best qualities. I even think today I pointed out something that wasn't my best quality and I got all bent out of shape around it.

1:20:25And after a second to breathe, I said, I am fully aware being called out on something that was an old habit or behavior or something I don't like about myself made me extra sensitive to that. So as much as I want to fix things and get them solved in a second, sometimes you got to take a minute to reflect upon it, but it does take an incredible amount of trust and bravery to do some of these things. But I think that's a wonderful example of how far your relationship can go if you can get to a point of communicating that way. Well, and one other point I'll make on that, which is, it's really about all of it, is that couples work, when it comes to money or anything else, involves a lot of self-work.

1:21:03It really requires a level of self-awareness. You are not an enigma for your partner to figure out. It's not just their job. Yeah, take them there. It's your job, too. You have an obligation to yourself. And that goes with money, right? With stepping into your power around money, being sure that you not only know, but that understanding that you have an obligation to know, not just the ins and outs of your personal finances, but to know what you want out of life to try and start asking yourself those hard questions. How can your partner begin to figure out those two partner can't figure out what those things are for you.

1:21:38You've got to figure out what they are for yourself. And then you two can work on it together. So like, I never want to lose that in this work. And I think because so many people, so many partners lose themselves in their marriage. They lose themselves in a relationship or they lose themselves to their kids, especially women. And so when I look at this work, it is not just about talking to your partner. We talk about fairness. How can we even begin to talk about fairness when you're not being fair to yourself, when you're not setting a bar for yourself to say, I deserve to have my needs met. Here's the baseline of how I'm going to do that.

1:22:12And then we can start to work together. It sounds like the real backbone of all of this is emotional maturity, agency, awareness. That's the life's work of holding a family together. Yes. Thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? Oh, now you're going to look at me? Listen, listen. Google it. No, no, no. If you're interested in learning more about the book, you can go to domoneytogether.com. We also write a weekly newsletter on joint finances called The Joint Account, and that's at readthejointaccount.com. Over on Substack, but also our book Money Together is available anywhere you like to purchase books.

1:22:56Absolutely. Grab a copy. Beautiful. Thank you. And we will link to all of that in the show notes as well. Thanks so much. Wonderful.

1:23:05Thank you to Doug and Heather. What are three key takeaways from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, your relationship with money started in your childhood. It started long before you met your partner because your early childhood experiences with money create deeply ingrained patterns that show up in your adult relationships. And so Heather describes how her parents' divorce shaped her relationship with money in a way that followed her for decades. And that's something that you need self-awareness of and that your partner also needs to understand about you. My parents got divorced right as I entered my teenage years.

1:23:39And I really embodied a lot of the scarcity mindset that my mom kind of imparted on me during those years. There was a lot of we don't have, you know, a lot of money stress in our house. It doesn't really matter what was. What matters is how you felt about it in those earliest years and your earliest money memories. That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, stop having money talks when you're stressed. The Bonapartes discovered that timing makes or breaks financial conversations, and they learned to table these discussions for when they're both relaxed and they can actually enjoy the process, like taking a walk together or over cocktails.

1:24:22Doug and I, we love to go for walks. We've always, I think this is like a COVID thing that we started. Actually, no, I would say it goes back to the city. We always used to walk at night in the city too. We were like, we're big walkers. We would just go out at night after dinner and we'd walk. Yeah, no shortage of studies on how amazing a walk is for your brain. But we've always been walkers. We walk through important conversations. That's just always been something that we do. But now also we'd go out for a cocktail. We'd like to sit at the bar, at a restaurant, downtown. And finally, key takeaway number three.

1:24:52Taking ownership beats keeping score. Real partnership means owning entire responsibilities from start to finish rather than trading tasks back and forth. Doug shares about how becoming swim dad, meaning completely taking over their daughter's competitive swimming activities, transformed the way in which they divide responsibilities. That's how swim dad was born. And I think the important thing too is like he doesn't get it right 100 % of the time, But I don't get it right 100 % of the time either. I can't get on him, though, and I can't step in and fix it and try and do it for him. If he forgets something, I tell him that he forgot and that he's got to do it.

1:25:30Yeah. You know what I mean? I feel bad I forgot because I've taken true ownership over this entire thing. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Doug and Heather Bonaparte. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with the people in your life. friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you know who is part of a couple, anyone who is single but is considering becoming part of a couple, potentially at some point in the future, anyone who was part of a couple and is trying to figure out a retrospective, share this with all of the people in your life because that is the single most important way that you can spread these lessons, spread educational teaching about money that we don't get in school.

1:26:14Unpacking your relationship with money individually and together as a couple is such a big part of having a healthy relationship. And it's a lifelong relationship, not just with each other, but with yourself and with your money, right? We all have a relationship with our money. So share this with anyone in your life who you think would benefit from learning this. Also, remember that we have a course on rental property investing. It's called Your First Rental Property, and it is open now through October 30th. This is a limited time window for you to enroll. Now through October 30, you can enroll in our course aimed at anyone who wants to learn about how to buy and manage a rental property.

1:26:56It's aimed at beginners. So if you have zero rental properties and you want to go from zero to one, this is for you. Or if maybe you have one, but you kind of like didn't know what you were doing and you sort of bought it on the fly and now you actually really want systems and processes. or maybe you're an accidental landlord. You had a primary residence and when you had to move out, you didn't want to sell it because maybe you've got a really low interest mortgage on it. Now you're an accidental landlord and you want to learn how to manage it. This course is for you. It is for beginners in the rental property space and it is only open between now and October 30.

1:27:32This is your limited window to enroll. To find out more, go to affordanything.com slash enroll. That's affordanything.com slash enroll. Thank you again for being an afforder. I'm Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything Podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.