#28 - Liv Boeree & Igor Kurganov - The Secrets of Relationship Success

0:00The reason we're recording this is that it was our 10 year anniversary. we made a prediction early on of how likely it is that we'll still be together in 10 years how about we make predictions from today about how likely it is that we're still together in 1 year and 10 years think about it for a moment and then we will yell out the numbers at the same time so for 1 year 99 % then in 10 years

0:37hello and welcome to the win-win podcast today's episode is all about love and relationships because i am speaking to my dearest significant other igor kirganov igor and i recently celebrated 10 years together so we decided to try this experimental episode where we interview each other about what makes a healthy relationship. Because the thing is, a truly good relationship is arguably the most positive sum win-win-y thing you can ever find, where two people create something much larger than the sum of their individual parts. So on that note, here is my conversation with Igor Kirganov.

1:29it's like the phones have a force field they're they're in what are you doing looking at my belly button your navel gazing i see okay so how do we start this do you just talk okay go ahead okay what did the people on twitter ask well no i don't want to start i want to why not just start with that we can afterwards do an intro all right no one knows what the why do you need an intro right now because just every other episode has some kind of I normally have like a nice maybe that's a mistake just all right we've been together for 10 years okay that's not a question come on keep going we've been together for 10 years it's a rattled you just come on and it's normally been great yes although I'm drastically rethinking okay and no it has actually been wonderful yeah and I I think the main question that people want to know is what is our secret ingredient?

2:29And I don't, off the top of my head, I don't think I can distill it down to one thing. The secret to happiness is having low expectations.

2:41No. So people want to know what a secret is? I don't know. That's a big question to start with. What's our secret? Communication. Communication. Definitely communication. Okay, what is unique about our style of communication? We're very, very, very honest with each other. We try to be very direct with each other and are good at it, actually. We know that while the other is commenting on mistakes or gives feedback to the other, that it comes from a place of we are one team. we are aware that there's like meta coordination basically in the feedback giving define meta coordination well like we we've agreed that this would be the better style to have communication and our general pro way of being with each other which involves sometimes like butting heads on various things very quickly rather than trying to optimize for each individual moment being one of um calm harmony pleasantness It sounds like it's awful to be us, but actually some friends experience it a little bit like that because we do very quickly tell each other, I didn't like that.

4:00Stop doing this. That's annoying. Why do you do this? You have this pattern. You always do that. We actually say it like the classic. Things you're meant to do. Yeah, like talking about the concrete thing, but making it into a general claim. That's like, don't do that with us. We do that quite a bit. and actually our reaction most often is, oh yeah, I actually may have this general bias. So we have this theory, which is like we discussed kind of like the relationships can be, or rather the communication in relationships that we have observed among friends. You are depleted on a graph with two axes and on the x-axis you have like how soft versus aggro the conversation is.

4:45The communication is happening. This is like a zero and here is the 10, let's say. and then here is the free on the y-axis you have the frequency of how often it occurs that style of communication occurs within the relationship i think a lot of couples spend their time and kind of like a um like a dumbbell like they're like everything is nicey nice the entire time very often very little time spent in three four five six seven eight and then because it builds up it jumps and like they fight quite hard right really hardcore fights yeah we spend our time it's basically very little nicey nice like zero to one is one very little one we we yeah but little and then it builds up it's like a lot of two three four five and then it goes down and basic and pretty much no nine or like no nine or definitely no ten no ten basically no nine i don't know like once a year nine or something and some eights and sevens very rarely like i can't think i actually can't think of the last time we had like a real fight yeah and i basically my Our theory goes that because we get to clear out a lot of stuff in this 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 region, we never fall into the stronger, worse explosion because there is no built-up resentment, built-up kind of desire to now say it all finally, etc.

6:04Just stuff doesn't build up if you talk about it. What you're getting at is that we never bite our tongues, or very rarely. Yeah, the reason to bite a tongue is when we're in public or among friends or like at a party or something. And even then, we often don't. Which is why many of our friends feel that it's like, ah, mom and dad are fighting. But well, new friends are like, oh, oh, oh, God, you guys, please don't fight. We're like, no, no, no, this is this is our normal place. So and then the question is, what is it that makes our communication function? what are the prerequisites that had to be in place so that we can have this direct, quick, honest conversation.

6:46And I think they are, one, we respect each other's opinion a lot. So then you want to listen to the other, obviously. We know that the intention is to be on the same team. for me at least, I feel like this deep sense of security that even if there is a major conflict or an argument about something, it's not ever going to be a, well, that's it then. I have like zero concern that you would leave and so on. And I think a lot of people don't actually have that luxury in a relationship. To bring it to three words, it would be security. Then the other thing was trust and respect. I think you could get away with just respect and trust.

7:34You actually don't necessarily need security. If you have full trust and full respect, then you're also already very highly enabled in a conversation to have good communication. But security just helps. It's like a kind of like positive undercurrent underneath that allows you to reduce the worry about the bottom falling out at any point. Right. And that's useful. It's like if you can cap the downside, then usually you can take much higher risk. Well, that's the other thing. Our love language is shit talking and like game banter is truly like what we both enjoy doing. Like we wake up every morning and our current obsession is backgammon.

8:13And we start the day with a cup of coffee and smack talking each other to death. That's how we get fired up for the day. And it's wonderful. and so that like slightly harsh or like intense language fiery language just flows over into our natural state but i i never feel like i've bottled anything up ever and i don't think you do either so i mean it will occasionally still happen right we're not perfect at this like what do you mean you never like when you just said you never bottled anything what's the extreme bottling up that you were excluding here i don't imagine you meant something like three hours ten hours 10 days right you've definitely had a thought that you haven't expressed for a few days yes yeah yes right but what so what did you mean when you just said that or were you speaking in superlatives because i feel like there's not really anything that i can't say to you it it so rarely bottles up like i get that one that one that one time like i had a crush on someone let's say i felt like i couldn't immediately express it for like a week or so because it was like the first time i I noticed someone else since we've been together, basically.

9:25And I was like, oh, what does this mean? What does this mean? But then eventually I blurted it out to you and you were like, okay. Yeah, that happens. I mean, we're going to be together for a long, long time. You're going to get crushes on people. And I was like, oh, okay. And then basically after that moment, I was like, well, there's nothing I can't say to him. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the idea there simply is that if you are going to be together with each other for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, it would be very odd to literally to have the expectation that the most likely outcome of amount of crushes each of you will have is zero like that doesn't in a functioning good relationship not because of issues in a functioning good relationship the expectation shouldn't be zero right that doesn't make any sense over a period of 20 30 40 50 years we are biological Biological beings.

10:13Exactly. That's fine. Winston is her backpack. Like that's. People. Okay. Well, Winston is the tortoise for those who are wondering. Not like a polyamorous lover or something who lives with us. But on the bottle up thing, actually, maybe you're right even in the never. Because not expressing something in the moment can be out of just, oh, I'll do it later. Or, oh, I can't do this. and the one is bottling up versus the other one isn't right so just because you expressed it later doesn't mean you bottle anything up so maybe actually your frequent expression later knowing that you can express it later does mean you it's just not a bottle up type of thing yes and and it's i mean they're i guess the like trade-off with because i am like the more emotionally volatile one in the relationship um the trade-off with me feeling like i'm comfortable to always sort of express how I'm feeling could be that therefore I would go too much into like not self any kind of moderation and but I think we actually have that imbalance too because um like a thing that always stuck with me that you said was like look you don't get to have more than like two really big dramas a month something like that on average if you're if you're having five dramas a month or 10 dramas a month where it's like ah the sky is falling clearly your brain is miscalibrated like like that's just not like our lives are good lives are fine that was there was a few months into our relationship i tell you sorry love you but you're just not that important you don't have three important things a day every day for a few days that's just right like presidents even have more caliber like had to calibrate their thing on the basis of the important things.

12:05Elon Musk has like important things and he still doesn't get like upset five times a day about the thing. Yeah I mean to be clear I wasn't getting upset five times a day. Well sometimes that's the thing. I think that it's more I think the time when I expressed this was probably when you were getting upset about something. Yeah I mean it was like oh this thing happened today then I had to deal with that bureaucratic nightmare and that's incredibly upsetting and then this in work life is like slightly uncomfortable and that's incredibly upsetting it's like okay the bureaucratic thing is irrelevant the work life thing is like how does that uh compare to the other things you expect to experience within your work life over a period of time if you're this emotional about a like if you were to sort them like the thing number 35 per year guess what one you have to be upset 34 more times and then when the thing that is still 10x worse are you going to be 10x more upset good luck with that right what you did well is you didn't necessarily try and be like look you don't have to have five dramatic things every single day uh you you didn't do it like right in the peak of when i was blowing up but like you waited until i was in a sort of i'd calm down a bit basically and then you're like okay now you're calm can we just talk about this as a general thing like pay attention like do you see me getting this upset this often about like a random like you know bureaucratic thing or missing a missing an opportunity or a meeting or something no so observe yourself you basically like would you'd fight you'd be good at finding a balance of like showing the mirror to myself when I was being unreasonable um without mistiming it when I was in an emotion basically reading when I'm in a sufficiently calm emotional state that I can actually input information because I think that's a mistake a lot of people make is that they try and like fix the person there and then in the moment when they're being irrational like you know let the person's fight or flight turn off you're not going to convince anyone of anything while they're in the heightened state totally um so yeah I mean very rarely sometimes you will but it's yeah you kind of it's hard to fully get there you need to like fight along and then reach some crescendo of the fight where it's but that's just or you just wait it out until it cooled down and then you discuss it and the person looks back at it and it's just better another thing that we developed is uh let's say we're actually arguing about something and whichever one of us is first to notice that we're actually in an argument because that's the thing when you're in the heat of an argument you're so in the heat you're kind of you're unable to take a higher perspective very easily, that's by definition you're in this amplified angry state, but whichever one of us first is able to notice the situation that's going on will go and make this cat hissing sound at the other one for what it's worth, it's not usually that fight is actively happening it's more often that driving somewhere and for the last 30 minutes, each time someone says something, the reaction by the other is like we are reacting like back.

15:23It's not even like active fighting. It's just you're taking the uncharitable, annoyed interpretation of anything. Alex Beiner asks, what is the role of forgiveness in our relationship? In other words, can forgiveness help bring us out of zero-sum dynamics within a relationship and back into harmony? I don't think that forgiveness is what changes zero-sum dynamics. I think you can forgive for having been zero-summy, where a relationship obviously should be win-win, because you're making each other grow and better. That's one of the fundamental parts of being happy about a relationship. So zero-sumeness would be really weird.

16:01But no, forgiveness can't get you out of zero-sumeness, because the goal... I mean, you need to forgive first, but then the way to change zero sumness will be to recognize that you are like better together than the sum of the parts basically and that can only happen if it's also true that one plus one equals three when you're together basically rather than if you separate it and it's us too and that's not always the case we have friends who were in relationships where they're both 10 out of 10 people for someone but they're terrible for each other about like one couple that was in their relationship and it's like that can happen they're both great people 100 but together they're just like loose loose basically uh it's not even zero seven yeah so yeah no i I think you need to understand whether you are a mutually beneficial relationship or not.

17:03Yeah, I wonder if some couples as well actually see each other almost as competition in, I don't know, whether they play status games with each other. I've never personally experienced it, but I could imagine that is a thing that plays out. Because we're both very competitive people in certain ways, but all of our competitiveness gets funneled through playing games against each other that's why games are so beautiful i think like they are a way that there's like healthy outlet where you can delve into wow you're you're an lom i'm an lom you can delve into uh a zero a little zero sum universe for the for 30 minutes or something and that's there's a clear objective one of you is meant to crush the other and I don't know for us that is so it's it's just so fun and it never there's never like negative overspill it's always like an enriching thing so even that is like a sort of win-winny thing um but I don't know we fundamentally see each other as as a team like when you do well in a business you know like when we were playing poker I would never ever like like I couldn't fathom ever being jealous of your success, even though you would often win a lot more than me and were a better player than me.

18:23I was just on a spiral. I know, you weren't listening, so what were you spiraling? Wondering whether you're fake and actually a robot that is an LLM and I've been living with an LLM my whole life. And you just slipped up. Okay, anyway, I don't think that's the case. I just imagined what it would be like to discover that. Remember the one where you had this vision of yourself that you were actually just an insane person who had dreamed me up? Because the first time it happened was when we were in New York walking down a street and I knew you were in front of me, but then you weren't. It turned out that you just got into some store, but you just disappeared all of a sudden.

19:08And it felt like this scene in a film where the character realizes that they might have just imagined all of this wonderful, great, like, relation that they had with someone. And all of the scenes were playing back, not all, but like a bunch of scenes were playing back in my mind of me sitting with you and our friends and then, like, me just sitting by myself with our friends and our friends being like, oh. He's insane. My friends, our friends. Yeah, like your imaginary girlfriend, basically. Yeah, just my imaginary girlfriend. Anyway. I mean... Crown Up Guy, Fedor Holtz asks, is there something that helped your relationship a lot that you weren't expecting or surprised you?

19:50What small thing would you say you did in your relationship, maybe regularly, that had the biggest effort or return?

19:59I think like the thing you previously mentioned is one of them, like the hissing at each other. yeah like something so that um yeah to to abstract it would be something that both parties have agreed is a quick and short uh sign one can show each other that makes the other realize that they're um they're temporary lost that you know they've gone into the red mist the alternative instead of the hissing would be to say hey you're currently being a bit irrational here or you're attacking me every time I say something or anything like that but none of these things work because you can still respond to that somehow.

20:39You're attacking me unjustly. It's like, well, no, you just did that thing and you totally deserve to be attacked would be the response. You can't respond to a hiss very much. So if you can find an alternative of that or take the same thing, who cares? I think it's useful to have something that shows kind of the ridiculousness of the moment a little bit. so the his was incredibly high value for the easiness of adding it if someone has a kind of bad pattern of behavior that they would themselves likely would not to have want to have finding a way for them to um like frame that concept around it such that it's really sticky yeah that that that i think is helpful i mean and one of the most impactful books I ever read in terms of relationships and understanding relationships is this is this book The Passion Trap which talks about how over time a power imbalance can develop and it can be you know everyone usually thinks oh the man has more power than woman it's often the other way uh whereby basically one feels a lot more secure in the relationship than the other um one has more confidence and it sometimes it can switch if like let's say one loses their job suddenly and so now they're having a confidence crisis and then they start like feeling bad about themselves and then they start like needing more from the relationship and it can create this like separation where the the one down as it were the the one with less power becomes needier and like more demanding of the the other one who now finds them slightly less attractive and if that if that imbalance isn't addressed and realized for what it is it can very quickly spiral and that's you the most common ingredient of why relationships go wrong i thought it was a great book as well and that leads to worsening patterns of behavior basically the neediness becomes needier the like push away becomes more push away because it reacts to the neediness etc and the helpful thing there is basically that the book makes you realize that some things are a problem of the dynamic that rather than about the person the individual exactly and that's that's really helpful and the thing uh yeah and just to say more on the power imbalance like it the way to keep balance is like yes in many relationships it will be the case that one person is more successful in their career than the other or one has a career and the other doesn't and therefore the financials may come from one person or not the other but you can in that has potency for creating a power imbalance but you can just have it still be balanced by if it's the case that the other person maybe is more emotionally mature or like more outgoing it might even be that the person who has more of a career would is kind of more introverted uh and in social groups doesn't actually is not that active and feels that their partner is much more active and therefore often like liked is the one that gets invited is the one that like people talk to and they actually then are one down despite having more financial career etc success right it's totally there are a variety of like uh categories within which one can be um comparatively more successful at than than the partner and it's good to really and you're probably looking for a partner who is not just worse than you in every single category that'd be weird like one partner might be more attractive or just i don't know better at certain sports that you want to be better at like it just there's going to be something why you love love them and probably that's the thing that they have more power in that framework over you another thing that came to mind that we do that is a small thing um is i heard this couple that were together for 70 something years they were asked what they do to a similar type of question to make it work for them and the husband said that they tell each other every night they go to bed that they love each other and since then now for years however we felt whatever happened I've always said I love you before I close my eyes and even though it's for you and it's probably nice for you to hear even if we're like slightly annoyed at each other for something it's also really just kind of has the same effect as doing like a gratitude journal or something yeah it's like you're putting yourself into a better state of mind by just expressing the i love you and also you're sleeping better i would imagine um it's just nice to end that way you don't want to end on a negative yeah never go to bed angry start yeah well that's but that's hard that's that's why i mean that's never go to a bad angry is the kind of idea behind it but because that's not actually achievable like how would you say they're like sometimes you just are like yeah they're just are the circumstances are so extreme that yeah imagine going for 10 000 days not never going to bed angry it's not going to work like you must be i mean it will if you're a great meditator or something uh hats off to you but just the easy thing to do is just to say i love you and get to a place where you mean it as well so actually not just think of something yeah think of something about them even though they might be driving you crazy at the time like yeah that that really helped how have we dealt with jealousy in the relationship we still have jealousy for sure we've talked about it though uh here just now as well um the main aspects were one realizing that it wouldn't make sense for to expect that there would be zero crushes for either of us over the duration of our relationship given that the expectation should be that there should be crushes therefore it's not something you fault the other for when it does occur but rather it's just like oh okay so the environment is now that there is a crush how do we go through that and And so that helped for conversation to be realized, communication to be improved on that topic.

26:45But then still, it's like, okay, do you now want the person to act on it? And this is where then jealousy would come from outside of the emotional when it moves into the physical. If it were to move into the physical exploration of the crush, that we haven't done because we're still too jealous for that. We're like, well, I suppose if your crush was so strong that you really felt that it would be necessary to act on it in some way, then maybe. But so far, that strength of crush at least hasn't occurred for me and not for you. And yeah, we don't also... The thing we don't have is a full expectation that for sure we have to stay mono for the next 50 years.

27:26We're very open to the idea of being open at some point. It's just that at present, it doesn't make sense for us. We just haven't felt the, I don't know, we haven't felt the overwhelming urge to do it. So the thing that others would say, though, is, well, it's because of the jealousy, like, wouldn't it be better if it didn't require an overwhelming urge, but you could just follow a smaller urge? And in that, you're assuming like, yeah, it would be better if basically the cost was small, but currently it just isn't. It's just not that easy for the way our minds are at present, I think, to just let the other go loose.

28:04OCD on Twitter asks, has navigating the path of growth and change together or separately posed challenges for you? If so, what are the reasons behind these struggles? And if not, what factors have contributed to the smoothness of this journey? It's difficult when I would imagine it would be difficult in a relationship where one partner has to stay at home and tend to the house and family and kids and whatever, and the other partner is traveling and making career moves or even changes and therefore probably has to go through various types of growth by themselves, whereas the other one doesn't at the same time, or they don't talk about it.

28:45It could be very difficult, right? Because you're changing as a person and the other one doesn't. With us, we're just talking so much about so many things. Yeah, we changed our careers together at the time, but we both talked about what we're doing to each other quite a bit. So I feel like we grew together. Manisha asks, is there anything now, knowing what we know, we would have told each other 10 years ago when we first met? I don't know if I would want to say you've met your soulmate because then that would change. No need for that, yeah. I worry about the time causality problem. By Bitcoin.

29:23more. Yeah, buy more Bitcoin. Classic. Yes. Fold the turn against Dan Smith. Ten years ago actually would have been too late. I would have already lost Bitcoin on Mt. Gox. Shit. Get it out of Mt. Gox would have been a good idea. Josh Thompson asks do soulmates exist?

29:50I mean to the degree to which it makes sense to have the concept of a soulmate like if there is the word soulmate that is meaningful in any way then yes i think there are soulmates my feeling on those types of questions is similar to that it's like in the same category of like do you feel like you're exercising free will or do you have free will it's like well i can see you having a justified framework where free will doesn't exist, where soulmates don't exist, etc. at all, but to the degree that the concept is understood when you communicate to someone else about this, and it does make sense, then yes, I have free will, because it makes sense to assume of the other to have free will, to explain certain things that you observe.

30:38It's that way when I make decisions. And it's a more useful way to describe situations than talk about... Determinism. Yeah, that's just really hard to compute. And similarly with soulmates, it's like, yeah, some people are just so clearly so right for each other that you could describe them as soulmates, I think. What comes to me when I hear the term soulmates is this appeal to magic. Is there some kind of magical thing or something bigger and beyond what science could ever explain? And I have to say it does feel that way. But then the worst question is, do you think there is a soulmate for everyone?

31:13So the question is, is like out of the 8 billion people alive, does, you know, every single person perfectly match with someone else? With precisely one other person. That would be the... So that is actually a very detrimental view, if I think that would lead to bad outcomes if people believe that. And it doesn't seem likely to me to be true whatsoever. Right, because they're going to be always searching for perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. And you can move on. And then you get to like, what's the perfect search stop algorithm again? Yes, it's a stopping algorithm. So imagine you have, what's the average amount of friends, like people have, that they talk to at least once a month to or something.

31:51Like that would probably be the cutoff line. Like 50 people, 30, 20, something like that. I don't know, 12 maybe? Yeah, something like that. Let's call it 20. So on top of that, most of them are in couples, so most of them are not available actually. and then you also have just random people you run into while you're at the store while you're like meeting friends of friends etc how many people do people have at least some word exchange with when they are per year constantly all the time don't interact with many people at all yeah so if you're someone who interacts with very few people and you only interact with say like tens of people per year that you feel like you had sufficient opportunity to kind of understand whether there is something even like, oh, we are having a good time talking to each other.

32:41Yeah, across 100 people, are you going to find someone you gel well with? I would imagine so, right? Well, there's also the fact that if someone doesn't get to meet that many people, then their expectations, sounds bad, but it's not at all bad. But truly, I could see a world where someone's an extreme social butterfly and then they never settle down. because they're constantly meeting new people, and they're like, well, this person's even better than this, and this, and this, and this. Yeah, it can cut you in both ways. Exactly. So it's not clear that one is superior than the other. No, I'm not saying that it is at all.

33:14But, I mean, allowing for more search definitely allows to find a better partner. We could switch. You know, we could go into the interviewer chair. No. There's no need for that. I want to try sitting in that chair for once. I want to see how it feels. Hello. Hello. welcome to the win-win podcast with mr livbury

33:40skeptically sassy asks how and when is stubbornness good when is it good and positive to want and hope your partner to change evolve and when is it not i don't know i i've always struggled with the word stubbornness frankly because it's so it feels like it's just used as a weapon uh because it's hard to semantically define or it's no it's easy to semantically define but it's actually hard to define in terms of the practical thing that they believe they're being stubborn it's like what do you think is an example where a bit of stubbornness is good and where is it bad so an example where it'd be good to be stubborn is let's say you have a real passion a hobby that you love doing and your partner doesn't like the hobby that much being stubborn about keeping that hobby because it makes you happy and it's a an outlet that you would you really really enjoy that would be an example of being stubborn in a positive way right when stubbornness just means standing your ground justly right it's a good thing that you should have and uh to change and evolve and when is it not yeah there are these concepts floating about right of um never try to change them they like etc what what do you think is actually meant by it and what's the um thing that you personally believe yeah i mean i'm i can imagine when they're like oh don't try and change your partner it's it's it's all balanced like there are certain facets about you let's say when we first got together that i felt like they were just hurting you so it's really about like the intention good in yeah it's like the intention and in in are you trying to change them to please yourself at a cost to them or are you trying to change them or help them change because that will truly uplift them too in your best opinion so it's a it's coming from a position of good faithness that said like we aren't perfect evaluators of whether something is actually good for the other or not so because we don't have a view on their internal like relative exactly what's going on with them so you do probably want to defer on the side of like oh i feel the need to change them.

35:48I'm doing it because I believe it's good for them and so on but it's like you should down weight that feeling by 30 % or 50 % or whatever just because you don't actually have a full, you can't fully picture what it's like to be them and understand why their mental models want this particular thing so much. Why are you fighting for a change is the main question, right? And the example would be if you want them to dress differently because you like to think of yourself as someone who is with a hip or whatever. It's the least hip word. Someone who wears suits every day. Maybe you just love that aesthetic.

36:29If you want your partner to do that, then that's a bad reason to change. but if you're like trying to, your partner never exercises and you're trying to change and make them have a habit of exercise, that's good for them. You should fight for that change, I think. I mean, it boils down to, it's one of my favorite quotes by this guy Forrest Landry, which is, love is that which enables choice. So are you coming from this when you're trying to like, there's something about your partner that you feel like they should change? is the thing that you're trying to help them change something that will enable them to be able to be more autonomous and make their own better choices for their own well-being and for yours and so on.

37:14If that change is truly in service to that, then I could see it being something that is actually, you know, a good example of this. But if it is not in service, if it's not truly coming from this, I am trying to help them upgrade their own ability to make their own choices. if it's not coming from that as its foundation then it's probably a bad you don't want to be doing that I think that's a good question how much did money help your relationship traveling where and when doing what you want etc financial pressure adds major weight to even the perfect couple says blah blah 3377 you're just making that up that's actually their name I mean yeah very very valid point and that's one of the ways how we've been lucky is that we through kind of playing poker in our 20s we had sufficient financial freedom to travel and have a lot of novel experiences where we didn't have to turn over kind of and double look on every single item that we spent money on like it wasn't an issue to while traveling get food in a restaurant or like order room service in the hotel like those weren't questions we needed to worry about and that for sure makes things easier.

38:29Anything that adds additional pressure to relationships, whether it can be a financial thing or someone is having to caretake for an elderly, their parent or something like that, that's going to put strain on a marriage or you have a bunch of children and your time is just so constrained because you're literally just dealing with changing nappies or whatever it is, all the children's stuff. pressures in general are just going to make relationships harder. And so, again, I mean, but the same kind of principles, it's like you're going to have therefore, it's more likely that you're going to have conflicts and so on.

39:11So you just really have to have solid foundation of how you dialogue in that. And also the ability to step outside of these situations and be like, okay, well, look, we're under additional pressure right now. finances are tighter or I've got my mom living with us now and so on. Acknowledging being mad at the situation as opposed to each other is really key. I think what you said is very relevantly true across the whole domain of potential relationships. That said, specifically advising on what if our financial situation was much worse or even much better. I don't know. I don't know how it would have affected us.

39:52We only lived through the one that we had. We did live through it. Like you went on a huge downswing in poker. Oh, yeah. I was broke when we got together, actually. You were literally broke when we got together. But it's a different type of broke, right? Like it's... You had the ability to borrow, which some don't. I was like... There is... It's like people... Some people that are in business or whatever, they go broke and are like down millions, you know? And it's like, well, you have to be pretty wealthy and free to be able to be down millions because probably it means that your earning potential is so high that you can get it back.