We celebrated our 10 year anniversary in mid-2023. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the biggest lessons I’ve learnt from our time together. I think these are the 3 biggest lessons I’ve learnt:
(1) You don’t have to have the last word. Attempting to “win” debates/arguments often results in us creating mountains out of molehills. Let molehills be. Let the small things stay the small things.
This has been a particularly hard lesson for me to learn. I can’t claim to have mastered it – my competitive instincts still occasionally get the better of me. But I’ve gotten better at it. I’m better this year than I was last year and orders of magnitude better than I was 10 years ago. I hope to continue to get better.
(2) Walk away when you are angry. When you’ve been together for most of your adult life (we dated for 6 years before we got married – so we’ve covered all of our adult life), you are going to have arguments. More so when you’re younger and more impulsive. And especially so when you are short of sleep or tired after a tough spell at work or, if you choose to have kids, for long stretches of time. ;-)
And these moments can often result in us saying things we don’t mean. Those words, in turn, cause damage that is often very hard to repair. Walk away when you are angry.
Of the 3 lessons, this the lesson I’d give myself the highest improvement grades.
(3) Give a lot more than you take – in a way that works for your partner. Stephen Covey encapsulated this idea in a lovely concept called “the emotional bank account.” Bad relationships have “overdrawn” accounts while great relationships always had a healthy – maybe close to infinite – balance. That happens when we give a LOT more than we take.
But that’s not all. People value different things. We read a great book when we got married titled “His Needs, Her Needs.” Gary Chapman has done work on love languages. All of these get at the same idea – don’t give what you want to receive. Give what your partner likes to receive.
Of the 3 lessons, this is the lesson where I have the most work to do. My wife outclasses me on giving a lot more than she takes. Competing with her excellence is futile. So I go back to doing what I do best – attempting to become a bit better every day.
A wise executive once shared that she thought the most important decision most people make is deciding who to marry. I agree. I liken it to building a great team. When you have a great team, you complement each other, cover for each other, and are far better as a whole. When you have a bad team, the atmosphere is toxic and nothing meaningful gets done.
For those of us that choose to marry, our partners then become the first and most important team we build.
Choose well.
Then invest in making it great.
