331 - Business Time
Business or romantic?
This episode began as research about any special concerns to take into consideration when starting a business with a romantic partner. But given the similarities of any human relationship to a business one, it grew to also encompass what we can apply to romantic relationships that we learn from business ones.
According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and a Stanford University study about relationship longevity, both business and romantic relationships have a high breakup rate.
Statistically:
20% of small businesses fail within one year.
50% fail within five years.
One third survive after ten years.
In romantic relationships that were studied by Stanford University:
In relationships that were less than two months old, 60% did not last into the following year.
Married couples who had been wed for five years had an 8% breakup rate per year.
Relationships that had lasted over 20 years had a less than 1% breakup rate.
We have collaborated to come up with three areas to improve upon in order to have more solid, positive, and lasting relationships in both business and romance.
Autonomy
The balance between autonomy and making decisions together.
You don’t need to think exactly the same, but if you can admire and respect each other and share enthusiasm for the partnership, then it will be a strength rather than a weakness.
Did you need the relationship at all?
Rushing in too quickly and overcommitting to things.
Do we have shared values so we can be more autonomous?
Discover and determine your own values, as well as how those relate to each other, specifically when you make decisions together or for each other.
Balance
Work/life balance or relationship/individual balance.
How many hours do you expect you and your partner to spend on the business? On the relationship?
The balance here is not only for these two areas for yourself, but also how balanced you and your partner are to each other.
Equal levels of commitment and effort.
This is where one partner alleges to put in more time and energy than the other(s), which may be the case. This is often due to the perceived value of the partnership and the time and resources available. It requires a good exploration of the value of the partnership, the return on investment, commitment, and resource requirements at the start.
In relationships this often shows up as invisible household labor or emotional labor, or mental planning and management labor. Management labor is respected and expected in business relationships but often undervalued in romantic ones.
Communication
Clarity of communication, and willingness to communicate about challenging topics.
Clear agreements in place.
Discussion about what happens if those agreements are not upheld.
Ongoing communication that can change over time.
Open communication.
Transparency.
Willingness to talk.
Exit clause.
What happens if the relationship ends and to the intellectual property, profits, debts, clients, etc. in the event of it ending.
Resolve issues quickly.
RADAR in both romantic and business relationships.
Remember it’s okay to break up!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are continuing our goal of being the least romantic relationship podcast in the world by talking about business.
Dedeker: Hold on, I need to pause you right there because I didn't realize that was our goal.
Emily: I think you mean like sexy time, least sexy time podcast.
Dedeker: Although, are we romantic? Do we like-- I guess not seducing, but do we woo the listener?
Emily: If communication is romantic, then yes, we're wooing you with our communication skills.
Dedeker: I guess, yes. For all you out there who are in these nontraditional relationships and where good communication does actually turn you on, which is very much myself, then yes, it's the most romantic, erotic podcast you could probably be listening to in this time and age.
Jase: I love that. Yes. We love talking about things like research studies and communication, it's not the most traditionally romantic things, even though, yes, as Dedeker says, for us and for many others, that probably actually is so hot. For this episode, we're continuing on that theme. Originally, I started looking into this topic for us today, specifically about special concerns for starting a business or going into business with a partner, but in looking into it and looking at what kind of research there is, what people are writing about business partnerships, things like that, this theme just started showing up of, for one, it's a lot of the same kinds of stuff, just approaching it from a slightly different angle.
It's a lot of the same kinds of things we talk about on this show, but then also there are some things that show up that I actually feel like we could learn from, the way people talk about business relationships and business communication, that we could learn from those and apply them in romantic relationships and possibly some the other way, because as it turns out, human relationships are still relationships at the end of the day, go figure.
Emily: Whatever kind of human relationship you're in, even if it's not romantic, it's still a relationship. I'm really glad that we're doing this because I think we have a unique perspective on this. We've been able to keep our business together for, going on, what, seven years? Almost seven years, yes. It's pretty impressive if I do say so myself.
Jase: Through transitions in our relationships with each other, living different places, just changing as people change business.
Emily: Many, many different places.
Dedeker: A pandemic.
Emily: Yes, that too. Working totally remotely, yes, all of that has been great. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about how, first, what are some examples of how business partnerships and romantic relationships can be similar. Let's see. Family businesses, that can sometimes be a little bit on the similar side too. What happens in regular business relationships or regular romantic relationships.
Dedeker: Family businesses are a perfect example of the blend.
Emily: Yes, because you know these people, you care about them, and yet, if you're entering into a business with them or, I think--
Jase: Maybe you were born into this business.
Emily: Exactly. Family businesses being passed down over time, and then all of a sudden, you find yourself inheriting a business. That's a big thing. Also, things like running a home. That can be like kind of a business endeavor when done with other people, with one or more other people.
Jase: I recently have been taking a course, a certification course in project management, and something that they talk about a lot in that course is just how the skills in project management specifically are ones that apply already in your life. That you've already been doing project management, whether you've been doing it well or not, or what sort of scale, but anything like planning a trip, running a home, especially if you're managing getting kids to school and back on time as well as managing the home and your jobs and all of that, that all of these things are, essentially, like business skills just being applied in this more personal way at home.
Dedeker: I think that that extends to the constant trope/joke about polyamorous relationships, whereas this constant, extreme schedule management seems to fall under that. That is the same thing that people have to do in business as well when you're managing multiple clients or multiple accounts or a billion different meetings or things like that.
Emily: Things like buying a home, that entails a lot of different steps, a lot of different people to go through banks, stuff like that, that also can be similar to running a business as well, because of just how many things you're juggling in the air if you were buying a home.
Jase: We didn't put this on our list for this section, but even something like getting married, that does come a history of business arrangements. Business is very much tied in with those things. Anytime you're having contracts, and you're intertwining finances, and essentially taking on the responsibility for each other's actions in a certain way like you would if you were in business with someone.
Emily: Then finally working together and actually creating a business together. When you are romantic partners or when you just decide to enter into a relationship with another person in that way, it is also almost like a marriage in ways because you are literally signing contracts that are legal to be together for an indeterminate potentially amount of time. I don't have any other people in my life who I have contracts with other than the two of you. I was trying to recall, when did we actually become an actual business? Do you remember that?
Dedeker: Like on paperwork?
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Two thousand and .
Emily: When we actually decided to make that change, that shift between just like, "We're three buddies/partners/former partners creating a podcast together," to, "We're actually entering into this legally binding business together," I think that added some more gravitas to the situation and it made just all of us have to really, I think, internally ask the question of like, "Okay, are we ready to do this? Are we ready to commit to something that is going to continue to grow and thrive, hopefully, for the foreseeable future?" I think that's a lot more binding and you have to stay in it and be more committed to it than just like, "I'm making a podcast with my buds."
Dedeker: I know, for me, it definitely brought up a lot of questions, more philosophical questions about how it's so interesting that we have these legal constructs that we apply to human relationships. Human relationships are squishy and unpredictable and go in all these different directions versus a legal contract that's very much expecting things to stay the same or there's going to be consequences, essentially.
It brings up a lot of those questions of needing to be really clear about, I guess, marrying those two things together of how do we deal with the soft squishiness of human relationships that may change? Someone may not want to be in the business, or there may be a falling out, or there may be a financial shift. How do we marry that with, essentially, the legal and financial side of things?
Emily: This is all in keeping with one of the tools that we have created and managed into this new tool from Scrum, from the Agile Scrum business model, and that is Radar, which is our monthly relationship check-in meeting. Again, we started it by using the principles from Agile Scrum, which I know, Jase, you said that you've used a lot in your businesses. We took the best parts of that, and then we tried to make it a little bit more caring and personal, and that's when we created our Radar strategy monthly check-in thing.
Jase: It's fun when you say, "Jase, that you've used this in your businesses."
Emily: Oh, sorry, like entrepreneurialable.
Jase: Rather than, "I've used them at my jobs." It makes it sound like I own like 10 businesses.
Dedeker: Like Jase is a freaking monopolist over here.
Emily: Sorry, yes, your jobs, your jobs.
Dedeker: Jase, the secret Elon Musk of Multiamory.
Emily: If anyone were, I wouldn't--
Jase: I don't know how I feel about this, Emily.
Emily: All right, fine. No, Dedeker actually is the secret Elon Musk because she actually has a separate business than just ours, so there you go.
Dedeker: That's true. My tiny business of one.
Emily: Hey, still-- there you go. It's pretty impressive.
Jase: Emily, speaking of that Radar came out of Agile Scrum, specifically the retrospective part of Agile Scrum, but as a fun note, Radar has come back around full circle. We have, at a conference a few years ago, ran into some people who ran a business together and they told us they used Radar as their business check-in, and I've also started using Radar as a structure for leading meetings at work. It came from business, got personalized to be a little more for romantic relationships, and then it's come back around to add that personal touch back into the business side of things. Anyway, it's all interconnected.
Emily: It really is, it's great, that's lovely.
Jase: All right, let's talk about some stits and stats here. We're going to get into the stats that no one wants to hear when they're starting a business. These come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that's that 20% of small businesses fail in one year. For this study, what they mean by "fail" is just that the business doesn't exist anymore. That's a little bit of a weird measure because you don't necessarily know how that failed, were people happy with that? Was it like, "Okay, cool, that did what we wanted to do and great, we're done?"
Generally speaking, though, with businesses, that's a fairly clear indication of, "It's not around anymore, so maybe it wasn't financially viable or maybe the partnership didn't work out." 20% fail in the first year, within 5 years from starting a business, 50% will have failed, and after 10 years, only a third of those businesses will still be around.
Emily: We got to get three more years in, everyone, three more years.
Jase: Yes, to get into that.
Dedeker: Knock on wood.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: The point here is just that a lot of businesses don't end up lasting terribly long, and I think it's interesting to look at how does this relates to romantic relationships?
Dedeker: Let's compare this to romantic relationships. We're looking at a Stanford University study that was conducted between 2009 and 2012, and in the study, they surveyed people in relationships each year for a total of four years. Of the relationships that they studied that were less than two months old, 60% of those relationships were not together the following year. It seems like we can glean from that that there's something about those very, very early stages of relationships where things are pretty hit or miss, which I think based on people's lived experiences, seems like that checks out?
Jase: Yes.
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: They found that marriages that had been together for five years had an 8% break-up rate per year.
Jase: It's like on average there was like an 8% chance that any given relationship would be broken up by the following year if they'd been together about five years.
Dedeker: Yes. Then on the other extreme end, relationships that were more than 20 years old, less than 1% of those broke up during the 4 years of the study.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: What's tricky about this, and I ran into this when trying to find numbers to compare the two, is just that they're studied in very different ways. The business partnerships, there's this clear, the business was filed at this date, does it still exist as a business entity? Versus romantic relationships, where it's like, okay, generally marriage is used as the thing to measure because it does have that clear on paper beginning and end, but it's not quite the same in that, I guess just the way we look at it. How long have they been together before getting married?
There's just a lot of factors that it's harder to study. I guess you could say the same about certain businesses. Maybe people were already doing these things independently and then joined together to make a business. If we look at these numbers that are presented in very different ways, essentially, though, we do get this picture of the early times, these first five years, a lot of them aren't going to make it past that, a lot of them are just going to end before that. Then of the ones that last, the longer you've lasted, the more likely it is you're going to keep lasting in both cases.
Emily: That's interesting. Makes sense. I think if people are like, "Okay, this is working, let's keep it going." Something catastrophic, I feel, would have to happen for us at this point to be like, "Never mind, we're done with each other."
Dedeker: Again, knock on wood. Really knocking on wood this entire episode.
Emily: Sure, all right.
Dedeker: We'll make sure that our editor edits out that in the background, my just constant knocking on my desk. I think I did read somewhere and I didn't have a chance to pull the actual statistics for this, so I'm pulling this out of the air, but I feel like I remember reading somewhere that particularly with friendships, once you've made it past six or seven years of being in friendship with someone, the chances that the friendship will end or peter out drops to very, very low. That there's something about those first few years of friendship where maybe life circumstances may cause you to just not stay in touch anymore.
We go through these periods of university being a transitional period or moving to a different town from where we grew up being a transitional period where we're likely to lose friends or lose friends, but once you reach that particular turning point, chances are you're going to probably stay friends for life or stay in touch for life. I think that in my personal experience, that's been the case. It is interesting to look at both business and romantic relationships and friendship relationships to see this turning point where the chances of "failure" tend to decrease.
Jase: Something that, unfortunately, there's just not a lot of research on is that question that we talk about a lot with romantic relationships of getting away from this idea that break up means failure and that you might end a relationship or at least end a relationship in one certain way, a certain way of that relationship looking, that might end in both of you feel great about it.
I did come across one article in this that did talk a little bit about when business partnerships fail or split up or separate that there is also a percentage of those who look back and say, "Yes, that was a successful partnership. It just ran its course," or, "We transitioned out," or, "Moved on to something else." I guess for all of this, keep that little grain of salt that looking at just the numbers doesn't quite give you all of the meaning.
Emily: You and I finished our romantic relationship, Jase, and yet we entered into a business relationship, which actually was probably more legally binding than the previous relationship that we were in.
Dedeker: See, that is the weird irony.
Emily: That's ironic.
Dedeker: I think that's the kind of the questions that came up for me when I entered into the specific on paper business relationship with the three of you, was that weird thing of so many people look at my relationships and think they're illegitimate because not only are they non-monogamous but also their unmarried and entwined in that way, but then I've had this business partnership that's entangled me in this particular way. I don't know, it makes me want to be irate with people, essentially, is what I'm trying to say.
Emily: Got it. Okay.
Jase: Wasn't where you were going with that. All right.
Emily: There it is. All right, so now we're going to get into the heart of this episode and our thesis of what we're going for here with this business relationship stuff. All of these things that we found were from a variety of sources, including Harvard Business Review, the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Forbes Magazine, and Business Insider. We looked at points in these articles, and then we also put together our own personal experiences in relationships, our own experience having these three business partnerships that we've done and we categorized all of this into the ABC of relationships.
These are three areas to examine and improve upon in order to have more solid, positive, and lasting relationships in a business or in your romantic life. That this is just the thesis of our show, basically, is what you're saying.
Dedeker: Yes, it's the same thing as always.
Emily: Yes, of course. Here we go, ABC, it's going to be autonomy, balance, and communication. Of course. Let's do it, let's get into it.
Dedeker: First things first, let's talk about autonomy, the darling of the non-monogamous community.
Emily: Love it.
Dedeker: Of course, in a business relationship or romantic relationship, there needs to be a balance between autonomy, individual autonomy, and making decisions together as a team. Of course, you don't need to think exactly the same as your partner, but if you can admire each other, respect each other, share an enthusiasm for the relationship, that's going to be a strength rather than a weakness.
We have a quote here from Leslie Smolan who wrote an article for Business Insider, and Leslie has been in a design business partnership for over 40 years. They say, "There's something about finding someone who continues to just intrigue you and interest you. You look at them and say, 'Wow, this person is amazingly talented and I'm so privileged to be in our other half.'"
Emily: I love that.
Dedeker: It's such an interesting sentiment that sounds on the one hand very, very romantic but also can come up in a business context as well. That it's something about having that admiration and respect almost for the other person's autonomy that can help you the juice that makes it a little bit easier.
Jase: This was one of those things that in reading it I was like, "Yes, if you ever wanted to make the case that business partnerships and romantic partnerships have a lot in common in terms of what makes them successful, it's this line right here," because she's talking about it very much just as a business partnership, but using phrases like "the other half" and "wow, this person is amazingly talented."
Dedeker: Oh, okay, yes. I didn't even get that. When I read that quote, I assumed, "Oh, she must be in business with her romantic partner."
Jase: No, and that's what's so cool about it.
Dedeker: She would say that about this person.
Jase: Yes, I love that.
Emily: That's lovely, and I think it's so true in relation to the two of you. The fact that we all three of us have our own set individual skills that we're good at and that we can lean on the others for, and that's such a lovely thing, and we are constantly, I hope, learning new things and also gaining new insights about ourselves and each other along with this.
Dedeker: We also have individual autonomous things that we each do that annoy the hell out of each other at the same time.
Emily: I suppose you're right, but I was trying to be nice.
Dedeker: No, no, I think the positives outweigh the negatives, for sure. That's what makes it work.
Emily: Yes, for sure.
Jase: I think that then to go to the way that this is phrased and looking at business is about finding what are the things that you need to decide on together and what are the things that each of you could do individually and trust each other to make good choices for your business? I think that when you think about that in romantic relationships, I know that for myself, at least, I've often struggled to feel like I can make a lot of autonomous choices without always having to check in with my partner about everything, but then also we've probably all run into people who make all their autonomous choices and never check in. Finding that balance between those and even maybe communicating about that more explicitly can be really useful for finding that balance of autonomy.
Speaking of autonomy, this leads us to one of the questions that I found fascinating that came up in these articles, which is to ask yourself this question of, do I need this partnership at all? In business, this is phrased more in the idea of before you go into an actual official business partnership with someone, evaluate, is a partnership the right type of relationship, or is this more than one person wants to have this business and the other person could be a consultant or could help them out with it, or maybe some other type of relationship besides equal business partners?
Emily: I've listened on various podcasts people talking about their business partnerships and how they really want it to be. That somebody has 51% equity and the other person has 49% so that somebody always has the higher decision-making process or something as opposed to--
Dedeker: That was a little bit more of the engine.
Emily: I guess, yes. That was an interesting thing to think about and I'm like, "That's not how we run our business," but there is more of a push/pull-- Again, I wouldn't want to do a business with only two people. I think three in a lot of ways is the magic number because, yes, if we need to gang up on someone, then we can.
Emily: I'm totally kidding. Or if one person needs to be the mediator, then they can also do that as well, but yes, it's nice. Three feels like the magic number, two seems really dicey, potentially.
Jase: Two is much more common and tends to be much more common. I think that maybe that's worked out for us, and I don't know, necessarily, that that's a universal truth.
Dedeker: I think asking this question makes a lot of sense of really trying to simplify it and get real about, do I actually want an equal business partnership with this person, or would I actually really love having more decision-making power, and then this other person can be the consultant, can come in and be support occasionally? Whether that looks like one person owning more percentage of a business or not, or whether it looks like a totally different relationship, I think that is really important to ask.
Jase: Or even for yourself, maybe it's that I would actually be happier just working for this company and being an important part of it, but not necessarily owning a business. Just all these questions come up. Then when we tie this to what does this look like in romantic relationships, it's that question of, is X, whatever type of relationship we're talking about, is that actually the right partnership for us based on what we each want and learning how to be real honest with yourself about that of maybe a friends with benefits type of relationship actually is the best possible setup for us, but maybe we like each other and so we've thought, "Oh, well, I guess we should do this kind of partnership," whether that's monogamy, or that, "Maybe we should live together or something."
Dedeker: Maybe just co-parenting.
Jase: Right, but there's just so many different ways it can look, and so it's not to just assume that it should always be this one type of partnership. Then the other thing that goes along with that is rushing in. Essentially, what they talked about in a lot of these business articles was effectively NRE, it's about too much too fast, whether that's starting your business too fast without really ironing out some of these things with someone, or it's after you've started the business, trying to rush, rush, rush to make it into something bigger than it's ready to be yet.
Emily: Hiring too many people at once.
Jase: Yes, all sorts of things. Overcommitting yourself, getting into too much debt, all these things that happen to businesses all the time. Reading that was like, yes, yes, yes, samesies in romantic relationships. It's that you can do all those things, either just getting into the relationship too fast or trying to relationship escalator that relationship too fast, or any number of things.
Dedeker: Or signing something in the first year.
Emily: Getting married after three months. Stuff like that. That makes a lot of sense.
Dedeker: Another really import of autonomy, both in business and romantic relationships, is determining, do we have some sort of shared values or shared value system? If we have shared values, that actually allows us to, I think, ironically, have more autonomy. It's like what we were describing earlier where it's like, we don't have to have the same thought. We don't have to agree on everything at the same time, but we can have shared values, which makes it a little bit easier for when we do disagree or when we are running into some kind of conflict.
We've talked a lot about discovering, determining your own values. We recommend going back and listening to Multiamory Episode 319, which was all about figuring out your values, both as an individual and together with your romantic partner, and it could be potentially together with a business partner or three or six or however many you like.
It's these important questions of figuring out how do these things relate to each other, specifically in the areas where you make decisions together or for each other? I know from our personal experience with Multiamory, we never really did a very specific values exercise because we were just like, "Podcast," whatever, just fell into it, but over time, we have had like many, many, many, many, many hours of conversations and many hours of figuring out things like mission statements and trying to get more clear on our values.
I know for myself that has really helped in the times when we don't know what the hell to do about something or we're really split about what we should do in a particular situation or we run into some kind of disagreement around that, that having a sense of shared values really helps me I know to trust the two of you, especially to know that like you're going to make decisions, even if we don't have to necessarily run them by each other 100% of the time, but that you're going to make decisions based on the shared value system that we have.
I guess that also extends to my romantic relationships. That I have to have the sense of trust that my partner has my back. That they're taking actions that are both in their interests and also in my best interest, and they're also taking actions that uphold the shared values that we have in our partnership, and so that's why it's really important to be clear on those things is that then there can be more autonomy. I don't need to be micromanaging every single decision that my partner makes, or my partner doesn't have to be micromanaging every single decision that I want to make.
Emily: I do so appreciate the trust that the three of us, I think, have for each other, because I was listening to a podcast recently talking about the big, big CEOs of the tech industry right now and how so many of them don't really people to rein them in very much. I think that that's something that the three of us do so well, is that if somebody is going off on a tangent or feeling really shitty that day or telling each other like, "Fuck this podcast. We're terrible," or whatever, then the other is able to rein that person into a degree and be like, "Hey, let's come back down to earth. Let's figure this out together," or maybe, "What can I do to make your life better in this moment?"
I just appreciate so much that I have that level of respect and knowledge that the two of you will be there for me and vice versa if we need it.
Dedeker: If one of us goes into a power coma and starts becoming super greedy, then the other two rein them in so that they can't become the terrible Elon Musk of the non-monogamy podcast.
Jase: I thought we established that Dedeker was Elon Musk.
Emily: All right. Fine. It's a perfect analogy, considering.
Dedeker: I would be if I didn't have the two of you reining me in.
Jase: There we go. Now you see what's going on.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: What's interesting about this question about values and how it relates to autonomy is that there's two levels of values. On the one hand there is just having these shared life values or just ethical values, which while the three of us didn't sit down and spell those out when we started this, we had been doing the podcast together for a while and did know that that's something where we aligned for the most part in just terms of how we think about ethics and how we think about behaviors, but then that combined with those more concrete values like Dedeker was talking about establishing things like a mission statement, or like, what is your company's reason for being.
I think that's an interesting concept to bring into romantic relationships too, is this blend of what our values we've explicitly agreed upon that maybe are good for us to remind ourselves of if we're having conflict or we're having trouble making decisions, or we're feeling worried about something, we can check in on these formalized values, but then it's also still really important to share these more core values with each other as well. If you don't share those, it's going to be a lot harder to make that relationship work out, whether it's business or a romantic relationship.
Emily: Absolutely.
Dedeker: We're going to be moving on to talking about the B and C, talking about balance and communication, but before we do that, we're going to take a moment to talk about our sponsors for this week's episode.
Emily: Now we're going to talk about the B in our ABCs, and that is balance. Work-life balance, yikes, that's something that I'm not great at. I don't know about the two of you, actually, I'm rather horrible at it.
Dedeker: I'm not great at it.
Jase: No.
Emily: I know you both are not great at it.
Dedeker: We have a shared value of really poor work-life balance and that equals success.
Emily: I got to say, this is something that my partner who also owns a business is actually phenomenal at. I really look at him as the gold standard of this because he very much turns it the hell off and is able to like to sit down and play Dark Souls for three hours and not look at his phone and it's very impressive. I don't know how to do that because I'm working all the time.
Jase: Just hearing describe that filled me with anxiety.
Emily: I know. I know. I know.
Jase: I'm sick to my stomach just thinking about it.
Emily: I hear you. I hear you.
Jase: I can't even imagine a world where that exists. Listeners, please do not look to us for inspiration on this. We recognize that this is a problem in all of our individual lives and we're working on it, but we also enable each other to a certain extent.
Emily: Do what we say and not what we do, please, because that's better, to have a good work-life balance, it's very important. In work, if you have balance, this is a work-life balance and that's the ideal, hopefully. You can ask yourself how many hours do you expect you and your partner or you and your business partners or you and your romantic partner to spend on your business or on your work. I think this is something interesting to also talk about in romantic life too because I think my partner sometimes, it's like, "Why the fuck are you still working right now when I'm chilling and having a good time at home and you're like still on?"
Dedeker: I'm like, "You don't understand. Shut up."
Jase: For sure. I think that what you're hitting on here though, Emily, is a really interesting question of, it's not just a question of balance in terms of what is your work-life balance, but it's with your business partners, do you all roughly agree on what work-life balance is? If you imagine, if you were someone who's very much like five o'clock, no matter what, I'm off, not responding to anything, and you have a business partner who's like, "No, we're starting a business," there's an expectation that we're going to be really dedicated to this at least for a while, that if those are imbalanced and that's not clearly defined, that's going to rip apart that business partnership in a hurry.
Emily: Yes. I really, really agree, and I think that this is something that's challenging for a lot of people entering into a business together because some will feel like that super, super, "I have such a huge work ethic and drive, and so I'm going to constantly work. That means that everybody else should be doing that as well." Whereas some people are like, "No, I've got a work-life balance, and I am going to turn off, and that is what makes me fulfilled and happy, is that I'm able to like do my own things sometimes." That's something to think about because I think that that can get jumbled pretty easily with this balance thing that we're talking about.
In romance, this can look like how much time are we expecting each other or ourselves to spend together versus maintaining separate relationships with friends, with family, with mentors, people that you care about, stuff like that because, again, some people will have the expectation of, "Hey, I want you to be with me 24/7 or most of the time," and other people will have the expectation of, "I really want to spend 40% or 30% of my time with other people, and you're going to have to deal with that." That's something to think about here.
Balance is not only balancing these two areas of your life for yourself but how balanced each of them are for your significant other and you, so internal and external balance with your partner or partners.
Dedeker: Again, to connect it back to the values thing is that that's why it's important to think about these things because the way that we value work or play or work-life balance, in general, and having a partner who shares some of those values, or at least understands us and can respect us even when we're different, is really, really huge for a partnership to continue.
Balance is also really related to finding equal or relatively equal levels of both commitment and effort. Of course, there's a situation where there may be one partner who alleges to be putting in more time and energy than the other person, which may be the case, and much of this is down to the perceived value of the partnership venture and the time and resources available.
A good exploration of the value of the partnership, the return on investment, commitment, resource requirements at the start, that's going to inform an agreement that clearly sets out to identify what's the effort required of each partner to make, in this case, the business work. Again, there's so many overlaps with romantic relationships as well because this shows up often as emotional labor or as invisible household labor or the mental planning, mental load management labor.
Things like that, often, specifically management labor, mental labor, Jase talked about the project management labor at the beginning of the episode, those are the things that are often highly respected in business, but it's often undervalued in romantic relationships.
It reminds me of, there's a really famous comic floating around out there by a French artist, and, again, I don't have the name in front of me, but where she lays out the fact that traditionally for a lot of women in traditional heterosexual relationships married with kids, women are often expected to take on this project management role of managing the kids' schedule, the cleaning schedule, the cooking schedule, and project management is its own role in the business world.
You hire a project manager where that's the only thing that that person does. They don't also do the project. They don't also execute on the project because it's a lot of labor in and of itself just to manage the project. Yet, traditionally, women are expected to both be the project manager, keep all the schedules, and the executer of all those things at the same time, and hence it leads to a lot of women just feeling completely depleted all the time.
That is a really interesting thing is that, in business, we're much more careful about seeing that delineation and seeing how much labor certain things take, but then when it comes to the household, that tends to fall apart. That's why it is really important to talk about these things with a partner and to be very specific as well because, like we said, a lot of this can become invisible and completely not thought about. I don't think there's a lot of people out there even talking about things like mental load or mental labor because it can't really be seen. For some reason, we can quantify it in business, but we have a harder time quantifying it in a household or in a romantic nesting partnership.
Jase: I think that's one of the things that stood out to me in reading a lot of this stuff about business partnerships, of just how in the business world-- I feel like, in the business world, there's less of this sense that you can take for granted the work that anyone else in the business is doing or the role of any particular person in it in a way that I think we are taught, whether it falls down those kinds of traditional gender roles, like Dedeker was just describing, or just anything else about like, "I expect that any partner will do X, Y, and Z, and that they'll do it in these amounts."
What I really found interesting was, reading about this, where in business you don't take as many of those things for granted, and so you do think about them more consciously. I think that's a really valuable thing that we could bring into romantic relationships.
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: All right. Are we ready for the big C?
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Big C.
Jase: Big C. Okay. Communication.
Emily: Our favorite.
Jase: I love it. Now, again, the same thing in reading about this, what I love about-- and I recommend this to all of you out there, look up stuff about business communication, things like that. Business communication is generally explained as if we have no communication skills at all. It's like, they really take it down to this really base level of, "Try saying thank you or being nice to someone when you ask them to do something." It's so basic, just like, "Really. Really."
I actually really liked that about it that I think that, again, we take a lot of that communication for granted, which is where the whole idea-- One of the questions that we will get when it comes to something like Radar as a regular check-in is this like, "Can't you just talk about things like a normal person as they come up?" One,--
Emily: You can, but you shouldn't.
Dedeker: I don't know about that.
Emily: I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Jase: One, is that you can, but there's this assumption that just that communication is enough, and it's going to be as effective and that's all you'll need and that there's no benefit to being intentional about it. Then, again, if you thought about, can you imagine a business guidebook saying, "If you're a business partnership, just talk about it when it comes up, no big deal. You don't need to take notes or anything, just talk about things as they come up," no business persons can recommend that business model for you.
One of the first categories here is specifically clarity of communication and also a willingness to communicate about challenging topics in a clear way. This comes up with things like agreements, talks about what happens if those agreements aren't upheld, which I think often is this kind of dot, dot, dot in relationships of, "We agree we're going to do this dot, dot dot," with no sense of, "What happens then? What does this mean for us? How serious are these? How negotiable are these? What's the process for changing them?" that we just assume we don't need to talk about that.
Also, I guess, just this idea that these agreements can change over time. In business, this can be a little different because you have contracts, as we talked about at the beginning, that assume things are a little more static, but actually, something that for those of you contract lawyers out there are probably already aware of this, but actually, in contract law, most of us are taught to think of it as this kind of iron-clad thing that never changes and that's never negotiable.
Actually, contracts are written intentionally to have certain amounts of non-precision, use certain terms that are not set in stone about exactly what they mean, specifically because you can't interpret every single thing that's going to happen, and that that's then the job of mediation or courts or whatever to then look at, "Has this actually violated what this is saying?" rather than trying to spell out every single little detail.
Then also just going along with that clarity and also being open to talk about those uncomfortable things, this one tends to come up with money, both in business partnerships and romantic relationships, it's one of the leading causes of divorce, is arguments about money. It's also something that many of us are hesitant to really talk openly and clearly and transparently about with our partners. It's just, again, both in business partnerships, being able to talk about those uncomfortable things, is really important, and that applies in romantic relationships as well.
Emily: This is something that upon reading this, I was like, "Wait a minute, we haven't really discussed this, but maybe it is an interesting thing to get into," and that's an exit clause. Things like what happens to intellectual property, to profits, to debts, to maybe clients you have, if that's the kind of business that you are involved in, other considerations in the event of or when the partnership venture ceases.
This is really interesting because it's difficult to have a contingency plan for absolutely everything, but a lot of people will have prenups in their marriages. It's precisely for this reason, it's a question of, "Hey, what's going to happen from a monetary standpoint if this does end?" I think in partnerships that are business partnerships, for sure, this is something to think about because like those statistics say, a lot of businesses fail, a lot of businesses end for whatever reason, so it's good to at least have that in mind, a contingency plan in case.
Dedeker: Of course, I think on this show we do often encourage people, in relationship, think about the end, you can create the beginning with the end in mind, which is so hard. It's not like a fun thought experiment, really, it's not something anyone really wants to sit down and talk to their partner about, but both if you're getting in a situation where you are choosing to get more entangled with someone, maybe choosing to get married, choosing to have kids, choosing to open a business, choosing to move in together, choosing to buy a house together, that that's crucial to think about that of, okay, what if someone leaves the relationship? What if someone dies? God forbid. Or even, what if it's just someone's not interested in the house anymore? What if someone's just not interested in the business anymore? What's going to happen then?
This doesn't even apply, it doesn't even necessarily have to always be about, what if we break up? but it can just be about, what if the living situation isn't working anymore? How is that going to go? How are we going to unentangle that? Is that going to automatically cause some major fallout in our relationship? These are some really, really important questions to ask.
I always love recommending a particular TED talk by her name is Jeannie Suk Gersen. She's a divorce lawyer, and the TED Talk is titled, How understanding divorce can help your marriage. It's a 10 minute TED talk, and it has been stuck in my brain for years now because it's so, so, so insightful for asking these really important and also tough questions about shared property, shared space, how we feel about the sacrifices that we each made in the relationship, really, really deep, sometimes challenging stuff, but I think really, really important. I really recommend everyone go out and listen to that TED talk.
Emily: I know something that the three of us talk about sometimes is like, "This week, I am working really hard," or, "That week, I'm doing a bunch of stuff," and I think sometimes it can cause resentment to come up a bit. This is interesting, just how sometimes things like that can fester, especially in romantic relationships over a long period of time. I love that you just said that, thinking about the sacrifices, or whatever you want to call it, that one makes in any type of relationship and sort of how that will manifest if it ends, and what a person thinks that they should be compensated for in lieu of that.
Jase: I think that it also, in looking at that in a romantic relationship, when we think about the end in terms of a divorce, specifically, I think it then-- I think kind of what that Ted talk is getting at is something we talked about in the previous section, which is all this kind of invisible work that can get done, or these sacrifices maybe you made in the hopes that then you'll get a chance to pursue your thing later. It's like, what if that doesn't happen? How long can that go before that happens? It gets you thinking about those things in a more concrete way like you'd be more likely to do in a business than a lot of us think in romantic relationships.
Emily: Finally, let's resolve issues quickly. When we have communication, and when we have good communication and something comes up that is challenging, let's try to resolve it as quickly as possible. Things that you can do are, we talked about it before, have a radar, have regular check-ins, and set aside time for repairs so that you don't end up with a backlog of resentment or unresolved conflicts.
I think that's super important for whatever type of relationship you're in just simply because I know for myself, I will let things fester, I will be like, "It's easier to just not speak about it or keep it under wraps or just get over it or learn to live with it or whatever," but especially in business, that's super, super important to not let it fester because you're just going to potentially resent your business partners, and that's not a good thing at all.
Jase: Then finally, it's okay to break up. It's okay to end a business partnership. I was actually just having a conversation with a friend of mine just yesterday, talking about this idea that staying in a relationship that's not serving either of you isn't doing anyone a favor. I think we often think of it that way of like, "Oh, well, I'm being nice," or, "I'm doing this for them," or like, "This is the right thing to do," or, "This is a good thing to do." In reality, that's not serving either of you if the relationship isn't working out. Whether it is or not, that's a more nuanced question, and that's a little harder to think about, but just be aware of it.
For this, we have a couple of quotes about this in business, but I think the same principles apply really well in romantic relationships. This first one is from Patrick Hull, who wrote this on forbes.com. Like any relationship, a business partnership holds a great deal of promise. However, sometimes it doesn't work out. That's all right. Don't stay in a business partnership if you believe it's no longer viable. I've learned that it's better to end the partnership and regroup than to force something that's not working.
Emily: We have one from Philip Thurston for Harvard Business Review. Although constructive solutions are far from easy to come by, I urge partners who have fallen out not to suffer along with the status quo. I see that as the most costly choice for their personal lives and for their businesses. Something to leave you with, it's okay to break up, it's okay to not suffer along the status quo, as Philip Thurston from Harvard Business Review said.
Jase: Exactly. We're going to be going on to record a bonus now, where we're going to be talking about the seven C's of effective communication from an article on proofhub.com. This, again, is a really cool way of breaking down communication in this very, very, very basic way for business people because, like we said, that's how a lot of business articles about communication are written, that I think is also a really neat glimpse into how we can apply those in our more personal relationships.