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If you’ve been struggling to achieve a perfectly equitable marriage, you’re not alone. Research shows that even couples who prioritize equality often find themselves fighting about fairness in their relationship.
That was the experience of today’s guests, Nate and Kaley Klemp, two high-achieving individuals, who started their marriage believing in a model of fairness, only to discover that, in reality, that balance was virtually impossible to achieve.
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It was out of this frustration that they developed what they call The 80/80 Marriage, a model rooted in radical generosity and shared success, which led to them co-authoring the New York Times bestselling book The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. We talk with Nate and Kaley about the concept of the 80/80 marriage, why fixating on fairness doesn’t work, and how adopting a mindset of radical generosity can transform your relationship. Our conversation also gets into key aspects of their book, like being intentional about each person’s role, creating explicit values, and setting priorities and boundaries together. Join us for a fascinating conversation on equality, radical generosity, and how to strive for an 80/80 relationship!
Key Points From This Episode
- Introducing today’s guests, Nate and Kaley Klemp.
- The story of how they met and got married.
- Why the first two years of their marriage were so challenging.
- The many ways couples fight about fairness and why it causes resentment.
- How they wrote the 80/80 Marriage together.
- The concept of an 80/80 relationship, and how it differs from one that is 50/50.
- Why it’s about striving for balance and radical generosity.
- Steps to creating the right mindset for an 80/80 marriage.
- How to create the structure for an 80/80 relationship.
- Building a bridge between mindset and structure through values.
- How to take a more intentional approach to your roles as a couple.
- Setting priorities and boundaries as a couple (and why it can be so liberating).
- Insights on what to do when you have an unwilling or reluctant partner.
- How to approach your partner about entering an 80/80 relationship.
- Nate’s new book Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World.
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Transcript
“KK: I think that there’s a way that you can tell our story, especially the early years, and think, “Wow, that’s such a fairy tale. Let them go and they’ll come back to you if it’s true love.” What’s absent in that rendition of the story is that our first two years of marriage were really, really hard. Part of what was so hard about them was that Nate and I had each been trained for our entire youth.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:33] SJ: This is The Bad Girls Bible Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Jameson, and this is the place where I interview experts and professionals and everyone in between to teach you how to dramatically improve your relationships and have more enjoyable sex more often. If you’re not already subscribed to The Bad Girls Bible Podcast, you just need to open your podcasts app, search for Bad Girls Bible, and hit that subscribe button, so you get the latest episodes delivered straight to you the moment they are released.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:06] SJ: Today, I’m talking to Nate and Kaley Klemp. They’re the New York Times best-selling authors of the book, The 80/80 Marriage. Nate’s also published a new book, Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World. Guys, Nate, Kaley, thanks so much for coming on the show.
[0:01:23] KK: So happy to be with you, Sean.
[0:01:25] NK: Yeah, it’s so good to be here, Sean.
[0:01:26] SJ: Great. I’d love to know, I guess, how you two met and then how you came to write The 80/80 Marriage.
[0:01:35] NK: We met about 27 years ago. We were 17-years-old.
[0:01:41] SJ: Guys, you look so young.
[0:01:42] NK: I know. We do. We’re both in our mid-40s.
[0:01:44] KK: It’s been that when we were babies.
[0:01:46] NK: We met when we were 17-years-old. We both grew up in Boulder, Colorado and went to the same high school. As cheesy as it sounds, we were actually chemistry lab partners. That was our meet-cute moment is that we would study for chemistry tests together. Then all of a sudden, we started dating.
[0:02:05] KK: The chemistry puns were outrageous at our wedding.
[0:02:09] NK: We went to prom together as high schoolers here in America. Then we actually dated right until we were both about to enter our university. We were going to the same one. We decided, we were just too young that it just didn’t make sense. We ended up breaking up, but we’re still friends for about seven years. Then when we were in our mid-20s, about 24-years-old, we reconnected. That’s when we moved in together and got engaged and got married. Then you should maybe tell how we got to the book. That doesn’t lead one to write a book about marriage.
[0:02:52] SJ: Before the book, I’d love to know if it was a good thing, if it was a bad thing, taking that seven-year break?
[0:02:58] KK: I think it was an essential thing for us that I don’t know that I would have appreciated Nat as much if I hadn’t really seriously dated other people besides him. There are plenty of folks who marry their first love, more power to them. But for me, I needed the reference point to be like, “Well, that FOMO that I had, it was pretty misguided.”
[0:03:19] SJ: How did you come to write the book then?
[0:03:21] KK: Yeah. I think that there’s a way that you can tell our story, especially the early years and think, “Wow, that’s such a fairy tale. Let them go and they’ll come back to you if it’s true love.” What’s absent in that rendition of the story is that our first two years of marriage were really, really hard. Part of what was so hard about them was that Nate and I had each been trained for our entire youth to go be exceptional, to go achieve alone. As you know, go to university, go get a job, go be outstanding by yourself.
Then all of a sudden, we got together and the mandate changed completely. Where all of a sudden, now we were supposed to be a team and we were supposed to share. Nate was actually a better sharer, even though he’s the only child in our relationship. There is something about that where I started to do everything and I was quite controlling. I didn’t leave any space. Nate was doing nothing. I felt super resentful and we got to a breaking point. I think part of The 80/80 Marriage is the book that we wish we had had early in our relationship as we were striving to create a life together that felt like, this is my person. I love Nate so, so much. How come we were creating so much drama with each other?
[0:04:44] SJ: What is the 80/80 marriage, as opposed to the 50/50 marriage?
[0:04:48] NK: Well, let’s start with the 50/50 side of things, because I think that’s a good place to anchor. We interviewed about a 100 people in the process of writing this book about their relationships, because we really wanted to understand beyond just us, what is the condition of modern love? One of the themes that kept coming up again and again was this theme of fighting about fairness. That couples would describe all the ways in which they’re trying to achieve this 50/50 goal, but the more they tried to make everything fair, the more they would have this elaborate mental scorecard of all the things they did, compared against what their partner wasn’t doing, the more they seemed to suffer, the more they experienced resentment.
We started to realize at a macro level, what’s happening here is that we’re really the first generation in all of human history, striving toward equal marriage. Our parents didn’t really do that. Our grandparents definitely didn’t do that. There’s something new that’s happening here that we’re having to figure out for the first time. The default way of solving that problem of being equals and in love is this idea of 50/50 fairness. This idea that if we just make everything perfectly fair, we’re somehow going to hit that point of fairness. We’re going to send to the heavens of marital bliss and everything’s going to be amazing. If you’ve ever tried that, we’ve certainly tried that. You know, it just doesn’t work.
[0:06:19] SJ: When you say 50/50, you mean, I do laundry one week, you do the laundry next week. You pick up the kids one week, I pick up the kids next week.
[0:06:28] KK: You’re exactly right. There are four different faces of fairness that we talk about a lot. There are actually six in the book that you can read about. Before example, so the ones that you’re giving we think about is in the realm of chores and domestic areas, where I unloaded the dishwasher last time, and so now it’s your turn to unload the dishwasher. I made dinner, so you do the dishes. Or that trade off of to be fair. It also shows up in other realms. We saw it a lot in social situations. Well, we went out with my friends last week. I guess, we’ll go out with your friends this week. Or the one that nearly broke us was with our families that we had this whole elaborate system around the holidays. We had left. We were living in California. We were going to come visit our parents for Christmas.
[0:07:18] SJ: When there’s more people involved, I know it myself.
[0:07:21] KK: It’s insane, right? There was this sense of like, well, all right, so we’re going to spend the 24th and the 25thwith Nate’s parents, and with that extended family and everyone’s going to be there. Then we’re going to go spend time with my family, and so they get the 26th, 27th and a bonus day. They also get the 28th, because Nate’s family got the real holiday, so we have to make it actually fair, so there’s a bonus day to try to make this even scorecard.
I’m telling you, Sean, we thought about what hour we were going to leave Nate’s family’s house to go to my family’s house. It was so intense trying to figure out what made it fair. All of this to say, when we asked couples in the abstract, well, do you guys fight about fairness? They’re like, “Nah.” But then we would hear them tell us stories of all these different ways that things were unfair.
I’ll give you one more story. We were on a podcast and we were talking to a gentleman where he and his partner had just had a baby. So much so that he was interviewing us with a sleeping baby on his chest, which was, I don’t know what deal was made in his house to make that happen. His partner walked by while he was reading our book. She said to him, she was like, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice to have enough spare time to read a book?” He was like, “No, no, no. This is not about fair time, or equal amounts of time with the baby. I’m at work right now.” That’s just another example of like, fairness is sometimes slippery and sneaky.
[0:08:49] SJ: How do you then – maybe you’re a couple, you come to the realization, “Hey there’s this resentment building, mental scorecards. Let’s fix this.” How do you start on that journey to an 80/80 marriage?
[0:09:03] NK: Yeah. Well, I think there’s one more piece about fairness that is actually the answer to your question before you get to something like 80/80, which is to go even deeper into an understanding of why this fairness fight, or this attempt to achieve fairness isn’t working. The answer to that comes from a lot of really interesting science and research in psychology that they’ve done, where they’ve actually done time studies of couples, where they follow around couples, measure how much time they’re spending on various things. Then they ask them questions like, how much time did you spend on those things? What they found is thing one, we are all subject to what’s called availability bias, which is a fancy way of saying, I can see everything that I’m doing, all of my wonderful contributions to our life happening in real time.
When it comes to what Kaley’s doing, her driving our kid to school, her helping our kid make lunch, or whatever it might be, I only see a small fraction of that. There’s this systematic tendency for me to underestimate what she’s doing. Then you add on top of that, what’s called overestimation bias, which is the thing they’ve observed, where basically, when it comes to housework and when it comes to childcare, we tend to radically overestimate the amount of time we spend on these tasks. In other words, if I say like, “Oh, I spent 30 minutes cleaning up the kitchen.” It was probably more like 15 minutes. You put these two together.
I think it’s really helpful, because you start to see why striving toward fairness never works, can never work. Because we’re basing these assessments of what is or isn’t fair on really bad data, essentially pure delusion. That’s why I say, that’s the starting point is just to see that this default mode that we’ve all been conditioned to pursue in our relationships, it’s absolutely never going to work. That opens the space for something different, which is what we call 80/80.
[0:11:08] KK: Yeah. Definition of terms, 80/80 is essentially striving to contribute 80% in your relationship. Actually, it doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s no such thing as a 160% of anything. The whole idea is like, it doesn’t make sense. Strive. In both parties striving for 80%, you land somewhere in the space of balance. Not fairness per se, but somewhere in the space of balance, somewhere in the space of equality. What that allows you to have is a mindset of radical generosity, and that radical generosity mindset then lets you build the scaffolding that you need for your life, things like roles and priorities and boundaries from a solid foundation.
I’ll tell you a story that happened this morning that I think illustrates it. This morning, Nate is unloading the dishwasher, and I’m still in the bathroom getting out of the shower. I yell at the kitchen, “Hey, leave half for me.” Which is actually just pure 50/50 mindset right there.
[0:12:19] NK: Yeah, I’ll unload half. Leave half for her, walk away from the dishwasher, have you do your half and then we’re both good.
[0:12:27] KK: Nate, much more embodying mindset of radical generosity. He’s like, “I got it, babe.” Came out of the shower and I was like, “Thank you so much for unloading the dishwasher.” He was like, “No problem.” In a 50/50 mindset, what happens in that moment instead is, he then keeps track, right?
[0:12:46] NK: Right. If I were to be in my 50/50 default mindset in that moment, I would probably say something like, “Wow, this is the third time in a row, Kaley, that I’ve unloaded the dishwasher with you not even helping me at all.”
[0:13:00] KK: To which I would respond, “Well, just to be clear, I was getting ready for the two-hour middle school parent meeting that I’m going to, that you’re not going to, to make sure that the math curriculum is right for next year.”
[0:13:14] NK: While I was taking care of our daughter, who was sick all day on Monday, while you were in San Francisco.
[0:13:19] KK: Okay, but I was in San Francisco for work.
[0:13:21] NK: You can see – you see where we’re going here? Does that sound familiar?
[0:13:23] SJ: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.
[0:13:26] KK: And so, if instead we have that foundation where he is striving for radical generosity, I appreciate that he’s only unloading the dishwasher. I called him on the way home from the middle school parent meeting. He was like, “Thank you for being our teammate there.” We didn’t both need to be there, because we’re a team. That allows us to create responsibility in the real world, without needing to keep precise track.
[0:13:54] SJ: I mean, a shorthand way of saying is both partners should be trying to do a lot more than their fair share.
[0:14:02] NK: exactly.
[0:14:03] KK: Mostly because if you think you’re doing your fair share, you’re doing way, way, way less than that.
[0:14:09] NK: Yeah. That’s that weird math we’re talking about earlier.
[0:14:11] SJ: Oh, no. I’ve got to reassess my own relationships.
[0:14:13] NK: Old reservation bias. Yeah.
[0:14:17] SJ: This is what an 80/80 marriage is. What are the next steps? Should you start defining roles? How does it go?
[0:14:25] NK: Well, I think the first step actually, is just for you to really look at the mindset piece. We like to say that there are two different dimensions to 80/80 and really two different dimensions to any relationship. One of those dimensions is your mindset. The background set of beliefs and attitudes that shape your perspective. You can think about this almost like, your mindset is the glasses that you wear in your relationship and your life. That color, how you see everything. That’s thing one. Thing two is about structure. How do you two organize logistics and roles and things like that? Structure is super, super important.
However, one of the key lessons we’ve learned is that if you go to structure without getting the mindset right first, all hell breaks loose. If you have the conversation, for example, about roles and who should be doing what, and you do that from a place of 50/50 fairness and resentment, that is just the ingredients for a massive throw-down argument and fight. If, however, you get the mindset right, then it’s like, “Oh, we’re doing this from the perspective of what’s best for us to hold different conversation.”
In terms of getting that 80/80 mindset, radical generosity is what we call it, there are a few different dimensions to that, which we think are really important. One of those dimensions is what we call contribution. This is in some ways, the essence of generosity. The idea is going outside of your comfort zone to do some act of contribution for your partner, ideally each day. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing. Sometimes we get blocked by thinking, “Oh, we need to buy our spouse, Taylor Swift tickets, which would be nice.” But like, hey, those are expensive.
[0:16:17] SJ: Face value, or black market?
[0:16:19] NK: Exactly. But it could be something more like, writing ‘I love you’ on a sticky note and putting it on Kaley’s monitor. That is just as impactful in many ways. That’s thing one. Do you want to talk about the second?
[0:16:31] KK: Sure. If you start with contribution, the second piece is appreciation. We sometimes think about that as the call and response. When someone does something contributes, do you notice? Do you make it explicit? Do you appreciate it? Because otherwise, there can be a sense of entitlement, or feeling taken for granted as you’re contributing in this generous way. It’s the ability to see it.
We also think about this a little bit like a scavenger hunt, that you find what you’re looking for. If I go looking for all the ways that Nate messed up, or didn’t do things the way that I wanted them, or somehow fell short, I will find them. You can think about tiny things, right? Whereas like, “Seriously, you left the top off the toothpaste again?” Or that I’m coming in and I’m like, “How come I’m the one who needs to have the conversation with our parents about Friday’s dinner?” You can find things to be resentful for if you want to, but –
[0:17:22] SJ: Absolutely.
[0:17:23] KK: But if you flip your glasses and go looking instead for things to appreciate, I have been really struck by how surprised I can feel around how many things I didn’t notice, because I wasn’t looking for them.
[0:17:38] SJ: It’s a gratitude thing, I think, as well that if you don’t take time to stop and reflect, everything can become negative.
[0:17:44] KK: It can happen in all of life. You’re spot on, Sean, and it can happen in your whole life, that you miss all of the things to be grateful for, all the moments. Certainly, in our primary relationships, especially as we’re overwhelmed, trying to do a life together, it’s really easy to miss. The third piece, do you want to do that one?
[0:18:01] NK: Yeah. One thing I would just say is, this appreciation piece is so powerful. When I coach couples and they have really hard conversations, like really delicate, vulnerable conversations, and we end with one appreciation, it has this effect of just completely changing the underlying tone of the conversation. Each person is able to leave with a very different feel and a sense of love and connection. So, why not bring that into our life every single day?
[0:18:35] KK: I think that’s so important. It bridges to revealing, which I’ll let you talk about. But I think that the gratitude for being willing to have a delicate conversation, then create some incentive to want to do it again. Whereas, if you leave a delicate conversation with a sense of either like, “I’m so glad that’s over. Hope we never have to do that again.” Good luck in married life. Or if you leave it with a like, “I can’t believe that I’m married to this person, who I have to have these kinds of conversation with.” Again, good luck. That’s a really tough spot to engage again.
Whereas, I love what you’re describing that these couples being vulnerable when they can finish. It’s not that the conversation is any less hard to have, but the tone on the other side says, it’s worth it because we’re in it together.
[0:19:25] NK: Yeah. There’s one more piece to this. Again, this is all under the category of mindset. How do we create that 80/80 mindset of radical generosity? It’s really about revealing. Because what we found is, yes, you can contribute. Yes, you can appreciate your partner. But sometimes there are other things going on, dynamics going on, or maybe the unfairness in your relationship really is so extreme that you can’t contribute and appreciate your way out of it. Revealing becomes a really powerful tool when that’s the case.
We think about revealing on two levels. One is there’s just revealing your full experience of what’s happening in your life. That may sound obvious, but so many couples don’t do this. There was actually a study done by UCLA, where they found couples with kids spend an average of 35 minutes a week –
[0:20:19] KK: A week.
[0:20:20] NK: – talking to each other.
[0:20:21] KK: A week. Not a day. A week.
[0:20:23] NK: That’s five minutes a day talking to each other. If you look at the content of those conversations, it’s often what we would call talking about the weather. It’d be like, “Wow, it’s cloudy and a little bit windy outside today.”
[0:20:36] KK: Yeah. Gosh, I thought that spring was here, but maybe not yet.
[0:20:40] NK: Yeah. Wow. That’s really crazy. There’s nothing wrong with that conversation, but there is no exchange –
[0:20:45] SJ: It’s not connecting. It’s not –
[0:20:46] KK: No. Right.
[0:20:47] NK: Yeah. There’s no exchange of like, my inner world, what’s really going on with me and hearing what’s really going on with Kaley. That’s one piece is just asking better questions, so we can really connect on that deeper level. Then the other piece is that, as I said, sometimes there are these moments in a relationship where you have a misunderstanding, your feelings are hurt, there’s some break in your connection. Revealing is a really powerful way to essentially turn those moments into opportunities for connection. If you can reveal, “Hey, when you showed up late last night, that really hurt my feelings, because I thought we had an agreement, we were going to meet at 8.00 and you weren’t there.” That’s a way where these moments of disconnection turn into moments of connection. That’s the full scope of what it looks like to cultivate that mindset of 80/80 radical generosity.
[0:21:43] SJ: That’s that first part, the mindset. Moving on to structure, could you talk a little bit about how to structure then an 80/80 marriage?
[0:21:53] KK: The bridge to get to structure is through values. One of my favorite things about the book, The 80/80 Marriage, is that the entire second half of the book, which is about structure, this is actually true for every single chapter, has an exercise embedded in it, so that you and your partner can together develop these skills for yourselves and can establish this for yourselves. The first exercise, which I think of as the bridge between mindset and structure is about values.
We think about this as like, okay, if we’re a team and we want to win the game, what game are we playing? Do we want to score touchdowns? Do we want to score goals? Do we want to score – what do we want to win at? This could be, for instance, we might say, “All right, this chapter of our lives is about preparing our kids to be adults.” We have a middle schooler. Okay, that’s our primary area of focus. That could be great. We met couples where they said, “All right, our primary focus, our primary value is adventure.” They live in a van down by the river, literally.
[0:23:02] NK: Left their jobs in New York. Yeah. Live in a van.
[0:23:05] KK: Yeah. They have incredible adventures. I don’t want to live that life, but they do. I think that’s amazing. Other couples might say, “We’re devoted to philanthropy.” We were just in an event where we were so privileged to be speaking to a group of philanthropists, and watching their devotion to that and how much they think about it and how they orient their life around it, that’s the idea of a value.
You might also say like, “Hey, these are the big earning years of our lives. This chapter of our life is about establishing a foundation of financial stability, so that we can live our lives, launch our family, whatever it might be.”
[0:23:47] NK: Sex could be a primary value.
[0:23:48] KK: It could be a primary value.
[0:23:49] NK: Absolutely.
[0:23:51] KK: Yup.
[0:23:50] NK: Yeah.
[0:23:52] KK: All of this to say, there are, at least in our world, there are no good or bad, or right or wrong values. There are known and implicit values. When you have known, or explicit, or agreed to values, then you have a north star where you can build the structure of your relationship. When you have implicit values, it’s very challenging, because you actually aren’t sure whether you’re navigating toward the same spot.
[0:24:20] SJ: They’re not defined.
[0:24:20] KK: If one person’s compass is pointed, I’m in the U.S. Like, if you’re navigating toward Florida and the other person is navigating toward Maine, the East Coast is not close enough. You will end up in radically different spots.
[0:24:33] SJ: When you get your values, hopefully on the same page, mostly on the same page, what next?
[0:24:40] NK: Well, you talked about roles earlier, and I think that’s a really important and interesting conversation for every couple to have. We found out through the research of this book that there’s really two ways in which couples design their roles. One way, they’re not designing them at all, that’s the accidental approach. That’s the approach that most couples take. When we would ask couples, “Hey, how did you decide who takes the trash out in the morning, who goes to the store, who takes your kid to the doctor?” Most couples would say, “I don’t know. We just winged it.” We actually turn that into a technical term, the wing it approach.
The wing it approach is all about accident. Basically, what you’re saying there is we’re going to let gender norms from the 1950s, we’re going to let random historical accident determine who does what in our relationship, and just hope that it works out for the best. In most couples and in most situations, it absolutely does not work out for the best, because you’ve got people and roles that they don’t really like. They’re not really good at. There’s a better, more intentional approach, where you take those values that Kaley was talking about.
You think about, okay, based on those values, let’s take out a new blank sheet of paper. We actually recommend this as an exercise. You can write down your current roles on one sheet of paper. You’d write down your roles. Then take out another sheet of paper and write down what would this structure of roles look like if we were to ask things like, what do I enjoy doing? What am I good at doing? Where are there areas where we could potentially outsource some of this?
Kaley and I are both really bad. Well, actually you’re really good at cleaning, but you don’t want to do it. I’m really bad at cleaning. It creates a lot of friction in our marriage. We used to fight about a dirty house all the time. One of the best investments we’ve made in our entire life is simply bringing in a house cleaner once a week. It’s in our budget under marital support.
[0:26:48] KK: Marital wellbeing.
[0:26:50] NK: Marital wellbeing.
[0:26:51] SJ: How long did it take to realize that? How long did you suffer beforehand?
[0:26:55] NK: I mean, it was a decade maybe. It took a long time. But that’s what I mean.
[0:27:00] SJ: Sometimes I find, actually, cleaning stuff up, it can be a good way to start the day, especially during the weekend.
[0:27:09] KK: Yeah. Okay, so Sean, I think that’s such an important point, because what you’re pointing to are some things, people don’t mind. As for instance, it sounds like, you don’t actually mind. Tidying gives you like, “Oh, it’s a good way to start the weekend.” I derive weird satisfaction out of doing the laundry. I like, it starts dirty, it ends clean. It becomes folded. I like that whole process.
[0:27:35] SJ: Do you also iron everything?
[0:27:36] KK: No. There’s no –
[0:27:38] SJ: Okay.
[0:27:38] NK: No ironing in this house.
[0:27:40] KK: We do have an iron, but it’s used for –
[0:27:41] SJ: It’s just my partner for some reason.
[0:27:43] KK: It’s used for art projects, so I wouldn’t recommend touching your clothes with it, because they will get burnt crayon on them. Anyway, but there are things that people mind and don’t mind. I like the laundry.
[0:27:53] NK: Well, that’s where I love going to the grocery store.
[0:27:56] KK: I would do Instacart and he –
[0:27:57] SJ: Same.
[0:27:58] NK: I just love it.
[0:27:58] KK: – he loves it.
[0:27:58] NK: I love being there. I love seeing the produce. But that’s where this exercise is so powerful, because most couples have never taken that step back and never thought from an intentional place, how could we redesign our roles such that this really works for both of us?
[0:28:18] SJ: Let’s say, you take some time, you do these exercises, you sit down and you figure out what roles you want, you don’t want, what roles you like, you don’t like, and what roles maybe you’re going to take on. What comes next? Do you start setting priorities for the relationship? Is there something else?
[0:28:36] KK: Yeah. I think that priorities and boundaries likely come next. I do want to add a caveat that not everything is going to show up on your sheet of paper. That’s where I think conversations just happen. I’ll give you a silly example that happens for us. I am very afraid of spiders. Nate is the spider killer in our house. I have already made the agreement, I’m willing to take on the karma of having killed all of the spiders, because he’s doing it for my benefit. But I’m in charge of the spider exterminator service that comes to make sure my office is the one in the basement. That’s not on a sheet of paper. We never said, “Yup. So, in our roles, how about you be the spider killer and I’ll be the spider screamer?” It just showed up.
What was interesting is rather than leaving it accidental, Nate asked me, he was like, “Wait, so you just got the name of a service to handle all the pests? Do you want that to be your role?” And so, there’s a clarification that happens in real life all the time, so that things don’t just pile on one side, because one person, for instance, is more proactive, or because one person just saw it first. I want to make sure that we don’t pretend that it’s a one-and-done, but it’s an ongoing aspect of a partnership, also because as your life changes, different roles show up.
[0:29:55] SJ: Absolutely. Setting priorities, setting boundaries.
[0:29:59] NK: Priorities, I think are a next step in this. We’re really thinking here about like, how do we build the ideal structure from that mindset of 80/80 radical generosity? We think about priorities and boundaries together, where priorities are the things you’re saying yes to as a couple. Boundaries are the things you’re saying no to as a couple. Why is this a useful exercise? Well, we have found that most modern couples have adopted this accidental approach to priorities and boundaries as well. What that looks like is you’ve got all these people asking for your time, your relatives, your family members, your friends, your co-workers. If you’re saying yes to all of those different things, you’re living this modern experience of basically having no time, feeling strung out all the time and effectively prioritizing nothing. This is the starting point where many of us find ourselves.
With that as our starting point, it’s really helpful, again, as a couple to start thinking about, “Okay, what are we saying yes to?” Our way of doing that, this is actually an exercise in the book. We call it the life report card, is to imagine that you are a student of your life and all the different things you’re doing are your classes. You’re enrolled in a sex class. You’re enrolled in a taking out the garbage class. You’re enrolled in a raising a kid class, maybe for some of you. You’re enrolled in a career class, right? Our tendency in this modern age is to say, “I think I’m going to be a valedictorian at life. I’m going to get an A in everything.”
The problem with that view is that it’s literally impossible to get an A in everything. If you’re going to get an A at work, you probably can’t make it to every tee-ball game that your kid has. It’s just impossible. The exercise here is to think about, what are the three things that I want to get an A at? Then even more importantly, to think about, what are the things that I want to fail at, that I want to get a D at? You should tell the story of our school, because I think that really helps.
[0:32:14] KK: Despite my attending the middle school parent meeting today, we’ve actually decided that we are D-plus parents at the school.
[0:32:22] NK: When it comes to school volunteering.
[0:32:23] KK: Which is amazing. The school gala just happened and we did no volunteering.
[0:32:29] NK: Showed up for an hour.
[0:32:31] KK: Right? We just felt awesome about it, because we crushed our D-plus. We went to Heritage Night, I think it was called.
[0:32:37] NK: Yes.
[0:32:37] KK: There were these amazing tables where people had homemade treats and crafts from the heritage of their ancestors.
[0:32:46] NK: They’d spent all day, maybe all week making this.
[0:32:50] KK: We went to the store and we bought crackers and hummus. We felt so awesome about it, because we made it to Heritage Night, which is crushing.
[0:32:57] NK: That’s what D-plus parents do.
[0:32:58] KK: D-plus parents do that. We’ll have this conversation where there’s no tension between us, because never am I saying like, I feel so embarrassed about the way that we showed up at Heritage Night with crackers. We high five and we’re like, “That was awesome. D-plussing right there. Nice work.”
[0:33:18] NK: Yeah. I think that’s the real liberation. Yes, it’s helpful to identify what are your As in life. Super helpful. But it’s almost more helpful to identify what are the things that I’m unconsciously trying to do well at that I could just completely let go of and just fail at?
[0:33:37] SJ: Then when it comes to boundaries, do you have advice on setting boundaries?
[0:33:43] KK: The way that we do that, so the exercise that we encourage folks to do in the book is to think about your life like a boat. If you do the life report card exercise and you see all the things that you’re doing, now it’s time to say, it’s like, what are you going to get an F at in life, but it’s also, what are you going to throw off the boat? Here’s the part that is essential. This will be uncomfortable. Just want to name it upfront, not pretend that like, “And then you’ll high-five all the time.” Because what will likely come at you is noise from what we like to call an extra. The way we think about it is if you think about a movie, and there’s two main characters that are in a scene, right? It’s you and your partner and you’re the two main characters in a scene. Then there’s an extra, and the extra all of a sudden says like, “I don’t the way that you’re saying that line, or I don’t like the way that you’re moving in that scene.” All of a sudden, all the attention is we should be doing what the extra says.
Translate that to real life. What that means is as a couple, for instance, we’ve decided that Saturday mornings, we hike just the two of us. Well, my best friend, who’s an extra in that scene, she doesn’t like it. She wants me to go do an event that she has set up. There’s all this pressure on me in our system to give up this thing that the two of us have agreed to, to then instead, pay more attention to the extra.
Now, you can imagine as a movie director, if you paid attention to all the feedback from all the extras, you would never actually have the scene with the couple. That’s part of what we think about with boundaries is, can you identify your most frequent extras? We just know, sounds extreme, but I’m not allowed to say yes to my best friend any time that there’s something that we have set up without talking to Nate first. There have been instances where I got myself in trouble. She’s like, “Hey, I booked us a trip. It’s going to be amazing.” I was like, “I can’t go on that trip.” That’s uncomfortable.
[0:35:57] NK: I think it’s helpful just to define that extras can be friends. They can be in-laws. They could be co-workers. They could be your work itself. Sometimes extras aren’t people. Sometimes extras are the company that you’re starting, or the podcast that you’re hosting, or the book that you’re writing. It’s anything outside of the system of the two of you that’s exerting pressure and influence from the outside.
[0:36:22] SJ: That’s all very clear. One thing you mentioned is radical generosity. You should be approaching an 80/80 marriage with this idea of radical generosity, giving a lot more than you think it would be fair. At what point should someone in the couple feel like, “Wow, I’m really embracing this radical generosity idea. I don’t think my partner is. I think I’m giving a lot more than they’re giving.” That whole point is it become almost abuse, I guess.
[0:36:51] NK: Yeah. That’s a really important question. You’re right. There is a interesting spectrum here, because you’ve got situations where both partners are experiencing the relationship from the mindset of fairness. We think that it’s a really powerful move when you shift that mindset, because your mindset is contagious. For many couples, when even just one person shifts to 80/80, it opens up a new space for the other person who might be the undercontributor to contribute more and to be generous in turn. Sometimes that doesn’t happen, to your point. Sometimes you may find yourself in a situation that is really more like 80/10, or 80/0, or maybe even 80/-20, right? Where the person is –
[0:37:42] SJ: Have you playing video games and drinking all the time.
[0:37:45] NK: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Somebody who’s on their Xbox all, day drunk.
[0:37:50] KK: Wow. We went there.
[0:37:51] NK: Yeah. That’s probably not a very ideal setup. That’s something that just requires discernment. There’s no formula that can tell you, “Oh, I’m in that terrain.” But if you’ve tried some of these mindset shifts and you find yourself coming back to that place again and again, then I think you have a few different choices. One choice is to really lean into that revealing practice that we talked about earlier. Sometimes there are situations where it’s really out of balance, but the person who’s feeling resentment and feeling like it’s out of balance doesn’t actually communicate that. They’re just living with it. Sometimes revealing is important.
Sometimes it’s so explosive that you can’t reveal safely. That’s where it’s very helpful to have a coach, or a skilled therapist to help you have that conversation. Then, of course, there are times where it’s just not working. The revealing isn’t working. The radical generosity isn’t working. The therapy isn’t working. That’s a really difficult moment, because then, I think, you have a very hard choice. Your choice is to stay in this relationship, where this person is contributing at whatever it is, 10% or 20%. Or you have the choice to leave the relationship. There can be those situations where you’ve tried everything and your partner is just unwilling to move toward you.
[0:39:20] KK: I want to distinguish that what Nate’s describing, especially in that last example is true and is real and is what we call an unwilling partner. This is a person who says, “10 is all you get. I am unwilling.” That’s when you have a really hard choice. We also think about what we call a reluctant partner. A reluctant partner is willing, they just don’t quite know what to do, or they’re stuck in a pattern. Typically, what’s happened where there’s a reluctant partner is there’s someone who’s over-contributing in the relationship and someone who is under-contributing in the relationship.
The complaint usually starts from the person who’s over-contributing in the relationship. It will sound like, “I do everything. Gosh, when I leave Jay at home alone with the kids, I come back to a destroyed house, an empty refrigerator. Everything’s a mess and none of the – the kids didn’t make any of their gains.” Whatever the story –
[0:40:23] SJ: Didn’t do their homework.
[0:40:23] KK: Right. Exactly. They didn’t do any other homework. Now, they’re all failing at school. I want really extreme, too. The under-contributor, right? The complaint usually starts with the over-contributor. It sounds in the abstract like, wow, it would be so great to be the under-contributor. They just get to hang out and make messes and do nothing all the time. What we learned in our interviews is that it sucks to be the under-contributor, too. That it’s really painful to feel like you’re not a good partner, or you’re not a good parent, that you are underperforming expectations. Especially, it often comes with a tenor of no matter what you do, it’s never good enough.
There’s a little bit of learned helplessness, or giving up. Almost a why bother, if no matter what I try to do, it’s never good enough. Because the complaint normally starts with the over-contributor, the place to start is with the over-contributor. The counterintuitive question is, how am I contributing to this? I’ll tell you the story of us in the early days. Can I talk about the grill, or finances?
[0:41:41] NK: Sure. Whatever you want.
[0:41:43] KK: Okay. We’ll talk about, do you have a preference, Sean? Would you like to hear about the grill, or finances?
[0:41:48] SJ: I like to hear about the grill.
[0:41:49] KK: Grill. Okay. In our house, we have this grill. Nate was the grill guy. He’d go out to the grill. The grill was gross. I think it had never been cleaned.
[0:42:00] NK: It’s true. That is true.
[0:42:01] KK: And so, I say to Nate some version of like, “Hey, babe. Can you clean the grill?” He says back to me, “It’s on my list.” A week later, I come out, I’m like, “Hey, so are you going to clean the grill?” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s on my list.” Two weeks later, I’m like, “What the, fill in the blank, with this grill?” He’s like, “Why are you always nagging me? Why are you always controlling me? Why do you –” What had happened is the grill was this microcosm, where I was so controlling over everything he did around like, when are you going to do it? How are you going to do it? Is it up to my standards? Now I’m going to nitpick the job that you did, or didn’t do. That I realized, I hadn’t actually relinquished anything, and so, he was resisting. Is that a fair way to say it?
[0:42:46] NK: Yeah.
[0:42:47] KK: Absolutely resisting by not doing it. Only when I could say, I’m going to let go of this and he gets to take it or not. In some ways, my controlling was contributing to the issue. In some ways, finance is almost an easier example. I was doing all the finances and then I resented all the money that Nate spent. I never actually showed him our finances to say, “Here’s the budget that we need to live within.” It’s back to that same like, I was controlling it, instead of sharing. By looking at how I was doing controlling, that opened a space for me to see what would it be like on the other side and what else was possible?
[0:43:31] SJ: Let’s say, one partner and a couple wants to explore 80/80 marriage, what would you advise the first steps approaching their partner and suggesting it? Presumably, when the marriage, or the relationship isn’t sunshine and rainbows?
[0:43:48] NK: Well, first of all, I would clarify that the book is called The 80/80 Marriage, but we really think of this as the 80/80 relationship. This applies to all relationships. Not just marital relationships, but any intimate relationship. We’ve actually even been exploring this with family relationships, co-workers, but primarily, intimate relationships. I think the best starting point is actually, to do one of these exercises together. If I had to pick one, I would say, it’s that life report card exercise that I was talking about earlier that’s in the priorities chapter of the book.
The reason that that’s a really good starting point is it creates a weird power dynamic. If one person in the couple is saying, “Hey, I read this book. Here are these concepts. We should really do this.” Now all of a sudden, you’ve got one person who’s the expert and the other person who doesn’t really know what this is about and is a little bit skeptical. Doing an exercise together, or practice together, though, is a way of just shifting that accidental approach to something more intentional and doing it together, where you’re both in the inquiry together, you’re both learning insights together. That would be my first step for couples.
[0:45:04] SJ: Guys, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Kaley, Nate, if people want to find out more about you, I know you’ve written a new book, Nate, Open. Could you talk a little bit about Open maybe?
[0:45:18] NK: Absolutely. Yeah. Open is a book I wrote that was really about an experience I think we’re all having on some level, which is this experience of having less space in our mind and almost closing down to life, because of things like, our addiction to screens. Also, our relationships with other people and politics, where it’s now increasingly difficult to have conversations with other people who don’t share our political views and we’re closing in that respect as well.
The book, Open, was really my attempt to explore both these really unique and interesting forces that are causing us to close down, but also, what are the practices we can use to cultivate a more open, more expansive mind in this crazy time? Things like, meditation, psychedelic assisted therapy. I actually spent some time with the National Rifle Association here in America, which is, I would describe them as my political adversary. What happens when we open to the other side politically? But it’s really an inquiry into how we can be more open in our life and in the world.
[0:46:29] SJ: If people want to find out more about you guys, maybe talk to you, get in touch, how can they do that?
[0:46:36] KK: The best place to find us, go first to our website. There, you can find a link to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, where we explore every week a different area of relationship.
[0:47:00] SJ: Awesome. Kaley, Nate, thanks so much for coming on the show.
[0:47:03] KK: Such a treat, Sean. Thank you.
[0:47:05] NK: Thank you so much for having us, Sean.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:47:07] SJ: One last thing before you go, if you want to hear more podcasts, just like this one, open your podcast app, search for Bad Girls Bible and hit that subscribe button.
[END]
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