Enduring Partnership - Building Your Relationship Playbook
Quality relationships are key to living well and taking time to talk about the important stuff is critical in strengthening them.
*Note - In this article I'll specifically look at how Isabella and I do that in the context of our relationship!
May you always be friends, lovers, and accomplices - My mother
Friends, lovers, and accomplices - what an awesome way to think about a relationship. This idea of what it means to be life partners resonated deeply with me and has been formative in my understanding of what it means to build a strong relationship with Isabella.
The Roles We Play In Our Relationship
Those roles helped us understand how we wanted to show up for each other in our relationship.
For example, when either of us is going through a tough time its just as important that we cheer each other up as it is to help each other move forward. Friends and accomplices.
Or, its just as important that I remember to hang up my towel as it is to surprise Isabella with a fun adventure on our date night for the week. Lovers and accomplices.
An understanding of who we wanted to be for each other was helpful in figuring out how to grow into our relationship.
What Those Roles Mean To Us
Friend - Having fun together, sharing interests, enjoying each other's company, being playful, and injecting laughter into situations
Lover - Surprising and delighting each other, showing affection and appreciation, creating opportunities for intimacy
Accomplice - Supporting each other, being interested in each other’s life, coming together to make decisions, setting joint goals, listening and understanding each other’s needs, feeling like no matter what happened we're in "it" together.
Defining Your Roles Is Unique To You and Your Goals
The roles you play are yours to define and frankly not something I have a framework for outside of sharing ours. Thinking about our relationship in terms of these roles works for us because our relationship goals are to have as much fun as possible, fall in love more deeply each day, and get better at doing life stuff together. It's never perfect, but its how we approach our day to day.
Once we understood how we wanted to show up for each other, it was helpful to think about the different areas that made up our relationship.
The Areas of Your Relationship
If you think about your relationship as a car (weird thought, I know) the areas of your relationship are the different parts of that car, and together, they make up the whole.
Big shout to Actually for giving us the language to describe the areas of our relationship that we work on (more on them in the recommendation section).
Relationship Areas
Communication & Team Dynamics - How well you talk to each other and work through things together
Values & Goals - A clear understanding (and support) of what is important to each of you and what objectives you each are striving for.
Romance and Intimacy - The level of closeness you share with your partner and the level of delight the relationships brings you.
Friendship - The level of fun and enjoyment you experience as partners
Work and Splitting of Responsibilities - A clear understanding of the work that gets done by each of you in the relationship and contentment with how it gets divided.
Financials & Security - An understanding of your financial needs, goals, and how each of you want to manage it in your lives.
Challenges We Faced In Each Area
To get a sense of how this relates to our relationship here are some examples of challenges we've had to work through in each area
Communication & Team Dynamics - We used to have a tough time talking about work related challenges. We'd try to solve each other’s problem instead of listening and figuring out how our partner best needed support. This made us defensive, frustrated, and led to less sharing. Talking about what was not working helped us figure out how to better show up for each other in those moments.
Values & Goals - When we started dating we were not each others first priority. As our relationship got more serious that changed, but our behaviors and actions did not reflect that change. It took us getting into a big ol' fight to decide we needed a day to talk about our values and goals. We drank two bottles of champagne, rethought our priorities, and worked out how to move forward. We'll probably do this many more times before we're old and wrinkly.
Romance and Intimacy - We've had moments where we've stalled here and gotten complacent on sweeping each other off of our respective feet (I hope that is a sentence). Thanks to Isabella one of our tactics has been to establish a weekly date night that we take turns planning. That's one of the ways we've made romance a priority.
Friendship - Sometimes life gets busy. We've had our share of moments where we feel like we have not been having fun together. We've tried to address that through small moments. For example, when we ask each other to grab a coffee in the middle of a work day, we’ve re-framed it from an interruption to a delightful surprise.
Work and Splitting of Responsibilities - Cleaning. I used to be pretty bad. I'll leave it at that. I've gotten better.
Financials & Security - We were not aligned on this subject whatsoever. This led to frustration and unpleasant conversations when either of us were surprised with an expense. Thanks to our relationship workshop with Actually (I know I’m namedropping them a ton, but its good stuff) we've got a pretty good framework now for how to think about this and a regular money date where we make sure we're aligned and on track with our goals and plans.
This is certainly not exhaustive but some of the ways in which we've had to work through challenges in each of those areas.
How To Explore Those Areas Together
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own - Robert A. Heinlein
Exploring these areas can be hard, scary, and often unclear on where to start. It takes a tremendous amount of vulnerability, openness, and courage to explore a lot of these topics and something we’ve had our fair share of struggles with. You're basically trying to get a map of each others brains so you can have a ton of fun coexisting together. I think I've mapped out like 7% of Isa's brain at this point. It's a work in progress.
Below I try to give a rough sense of how we explore those different areas to share some ideas that might be helpful.
Reflect on Your Relationship 🧐 - The point here is to get a baseline on how you're feeling about the different areas of your relationship.
What Do We Do Well? - What do I feel really good about in our relationship? What am I sure of in our relationship and of our dynamic?
Where Can We Improve - What bothers me in our relationship or in my partner? What trips us up regularly? What am I insecure about or unclear on in our relationship and our dynamic?
What Are Our Personal Strengths & Weaknesses - What do I do well? What does my partner do well? How that show up in the relationship? What do I/they do poorly and how does that show up in the relationship?
Decide What To Talk About, and Do it! 👊 - Depending on the importance of the topic and length of the conversation you can do this casually at dinner or set aside time to discuss it.
Make It Fun 🕺 - The more enjoyable these conversations, the more you'll do them. Be intentional about making these moments delightful.
Define a goal 🥅 - When you sit down to talk its helpful to define what you both hope to get out of this conversation. Here are some broad goals we work with:
Share What’s On My Mind - Communicate how I think and feel about this topic. Communicate what I need that I don’t feel I’m getting.
Understand How My Partner Thinks About It - Understand how Isabella thinks or feel about this topic. Understand what she feels she needs.
Come Up With A Game Plan That We Both Feel Good About - Figure out how we want to think about this topic moving forward. Figure out how we can both feel good about it and what are some things we can both do to make that happen.
As an example, right now, Isabella and I are working on our shared financial plan as well as getting progressively more creative with our date nights. We'll keep you posted.
More Questions To Support Your Explorations
Below, I'll try to share some questions and ideas that have been helpful for Isabella and I over the years when talking through our relationship. Hopefully this serves you in jump starting your own conversations!
Values & Goals: Aligning our lives so we both feel great 🌎
Questions to jump start your values & goals convo
What is important to you in your life? How would you like that to show up in your day to day and in your life in general?
What are you focused on today? What is something you aspire towards? What goals do you have (personal, professional, family)?
Is our relationship currently supporting or working against those values & goals? If its against, what would it look like if it were supporting them?
Communication & Dynamics: Love your life experiences 💥
Questions to jump start your communication & team dynamics convo
How do you respond when your partner gives you feedback or asks something of you?
How are you working through problems and stressful situations together? What is working (not working) when you communicate or encounter new challenges?
What does your partner do that bothers you? What do they sometimes that can be hurtful?
How effectively and enjoyably do you speak to each other and work through things together?
Romance and Intimacy: Prioritize spiciness and delight 🌶
Questions to jump start your communication & team dynamics convo
How do you want to receive affection? How often?
How do you like to show affection? How often are you doing that?
How are you prioritizing romance and intimacy in your day to day? What do you feel good about? What do you feel like you're missing?
I won’t dive into questions on the other areas as they require more of a deep dive, but hopefully the above can be a helpful start in your explorations!
We believe in regular & intentional communication
We believe we’ll forever have stuff to work on together. The key for us is to make it a priority and commit to discussing it regularly. We do this casually in our day to day or make an event around it when its more important and we need more time to discuss.
This helps us feel like we’re in it together and every time we figure something new out, our playbook expands. It’s the ultimate multiplayer game where we can slash through levels. Maybe that’s a bit nerdy but its what makes it fun. At least most of the time ;)
Feedback Time 😁 - Share Your Thoughts
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To Living Well,
Alvaro
Weekly Live Well Recs
Read of the week 📖: I Do Not Love You by Pablo Neruda
Listen of the week 🎧: Save Room by John Legend - Play to add spiciness 😏
Product(s) of the week 🍯: Actually - Incredible relationship workshops led by world class coaches that give you practical exercises and frameworks to build stronger relationships. Cannot recommend this enough. Was hugely helpful for us!