When your partner has more ambition than you

Is this going to be a relationship advice blog???

Hi friends,

Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I’ve been a sporadic blogger for the last few years. It’s something I enjoy but haven’t found a good rhythm with. I love the format and layout of Substack so I thought I’d jump on and give it a go.

I hope you’ll find some interesting and provocative ideas here about running a small business, making art, history, and any random thing I’m interested in at the moment.

My wife is a rocketship

I’m married to a doer, a hard-charger, a get things done person: my wife, Amie. I’m also in business with her.

I am a chiller, a plodder, a get-things-done-slowly-over-time-er. My natural pace is slow and steady.

We’ve been running our little coaching/writing/course-creation business together for six years . We’ve written two books together. We spend 99% of our time in the same house. And that is great, but it’s also exhausting.

It doesn’t always work.

People often express surprise (and sometimes dismay) that I run a business with my spouse. Someone at a workshop the other day confessed that it’s their idea of hell.

I love it. It brings us closer, it gives us things to talk about on long car rides, it means we’re constantly living in a world of ideas with each other.

But it’s also hard. It’s hard when our dinner dates become business meetings, when travel becomes an opportunity to work, when our house is 80% work space.

It’s mostly hard because we’re rarely on the same page when it comes to output and to-do’s.

Amie’s biggest challenge in life is to chill out. Mine is to follow through on projects I know in my heart I really want to do (like this newsletter).

I find it difficult not to be sucked into Amie’s vortex of tasks. She has this incredible drive to make art, to bring creation into the world, and encourage other people to create. But, like everyone, she doesn’t have unlimited capacity.

I often think I’m not doing enough to take the load of her.

Car breakdowns or breakdowns in cars?

I had a breakdown in the car today on the way to the gym. This exact breakdown seems to happen once every few months. Amie is so busy and I decided to spend my last two days playing Elden Ring.

I felt like I was dead weight. Not contributing. That I was somehow causing her stress because I wasn’t contributing to every task on her to-do-list.

She was, of course, lovely about it and explained to me that I still manage to get through as many major projects as her, I just do it an aggressively sedate pace. That she is really trying to do less all the time and that she wishes she worked more like me.

Which was logical and fair. But when does fairness and logic help us if we’re mid-breakdown?

Slowness is good

Neo-liberal capitalism tells us our value is determined by our daily output.

On my better days, which I’m glad to say are more common than my bad days, I know this to be a lie. I know that it doesn’t matter how full my calendar is. It doesn’t matter if I feel tired and need a nap in the afternoon.

I have a functioning business that provides for me. It works well. There is no productivity police waiting to take the money out of my bank account if I don’t clock a certain number of hours. The point of working for myself is to have this freedom

I don’t need to do more. We don’t need to do more.

As long as my books get written, I edit what Amie needs me to edit, I show up to run our classes, I tend to the website and our support emails, I am fine.

I am fine.

And my wife?

Amie and I are so similar in so many ways. We have similar values, we have similar ideas of what’s important, we like similar TV shows and similar food.

But we are constant reminders to each other of something we’re both bad at.

The charitable interpretation is that it’s good. I remind Amie to chill out more. She reminds me to pursue things I want.

But it’s also just hard sometimes.