Why 50/50 Doesn't Work: A New Model for Happier Relationships with Nate & Kaley Klemp
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of All the Hats, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Amy Fox, and I'm excited you're here today. If you're confused and thinking I might have hired a professional voice actor to spice up this intro, you're wrong. Amy's actually my wife, and she's joining me to help co-host this episode. Why?

When I saw that our guests today were another married couple that liked doing their interviews together, I thought it would be so much more fun with all four of us. So who's this married couple, Amy? Today we're joined by Nate and Kaylee Klemp, co-authors of a fantastic book called The 8080 Marriage, A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship.

When Chris first brought it home, it made me think he was trying to tell me things were not going well, but it ended up adding so much value to our lives. It must have added a lot to other people's lives too, because it was recently named as Editor's Choice Pick by the New York Times.

Now, who are Nate and Kaylee? Nate is an entrepreneur, a philosopher, a best-selling author, and mindfulness junkie. And Kaylee is a group facilitator, executive coach, and an expert in small group dynamics and leadership development. In our conversation, we'll explore the history that's led couples from imbalance to too much fairness to what they call radical generosity.

We'll also get into the tools and tactics that make it easy to implement these changes in our own lives so we can stop keeping score and have a lot more fun together. I am excited for this conversation and frankly, just as excited that I get to do it with Amy as my co-host. So let's jump in. Nate, Kaylee, Amy, thank you so much for being here. Great to be here. So excited to be with you.

I love the way you approach the book at the beginning about the evolution from 80-20 to 80-80 and the stops in between.

For anyone who hasn't read that, can you walk through that evolution for everyone? One of the things that inspired us to write this book is we felt like we were part of this generational shift that's happening in marriage. If you look at your grandparents' marriage or maybe even your parents' marriage, it's likely that there's a very different structure and a very different mindset. In the book, we call that 80-20. It's the idea of one partner, generally the woman, doing about 80%.

Another partner, generally the man, doing something more like 20%. And so we're a part of this new generation, sort of Gen X, millennial, we're the ones getting married now, having kids, where all of a sudden the norm is egalitarian marriage. There was just a recent Pew poll that was conducted that found 97% of Americans agree with the idea of equality in marriage.

So we are entering marriage with this idea that we want to be equals and in love. And that turns out to be a very difficult task because we have this kind of default mindset that we talk a lot about in the book.

Where we try to achieve equality. We certainly did this for about a decade in our marriage. And we interviewed about 100 couples, found this is very common. We try to achieve equality by making everything perfectly 50-50 fair, keeping score. And that's a recipe for all sorts of resentment and conflict.

And what goes into these percents? Is it 80-20 of the household chores, 80-20? Like, just so everyone has some context, what goes into those? So if you start with 50-50, trying to be perfectly equally fair, going back to 80-20, we're looking at how are you contributing to the relationship? And so that's where historically the woman was 80% responsible for the well-being of the relationship and the man was less so.

As we go forward, then we look at 80-80, which we recognize the math doesn't actually work. But the whole idea is when we stop scorekeeping with 50-50, if that's our foil, and strive to contribute to the relationship at 80%, it's much more likely that where we land is going to be radically generous and feel like we're winning together.

So I'm very curious, why is it so challenging to achieve a balanced relationship? This was one of the key insights that led us to want to write this book.

We experienced in our own life that it was failing, but we couldn't really figure out why. So then we started looking at the research in psychology, and we found out that there's a way in which our assessments of what is or isn't fair in relationship are clouded by all sorts of cognitive biases. And there are two that really stand out. One is what psychologists call availability bias, which

which is just a fancy way of saying that all of my wonderful contributions to our life together, my drop-offs at school and taking out the trash, all that information is available to me.

But when it comes to what Kaylee does, it's a little fuzzy. And so I have this tendency to systematically underestimate everything that Kaylee does. And then in addition to that, there's this other cognitive bias. We call it the overestimation bias, where we have this tendency to overestimate the amount of time spent on things like child care and housework.

So in other words, if I say it took me like 90 minutes to clean up the house, it was probably more like 45. Both men and women do this. The research finds that men do it more.

But I think that's really important because what that means is that when we are arguing about fairness, we are essentially having an argument from total delusion based on really bad data. And that's why we keep arguing about it. And there's no way out of that cycle of this sort of 50-50 downward spiral into fairness.

I think it's interesting that when we were interviewing couples, if we asked them directly, hey, do you guys ever fight about fairness? They'd be like, no, we never fight about that.

But then as they would tell us stories, we started to recognize that fairness was underneath a lot of the different things that they were actually fighting about. So as a for instance, there's the very typical housework argument. Hey, how many loads of laundry do you need to do to make it fair for the time that I got up in the middle of the night because the kid threw up?

But then there was also fairness around things like, so we just did Father's Day for an entire weekend with your parents. Now we're going to go see my parents. You want to leave on Saturday instead of on Friday? That's not fair. We need to spend equal amounts of time with each of our families.

Or the version of, we've been out with your friends for three weeks in a row. That's not fair. What about my friends? And all of a sudden, you could start to see these through lines where fairness was in some ways invisible and therefore insidious and polluting things. It's so interesting you say this. I think before we were chatting and before I read the book,

In my mind, I thought Chris and I were actually very balanced. I was like, we've got this. And...

As I'm hearing about these things like the availability bias, for example, I realize that I many times will be the person on a more regular basis that says, hey, Chris, I've woken up. I've made our daughter's breakfast. I've walked the dog. I've unloaded the dishwasher. I got her out of the crib. And meanwhile, what I don't know is he's actually going through and pulling together all of our finances.

These things happen behind the scenes. I actually hate doing them and I have a deep appreciation for it, but because I don't really know what goes into it and I don't see it happening, I'm like, well, I'm superwoman here. What are you doing?

I think it's really important to see that and to also just be gentle with ourselves that we fall into this mindset. We wrote this book. We've been talking about it for the last year. And yet we fall into this mindset all the time. Yesterday, we had a snow day here in Colorado and our daughter couldn't go to school because

I was the one who had the more open calendar, so I ended up managing all the logistics. And I found myself several times falling into that same mindset of, this isn't fair. I'm the one who's doing everything. Kaylee's just sitting there at work. Why am I the one who has to do this? And it's the mindfulness around seeing that, being gentle with yourself, and then shifting to where I ended up at the end of the day, which was, hey, we're trying to win together here.

This is not a competition and we're definitely not trying to make everything fair. So it's like a default thing

center of gravity, this idea of fairness that our mind is attracted to and falls into habitually. So I think you can be gentle with that and then just see it and shift. So I definitely want to go into the tactics that people can use to make these shifts. But before, I'm really curious, when you did the research, were there types of people, whether it's culture, ethnicity, personalities, where you saw that this was already happening or it was harder to do or kind of made it a different circumstance? Yeah.

In the interviews that we did, we interviewed as much diversity as we could find. So we found a couple that was living out of a van, traveling around the world, socioeconomic differences, cultural differences, race differences, LGBTQ plus differences. And what we found was, one, as soon as you added kids to the mix, then fairness seemed a little bit more prevalent because time felt a little bit more scarce. Right.

The second thing that we noticed is that, interestingly, gay couples actually had a little bit of an advantage because they had less of a historical hangover around expectations for what each of them might do because of traditional gender roles.

And so as they were defining in some ways anew, they got to create things in their relationship that felt to them like it helped them win together. And it wasn't that they never fell into fairness. That definitely happened. But they had fewer things that they were bringing forward from the past that informed the way that should look so they could design it more skillfully for themselves.

Interesting. So I don't think either of those are things that people can just up and switch in their lives. No. If you have kids, you can't make those changes. So I think that's a great segue to what should people be doing? What kinds of tactics can they do to achieve this 80-80? And maybe you could talk a little bit first more about what it means to have an 80-80 marriage.

Absolutely. We were actually just talking this morning, knowing that we're on all the hacks about some of these shifts. And we made this distinction for the first time between what we think of as micro hacks and then meta hacks. And if you think about the 80-80 marriage, there's all sorts of micro hacks that we'll get into that are small routines and habits you can build into your day.

But there are two big meta hacks that I think are really important for grounding this in everyday life. And the first is a meta hack that's all about mindset. And that is this whole idea of 80-80, or we call it radical generosity. So it's this idea of

Viewing your life together through this mindset of radical generosity instead of scorekeeping and fairness. And that macro level mindset has the ability to sort of put everything else in motion. So the second of these is what we call structure. So this is another example.

Big idea, which is about shifting from asking the question, what's best for me to asking the question, what's best for us? We call it shared success, or you can think of it as winning together. And that's the orienting principle for how you build structures around finances and logistics and priorities and all those different things. So if we go to just the first of those, because that's, I think, where it all starts, that meta hack of radical generosity.

There's a few key elements of that. One is contribution. If you think about the essence of generosity, it's often about contributing to your partner, which is something we do, but we often do it from a mindset of fairness, which makes those acts of contribution land in a different way.

So one of these pieces is contribution. Another is appreciation, which is basically shifting the way in which we see our life together. As everybody probably knows, when you're in a relationship long enough, you start to revert to this default mindset. Neuroscientists call it the negativity bias, where you're essentially looking for everything your partner did wrong. You're looking for ways in which they fell short. And appreciation is about flipping those glasses and

So that you're actually looking for what they did right and then appreciating them for that when that happens. And those two together are sort of where radical generosity starts. It's almost like a call and response in music.

contribution is the call, appreciation is the response. It's easy to say, oh, of course I should just not keep score and I should just have this generosity, appreciation. But how do you actually do that? Because sometimes you're sitting there, like Amy mentioned, she's done 10 things in the morning and to be generous, she says, and balancing our finances, I might just be like,

sleeping in or taking a long shower. So playing Wordle in bed. So how do you actually make that happen? Like, how do you actually put those changes into place? Are there are there triggers or cues that you can apply to make it easier? Absolutely. The first around contribution, I think, is to remember that we're playing the long game.

That if I look at any slice in time, someone's doing more and someone's doing less just because it doesn't actually work that every single hour we're working on the same things. And so we want to take a long view. Does this balance over days, weeks, months, years?

For contributions specifically, I think it's really important to know what does your partner value? What do they care about as a contribution? And we joke sometimes that I could try to contribute to our relationship by doing cartwheels down the hallway because doesn't that bring joy and delight to our family? And then Nate would say that actually provides no value in our family. Please contribute differently. Yeah.

It's an interestingly vulnerable experience to have the conversation with your partner. What could I do that would feel meaningful to you? How could I contribute to you, to us, to our family in a way that would feel like you knew I really cared? And then internalizing that. Micro habit, really specific. We say find one way to contribute every day.

Start small. You can build if you want to. But these are little things like I'm a coffee drinker. If Nate turns on the Keurig in the morning, I am delighted. It feels like that he loves me.

This is noticing that socks have been left on the floor at the top of the stairs. And because I'm a neat freak, that makes me feel crazy and moving them to a laundry basket. These are teeny tiny things. But if you're wearing the glasses that say, how can I contribute in our relationship in a way that you care about? Doing that one thing builds the habit and that lets you continue doing it

Well, and then tactically with appreciation, this is where you can do the kind of BJ Fogg habit stacking approach, which is what we do, where obviously appreciation can happen organically and spontaneously. And it's great when it does, but we're busy. Life is crazy. The world is crazy. So it doesn't always happen that way. So one of the things we've done is at the end of every day, just before we go to bed, we're lying in bed. We use that as our cue to,

to do one appreciation for each other. Takes like 30 seconds, really doesn't take much time at all, but it ends the day on this high note of appreciation. And so that's another practice where it sounds abstract, but you can actually build it into certain things that you're already doing. Dinner, going to bed, waking up in the morning, whatever that might be for you. My last favorite tiny tip around appreciation is to get a sticky notepad.

that in our house, we've gotten into leaving each other's sticky notes around. They do not have to be profound. These can be things like, good luck today on your podcast, or I love you, or hope you have a great day. Good luck at the spelling bee, whatever it might be. And what I love about this is once your kids get to be of the age where they can write, it gets contagious. And so the whole family can get on board with a sticky note game. Our daughter was watching that we were leaving sticky notes for each other on one another's bedside table.

And she got really excited about it, that she could write sticky notes. And now we'll find for me as I love you, mama, sticky notes. My favorite is the one that fell on the toilet. But the sentiment was there. I just want to know, is it disingenuous if you're like, oh, I'm going to set a calendar reminder every Thursday at 3 p.m. to make sure that I show my appreciation? It feels sometimes like something like that would be like disingenuous because I needed the calendar reminder. But is that from what you found not the case?

I think that's a really important point. And this is a debate that we've actually had with various folks on Instagram. There's a view out there that everything in love needs to be spontaneous and it just has to happen organically. And isn't that great? And that does work when you're first dating and you're 18 or you're in college or something.

But we are advocates of the position that structure creates freedom within a relationship. Structure creates connection and intimacy. So we are totally fans of the calendar reminder or scheduling date nights or even scheduling intimacy. I know that can be a controversial position, but...

in our life with kids and all the craziness that is the logistics that go into our day, sometimes that's the only way we can make these things happen. I want to go back to something that you had talked about related to values. And I'm curious how you think about the 80-80 marriage working when a couple has different values or standards. I'll give two examples on both of our sides. One is,

I think it's really valuable to have a good sense of how much we spend. So I really like going and categorizing our transactions to know how much we spent in different categories.

Amy, on the other hand, doesn't love that process or probably think it's as worth it as I do. That is an understatement of the year. I'm like, we're clearly spending a lot, a lot less than we're saving. So I think we're in an okay place. And Chris was like, no, no, no. I've got to know every detail. The flip side is, I don't know if you guys know what Soylent is.

But from my perspective, when I think about food and our kid, I'm like, well, our daughter, she can have yogurt or oatmeal every day. Does she really need variety? I take a slightly different point of view. I think it's so important and valuable for her. She just turned 18 months today. And I think it's incredibly valuable for her to experience different textures and flavors and colors and flavors.

have that variety. So the way that I prepare her food, I think is vastly different than the way Chris approaches it. Both very clearly work, but I'm curious to get your perspective on it. The first step is you have to start with a mindset of radical generosity because everything I'm about to say, if you start with a mindset of we're going to litigate this and one of us is going to be right and one of us is going to be wrong, we all lose.

So assuming that we begin with this premise that we want to win together, the place to start is actually at the notion of values, right?

And values are actually deeper than I want our finances budgeted or I want our daughter to eat different textures of food. Values, if you really stay with it with each other, are things like I want our child to have a variety of experiences. And I imagine just having listened to this podcast that, Chris, a variety of experiences might be something that you could get on board with and food could be a subcategory of it or

Or things like, I want to make sure that we have the resources so that we can enjoy our life. And Amy, I imagine you could say, oh yeah, I could get on board with that as a value. If you can get to a place at the root where you do agree, it facilitates the details of the conversation. Then just completely structurally, we believe in a couple different things. One, sometimes the person who cares more gets to take the lead.

So if Chris cares more about knowing each line item, then he might get to take the lead in going back through the Amazon purchases and deciding which category they belong in. If you care more about the food that your daughter is eating, you might take the lead on creating those experiences. And when it doesn't create conflict for the other person, I'm delighted to have you do those things, particularly if it doesn't require a lot from me. Great.

Sometimes though, that's not quite enough. And that's where we think having agreements and structures help facilitate it so it doesn't create conflict. So using money just because it's a great for instance,

We think budgets are really useful. So couples will often get in conflict around how much are we saving versus how much are we spending? And are we saving too much? Are you actually just being a penny pincher and you're a drag to be around? Or are we not saving enough? Are we being frivolous? Are we being irresponsible? We're not going to be able to have the resources we want for our life.

And sitting down from that mindset of radical generosity to say, how much do we want to spend in these buckets? Because it's aligned with what we value. And that's where the connection happens. Based on our values, what do we want to do? And creating some structure or frameworks around it helps take the conflict out of it.

I want to pause for one second on the relationships and moving to a couple other questions and just ask, as you talk to couples about money, are there things you learned aside from the value of a budget that people should think about when they're talking about money, whether it's combining their finances or reviewing spending or creating rules? Are there things that came out of those conversations that are worth sharing? At the macro level, we found that money is

is very tightly interlinked with power, which is kind of obvious. But, you know, when we started asking couples about money, it was really interesting that they would say things like, we interviewed a woman who admitted that because she makes more money, she decides where they go on vacation. Because in her mind, it's, this is my money, I get to decide, right? So there's- I wish everyone could see Amy's face right now. Yeah, she's like, what? Yeah.

So there are these really interesting dynamics of power where often in a couple, I mean, it's very rare that couples make the exact same amount of money. So often there's an imbalance there and there can be some really strange and interesting power dynamics that are worth being aware of. And that's where, again, structure can be really valuable to the point about how you use money together, whether you share it or whether you have separate accounts, right?

We found that there are a lot of different ways to make it work, so long as there is some pot of money or resources that's commonly held, that you share together, that you can win together with. And so one of the easiest approaches is just the all-in approach, we call it, where you share all of your resources.

we also know couples who do that and have what are called side stashes. So they have their own little personal allowance that they can use to spend on whatever they want. The other partner doesn't get to criticize them or micromanage them.

And then there are couples who have separate accounts. But the key with those separate accounts is to have some shared pool so that if one of you gets a promotion or one of you lands a big, you know, movie deal or book deal or whatever it is, you both win together in some way. And is it okay if one partner takes...

on a responsibility almost exclusively? I know in a lot of relationships, there's like the, I like to manage the money and the investments and the savings. And in this model of a ideal marriage, is that okay? Are there things that are exclusively owned? We think it works better if you can be really clear about your roles. And so if we look at our macro hacks, the mindset and structure, underneath that is relationships.

a roles piece. Do we know who's doing what so that we aren't stepping on each other's toes, criticizing the way that somebody else is doing it? And are our roles balanced? I love, Amy, that you used the word balanced earlier. It's not about fair. If you write down everything that each of you are up to on a sheet of paper, which we actually did, and it created a huge unlock for us.

It was really valuable that when we did the initial exercise on the ledgers, if you will, mine was 3X as long as Nate's. And we looked at it and said, huh, it makes sense that this feels completely unsustainable. And then we looked at it not through the lens of how do we make it fair, but what do each of us care more about? What do each of us want to take on? What are each of us good at?

And so running it through that sieve leads us back to what you were just describing, Chris, that one person in the relationship might love looking at investments, thinking about how they could be more strategic with those things. They might care about balancing the budget to the penny or the dollar. And the person on the other side says, I trust you completely. And there could be one person who really owns it.

I think it is helpful to have awareness of what your partner is doing, not because you want to manage it for them or step on their toes, but because it helps us appreciate, wow, there was a lot of time and energy that went into that portfolio and it performed really well. Thank you for doing that on our behalf.

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To get more tactical, is there a tool for organizing this concept of moving to the 80-80 marriage? Is there a spreadsheet? Are there other tools or sheets that you use in order to keep things organized and maintain that clarity around ownership and roles? There are actually a number of different exercises in the context of the book.

that allow you to do that sort of thing. We don't have a spreadsheet, although we did have somebody email us a spreadsheet, which was like their detailed breakdown of roles. But I think that what you can think about when it comes to these kinds of structures is building structure around any of those areas where you find you go into conflict or where you find it's an area that's more or less unconscious. And I think that's one of the big shifts here is that

For many of us, when we get into a relationship, we're coming from a place of unconsciousness and a lack of intentionality. Things are just happening by accident. When we would ask couples, how did you design your structure of roles? They would say, I don't know. We just sort of winged it. And so that actually became a technical term for us. We call that the wing it approach, which almost every couple we've ever met adopts. We certainly did.

And what we're doing with many of these different practices is we're going from that unconscious place of winging it, whether that's with roles or our priorities, where we're just saying yes to everything that comes in, or our boundaries, where we're saying yes to everything and no to nothing. We're shifting from that unconscious wing it approach to something that's more intentional, more conscious, more designed.

And so I would say that's the key move. And then the exercises are helpful for some couples. It is helpful to have a detailed budget and spreadsheets and things like that. For other couples, it's not. But I think the key move is just bringing in that structure and greater intentionality. I think there's also, in some ways, a silly tool that really complements this, which is to name your team.

And this might have flashbacks to when you were at summer camp and you had to name a group of people. We've actually found it tremendously helpful as a way to differentiate between which entity we're talking about. So our team name is Kajona. It's just the first two letters of all of our names. We've got K-A for Kaylee. We've got Joe for our daughter, and we've got N-A for Nate. And we'll ask the question, what would be best for Kajona?

And a simple example that actually was really profoundly life-changing for us was when she went to school and she was going to get off the bus at 3 p.m., Nate and I had a whole conversation about what we wanted to have happen. And what was best for me was for Nate to be available every day at 3 p.m. to meet the bus.

And what was best for Nate was for me to be available every day at 3 p.m. to meet the bus. And we had really elaborate conversations about why it was individually best for each of us to have the other person do this task that neither of us wanted. And we were going to get nowhere if we stayed in that winning for me mentality. Then we were able to take a step back and ask the question, what's best for Kajona?

And it included our daughter. It included the whole family unit. It included some of the commitments that we've made. And I'll let you talk about what happened. I think with that alternative framing, we realized that I was in a place professionally at the time where I could go down to 80%. It made sense for me. Kaylee really needed to be working those hours. And so...

All of a sudden, when we shifted the frame, the solution was obvious. And I was actually excited about it, even though it was a loss for me, I guess, on my side of the ledger. But that is a just really powerful and simple example of how you can shift from asking what's best for me to what's best for us through a name that kind of orients you toward that. The name itself pushes you toward that.

First of all, Chris, you and I need to come up with a pretty good family name here. So that'll be task one. Our daughter's name is Quinn. So if we take your approach, it's gonna be a little tricky with the QU in there. It'll be a little tricky, but we're gonna get back to you on our family name. But I think the question that stems from this whole bus thing

conversation and conflict resolution that you all work through together is how does that change when learning

life changes. So for example, one of your roles may become more demanding at work for a shorter period of time, or let's say I have a baby and it clearly changes the time and availability I have to give towards the things that I previously was giving to. How does that work when shifts in life change and therefore your availability and schedule changes to the things that you previously committed to? How do you approach that?

We like to think of life as happening in chapters. And so having your values, having your priorities, having your boundaries, all of the things where you say, what's our North Star? What are we saying yes to? What are we saying no to? And how are each of us going to show up in the relationship? You revisit it at each chapter. And a chapter could be we had a

kid. A chapter could be one of us had a big shift in a job. A chapter could be our kids left. Now we're empty nesters. A chapter could be now we live in a new city. We moved. I think ideally, if it were only up to me, you would get to set your values, priorities, and it'd be a one and done. You could just coast from there on out. I like systems that you press play and they just happen.

That is not how this works in real life. And so giving permission to revisit things at a different point in time, at a different chapter, or if you notice it's not working, that there's an invitation to come back to things. Hey, we thought this was going to be awesome.

shoot, it didn't turn out the way that we had hoped. Let's revisit it. Let's reconsider. Amy, I think that there's a reality check that happens each point along the way. We also, I'll let you add to this if you want, we believe in outsourcing technology.

when it makes sense. And there are really skillful ways to do it, especially around things that create tension in the relationship. So as a, for instance, the person who comes and helps us clean our house goes in marital wellbeing. That's the line item in the budget.

because we're so much happier as a couple when we're not fighting about whose turn it is to sweep the floor or to clean up whatever it might be. And so giving yourselves permission too that in a different chapter, there might be things that you stop doing that you have someone else do for you or that just fall off the list because they're not as

crucial anymore. So outsourcing is something that I think we've embraced, especially as we've had children. And earlier, you said that you feel like you don't have time. I genuinely think we have less time. Like the day must have shrunk. I'm not sure. But I'm curious if there are things that you've seen people outsource or you've outsourced yourself that might not be obvious. And one I've shared a few times is that we never really considered or knew about the fact that

you could hire someone and we literally hired someone off of Craigslist to cook food and drop it off twice, once or twice a week. We started it twice. Now we're back to once and, and glass Tupperware in the fridge, you've got meals.

That was crazy that we just never knew that was a thing. And when we ran out of time, it created a lot less conflict by not having to decide, similar to yours, who's going to get off work early enough to prep dinner because it turns out kids eat about the same time that senior citizens do. So we got to stop work early. Are there other things that people outsource that you've seen? Cleaning and cooking are two, but I'd love to know the others so we can experiment. Yeah.

I think there have been a couple of things that I'm not sure it's outsourcing per se, but that have really changed my experience of time. And one is I often travel for work. And so the back and forth to the airport, I'm not sure why, but I had in my head that I should drive myself to the airport.

And giving myself permission where now I am always in a Lyft or an Uber on the way to and from the airport. I work in the back of the car or when my flights are late, I get to sleep in the back of the car. That freedom of time has been a huge unlock for me. Just that driving home at one o'clock in the morning, I don't do the adrenaline filled hour to then wonder why I can't fall asleep when I walk through the door. I

think another one is around food, but a clever way of doing that when you have young kids. So I was just talking to a couple, they have a one-year-old and they were having that same time crunch around, we don't have enough time for cooking, we're not eating good food. And they had hired a nanny and they realized they had never asked if she cooked. And it turned out she loved to cook. And it was like,

She wanted to actually spend the afternoons planning meals and getting food prepared for the evening. So that was one where there was an interesting synergy between them and the care provider that allowed them to now have meals cooked for them every evening. So I think there are a lot of clever things like that that are probably going to be different for each family, but there's absolutely so much room for creativity around outsourcing.

That's amazing. This just reminded me of something a friend of mine told that is probably another good one. He had a nanny and they

they had all of these people. Someone yesterday was telling me, it's like, once you move to the suburbs and sorry to be gender normative, I guess he was like, you just have a guy for everything. You got a lawn care guy. You got the sprinkler guy. You got this. And he was talking to his nanny and he was like, gosh, the nanny knows the most about the family. They're in the house every day. They know everything. And one day, I don't remember how it clicked, but he found out that the nanny would be interested in making a little extra money and managing all of those things. Right.

So that person now is like, I will make sure that the cleaner comes on a day that works. I will make sure that the yard people are here. I'll tell them to text me. I'll make sure that we send them the PayPal when it's done. And it was like, they basically...

And it was she wanted to do it. They basically have this kind of household manager. But to find someone that wants to do all that for a couple hours a week is probably pretty difficult because they have to learn so much about you. So if there's anyone in your family that's if you have child care, that could be an unlock if they're interested. I think that the through line that's really powerful is being willing to ask the question.

Are you interested in, hey, is this thing important to you? Hey, would you be deeply offended if we dropped off all of our laundry at the laundromat and they folded it and cleaned it for us? Or are you okay with that? Just...

I think there are sometimes internal obstacles around what we think is possible or what somebody might be interested in. And then random non-sequitur aside, I think a huge time saving that occurred in my life is I recognize that I have a black thumb. And so I stopped trying to have plants live in our house and instead just bought fake ones. I like how they look. I'm delighted to have them around and giving myself permission to not have to keep it alive was, it was really actually psychologically soothing.

Kaylee, we are clearly cut from the same cloth because for the last several years, I would bring home even something as robust as a bamboo or a succulent. And somehow, months later, it's just shriveled up brown and dead. Yes. And finally, Chris was like,

It does not make sense for us to continue spending money when you end up with this heartache of everything dying. You throw it out months later and you replace it all over. So thanks to Ikea, Amazon and a variety of other websites, we now have a bunch of very good looking fake plants. And you're right. It still gives that really nice, soothing vibe to the room.

But it's very relaxing for me because it's zero maintenance. The alternative was to get a plant guy. And I was like, no, that's way too expensive. We don't need a plant guy. There are limits. There are limits to how many guys. And there's a principle here that I think is really important that is itself a hack.

We have this exercise that we call the life report card exercise, which is really about priorities. And the idea is, imagine you were going to grade yourself on all of your various life endeavors, work and community service and parenting and all these different things.

And the exercise isn't just a grade where you're getting A's and B's, but it's actually to shift your life report card so that you intentionally get more F's and D's and C's, which is kind of what you were saying. You were unintentionally failing in cultivating greenery and plants in your house and

And then you made the shift to intentionally fail, to just say, you know what? I'm going to get an intentional F in that. I'm not going to put much energy into it anymore. And now I'm going to free up all this energy for other things in my life that really matter to me. And so that itself,

is this amazing hack because so many of us are spending so much time and energy trying to do things that we're maybe not good at, that are not really adding much value to our lives, that we're doing for reasons of like historical accident or just obligation. And so intentionally failing can be another really powerful practice in marriage and in life. I love that concept. For many people listening, they'll go home and they'll implement some of this and they'll start being much more radically generous.

But then let's say six, nine months from now, life's getting really busy. It's so easy to fall into those old habits. How do you stay aware or present in the moment right before you're keeping score when it's not top of mind? What tactics do you have for people to keep this going for the long haul?

The idea of making it structurally part of your life is really valuable. So while you're on the post-podcast, post-reading the book high, putting that calendar reminder there every Thursday at 3 p.m. or starting the practice where when you sit down for dinner, you start with an appreciation, building that in so that it becomes something that you just expect and

is a really good way to give it legs and give it some longevity. There's also a piece that you're naming, which is around presence or mindfulness, that this work is easier if you have a practice of being able to take a deep breath,

see yourself in the moment, and then choose how you're going to respond rather than just reacting. So in that moment where you're doing the dishes after you've already made the meal, after you're the one who unloaded the dishwasher and got everything ready, and you look around and you think to yourself, wait a second, this is not fair at all.

to be able to take that deep breath and reveal, hey, I'd love some help in the kitchen right now versus attacking your partner also helps it be sticky. There's another habit I would add to that, which is carving out space for connection. And there are a lot of different ways to do this. You could do the micro space where it's 15 minutes at the end of the day. There's date night, which we hear about all the time, especially for parents.

But then there's, if you have the opportunity, spending a day together or a weekend together. And what we find is that the momentum of life is such that it's often very difficult to have these conversations about,

Hey, how can we win more as a team? What do our values look like? What are our priorities? Where are we not living up to those? Where can we make some adjustments? In everyday life, there's so much happening that that conversation really isn't even on the table. But when you can carve out a little bit of space from the craziness of modern life, you know, a day or even just an evening, having that become a regular pattern is

gets you in that mindset of taking a step back, seeing the bigger picture. So I think that can also be really valuable. I would very much agree with that. I think one of the things that Chris took away, Chris and I took away after reading your book, and it's been incredibly helpful, is this concept of

weekly scheduled date nights and these short weekend getaways. So actually in about a weekend or two, we are doing a short, just the two of us trip down to Southern California, just to enjoy the sun and the two of us for a bit. So those things have, have definitely helped. I'm curious though, because Kaylee, you had mentioned the, the, the concept of presence. And I think that

One of the things that for me certainly is very challenging is we've carved out these special moments for the two of us, whether it's a date night or a weekend away. But you have these very regular touch points, for example, dinnertime, where you're

With technology now playing so deeply into our lives, it's easy to shift that focus towards work emails because now we all work from home, work never really ends. And now you're multitasking, you're on technology. And I find it incredibly hard

to stay present and focused on the 80-80 piece of it at some of these pretty critical moments because they happen so frequently. So I'm curious to get your perspective on how

you feel technology has shifted people's ability to stay present in these moments? Technology has definitely made it harder. You are not alone in being tempted by your phone at approximately every hour of every day. The dopamine that we get from that moment of someone needs me or I'm important or there's a notification is addictive by design. And so one of the main things that we

recommend for couples is to put your phone away because it's so hard to multitask. I would argue it's impossible to be present with your partner and present with something that's happening on your phone simultaneously. And it's actually one of the things that was in our interviews, really sad to hear from people. Hey, so every night we crawl in bed at the same time and we both get on our phones and I'm scrolling Instagram and he's doom scrolling the news. And we don't have a conversation because we're each on our own device doing our own thing.

And so a couple of things that we highly recommend, number one, kick your phone out of the bedroom. It's much more likely that you'll have a meaningful conversation, that there will be intimacy if your phone is not there. The second is if you can kick your phone out of whether it's date night, we actually do a date hike and we'll drop our daughter off at her grandparents' house. And I would say like 95% of the time I leave my phone behind.

And I do that because I am not good at staying present if my phone is there buzzing in my pocket.

Only once was there a medical emergency when I didn't have my phone and was off on date hike and it turned out to be fine. Somebody else picked up when the person called and my mom ended up being totally fine. But there was that moment like, see, I should never leave my phone back again. My mom needed me and I wasn't there. She was fine. And for that 90 minutes after date hike, there was a level of connection that isn't possible when we're

We're trying to be two places at once and are therefore nowhere. We also learned from one of our interviews, there was a couple that told us about asking permission, which initially I thought was a crazy idea. But we will now do this when we can. We don't always do this. But what it looks like is, hey, is now a good time for me to send this text as we're driving together? Or, hey, is now a good time for me to order these plane tickets as we drive together or whatever it might be?

But just having an actual conversation before you just habitually jump onto your device can be really powerful and lets your partner into the decision. I think that happens a ton on date night too, where you're in a conversation, perhaps you're envisioning a vacation that you're going to take together, you know, whatever your QX

couple's trip is going to be. And there's a temptation because you can make it happen right then to at date night, right then book the hotel, book the plane tickets, make sure that everything is set. And it actually takes you out of the intimacy of the moment that you have with your partner then.

And if you ask permission, hey, do we want to handle this right now? I think it's going to take seven minutes. That might be a choice, but at least then it's conscious versus unconscious. I love that. There's one thing in there that I took that I thought about, which was we do that sometimes where I'm like, OK, we're going to leave my phone or one of us. And when our daughter is 18 months and sometimes it's hard. But when you come back and you're like, all of a sudden you have 10 emails saying,

Instead of taking my phone out and ending up on the news or ending up on like social media or something, I'm actually doing the thing. I get home like, ooh, now I have 10 emails, not just one. And so it kind of like took the small blips of, ooh, what's that? Ooh, what's that? To a gold mine of things, whether it's, you know, something happened. And the other thing was,

I talked to another author named Nir Eyal, who wrote a book called Indistractable in, I think, episode 25. And it was all about how to avoid distraction. But one of the interesting things that I think can apply to a lot of what we discussed is that when you hit that moment of anything that's uncomfortable and default, like I'm going to go scroll my phone.

when early on, when you're on the high after listening to this or reading the book, just pause for a moment and feel it. And it makes it easier to understand it in the future. So if you're unloading the dishwasher after making breakfast, after walking the dog and you're feeling frustrated, it's like pause and like,

It sounds a little crazy and Nate, you might have better tactics with all your mindfulness experience, but feel what it feels like to have that frustration, to have that urge so that you can better identify it in the future. I love that. And you're right. This is mindfulness in a nutshell. It's instead of following the stream of habit, which is what we normally do when we feel something uncomfortable, taking that moment to stay and

And what I like to do is to notice where is this happening in my body so that I get out of the thought stream? Because if you're mind wandering about what's happening, that usually leads you out of the present moment. So can I locate this in my body and can I notice that it's changing? Can I notice that the discomfort I'm feeling, the anxiety, if you really look carefully, there's an impermanence to it and a flow to it and a shifting to it.

And that can be really powerful for learning how to just stay in those moments. And then like you, Chris, I love the idea of the sort of like double dopamine hit, right?

And this is something I've been doing lately. One of my, it's not a marriage hack, it's just sort of a life hack. Like you, I'm very interested in crypto and I have my own issues with news addiction. And I could easily spend most of my day just looking at various financial things and the news. And so what I've done is given myself permission to do that when the clock says PM, but not when the clock says AM. And so when the clock says AM, that's my time to stay with

the discomfort. But when the clock says p.m., I give myself free reign so that I'm not living in this kind of restrictive zone of no, never, never check the news, never check the crypto markets. But still, I'm restricting myself enough that I have that space for mindfulness. I like having these rules where it's like I'm telling my brain I'm

I can do this, just not now. Because as much as we like to think that we're logical and rational, like sometimes our brains just aren't. It's like, I'm logical, but my brain's not logical in this moment. So being able to say, okay, for me, it's eating sweets and Amy has all the self-control and I have none. And the thing that worked was saying,

I can have a cookie and this was a, I think this was a hack. I can't remember who said it, but it's going to be in five minutes. So you don't say no, you just give yourself permission to do it later. And that early...

urge subsides. By the time five minutes comes around, I'm on, I'm writing an email, I'm doing something, I'm on a walk and I don't need the cookie. But, you know, my brain allows me to say no if I say yes in the future. It's I don't understand it. There's probably a neuroscientist who could explain it better, but it works for me. There's a really crazy reciprocal hack, which is if you give yourself permission to quit exercising at the 10 minute mark,

That most of the time, if you set aside whatever it is, your half an hour that you're going to exercise, but you give yourself permission. If I hate this at five minutes, I could quit. Or if I hate this at 10 minutes, I could quit. Most of the time you finish the workout because I'm already there. I'm already doing it. The endorphins finally hit and you keep going. Love it. You just said reciprocal. So there's one, this is a bit of a segue, but it's something we talked about briefly earlier.

It's easy when we're both like, yeah, let's do this. We're both on board. What happens when someone's not on board or was on board and has fallen off board? We, in some ways, are a case study of how this works. When we got married, we were 26. Kaylee had a job at Deloitte, a consulting firm. She managed her finances. She had a 401k. I was a grad student at Princeton who lived in a dorm and cleaned it like twice a year. And so that was our entry point.

And as a result, she became the over-contributor. I became the under-contributor. She was the one interested in working on our marriage. I was the one who thought that was a total waste of time. And so it created this dynamic, which we call the reluctant partner dynamic, where one of the partners is super engaged and enthusiastic and the other one is very reluctant. Right.

And what we found, and this is like a 10 or 15 year case study. So it has a happy ending. But what we found is that both of us had to look at our part in the dynamic. So I'll tell you what my part was. And maybe Kaylee can tell you what her part was. My part was that I had this kind of unwillingness to lean in and contribute more or become curious about ways in which I might become more engaged in the relationship.

And I heard her feedback as constant nagging. And I responded in this very passive aggressive way where I said, you know what, it turns out anything I do is not enough. So I'm just not going to do anything. And that became the pattern. That was certainly the way I contributed to the pattern.

Seeing my part was a really big deal because I set it up where I would ask him to do something. He wouldn't do it the way that I wanted him to do it. So I would either redo it or I would nag him to do it the way that I wanted him to do it. And I can't imagine why he was so frustrated with the way that I was giving space for him to do things. I feel you. I feel you, Nate. Yeah.

And so it was actually a really profound shift for us to take a look at where we were doing things and to actually give full ownership of things that I historically had owned and micromanaged and to say, I trust you to do it differently from me and change.

to actually empower him to do so. So finances is an interesting example where I was a bit more of the Chris and I relationship that I quite like it when things reconcile. And I like being in the spreadsheet and in the details and knowing exactly what the purchase was.

And then I was mad at Nate all the time early on because he was making these purchases. I didn't know what they were. I felt like he was being irresponsible, but I actually gave him no insight and no power and no ability to do anything differently. And so for us to make the shift where I actually turned over our personal finances to Nate and said, let me show you all the systems that I've been using for however many years that I've been doing it.

And to let there be ways that he did things really differently, owning my part and saying, if I control it, I can't be mad about the resistance. If I'm willing to let go, can I also empower with the tools rather than just expecting him to read my mind? Which is a side note. I find that expecting partners to read our minds is one of the fastest ways to have conflict. Right?

Our ESP is just terrible. And yet the reliability of what do you mean you didn't know as an excuse or as an accusation is really fascinating. So if one person's really in and the other person's not, we think that owning how you're creating your own experience can really shift the dynamic.

super, super tactically, we think that you can stealth bring in 80-80 to your relationship by using some of the exercises that in some ways, the 80-80 marriage book, you can use as ideas for ways that you can, if you want to use hacks, sort of like hack in to how your marriage system is working.

Your partner might not be psyched. And Amy, I thought it was so interesting that Chris brought the book home and you thought, oh no, something's wrong. We heard that over and over in a way that was completely fascinating. Nace written New York Times was selling mindfulness books. I've written leadership books and people like to show them to us. Look, I have the 15 commitments on my bookshelf, but you bring in a marriage book and people start to go, oh, are we okay?

And so sometimes handing them a book can feel a little scary. Instead, you can just do an exercise. Hey, I was reading this book. It had an exercise around priorities. It feels like we're both really overwhelmed. What do you think about sitting down and doing this exercise around a life report card where we try to get Fs? That could be kind of fun. And after they've done something where there's a positive outcome,

they're more willing to engage in some of the concepts or some of the other pieces that bring the whole thing together. That's a very good takeaway. There are definitely things that I think out of the gate

From a pure communication perspective, I realized are just minor tweaks that made a significant difference. But there are clearly some really good, as you call it, hacks or as Chris lives by hacks or tactics that we can certainly apply and hopefully that those listening can apply as well.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Is there a thing to do to catch yourself? I think we're both, I would say, somewhat type A. When there's something to do, we both definitely have an opinion on how to do it. And so...

How do you share that feedback without frustrating the other person, I guess? It's like, oh, you're not doing it the way I wanted you to do it. And the default is like to tell someone. And then that person often says, why am I even doing this? The experience Nate had. One option, as you mentioned, is to just completely give away control. But there are some things where, whether it's, you know, cleanliness, the level of cleanliness or the variety of food, as we talked earlier, there's a lot of examples of

How do you, without giving control completely, constructively give feedback in those circumstances? We have a practice that we call reveal and request, which I think is really helpful here. And it's counter to the way we normally offer feedback in a relationship. So we were just talking this morning on our walk before this about how

In relationships, our default mode is when something goes wrong, we point our finger at the other person and there's some form of blame or criticism that goes along with it. Here's just an example. We were on a radio show that was talking about the 80-80 marriage and I thought this was so cool and I was waiting all day to play this for Kaylee. And...

She came into the kitchen. I told her about it. She walked away before I could even play it for her. And I felt like totally disappointed. Like I had this great surprise that I was about to reveal and she just left. And the default for me in that moment was to be like, I can't believe you just walked away. You always do this. You're too busy. You need to slow down at work. You need to be more present. It was all about you, you, you, you, you.

And so the idea of reveal and request is a way of giving feedback where we start with our own individual experience in that moment. So I actually believe that I was able to shift in that particular moment where what that looks like is, hey, I was waiting all day to share this with you. And I just feel sad that you walked away and I didn't get to play this for you. Can you come up in five minutes or can I play this for you now?

And it's a reversal in the way that we usually give feedback in the sense that you're leading with vulnerability and what we often call an inarguable truth, which is just, I feel sad or I feel irritated or I feel anxious, whatever's happening in your body and your experience.

So we found that that's a really powerful way to give feedback that's really different from judgment and criticism and the way that we're generally giving feedback in life, that we're almost wired to give feedback differently.

It requires a little bit more self-awareness in the moment. So hence the pause is really useful. A different example with the same theme. I was really anxious and I'm walking around the house and I realized clutter is not acceptable in this present state of anxiety.

But rather than picking up everybody's stuff with an air of resentment and throwing it in whatever room I thought that it should belong in or throwing it in the garbage, which I have been known to do, instead, I revealed and said, I'm feeling really anxious. Clutter is adding to my anxiety. You could really help me out today by picking up a couple of the things that are around, especially those that I might step on in the kitchen.

And that let me that let our daughter show up in a way that was so loving to me. And that didn't turn into the like, Mom, you suck or the like, seriously, you need to handle your yourself. I'm really curious. We've been talking a lot about some of the tactics and the mentalities and mindsets that go behind 8080. I'm curious why not? Why is the book not 100 100 marriage?

We thought long and hard about that because we had the same idea. If it's really about radical generosity and we're really trying to uproot our position in fairness and 50-50, then why not go all the way to 100-100? And

The reason we advocate for something more like 80-80 is that we think it's actually really important to carve out some space for yourself and that there's a way of underdoing radical generosity, which is what most of us do, but there's also a way of overdoing it. So for instance, we talked to one individual who was a man who told us,

that he was so giving in his marriage that he felt like he just got on this bus. And the bus was marriage, and then the bus was kids, and then the bus was a career that he didn't really enjoy. And he felt like he gave it all away. He had no purpose. And so we think it is really important to have your own sense of purpose and

your own projects that you find really interesting. Like I really enjoy playing Frisbee golf, which is super weird and random, but I don't expect that Kaylee is going to be out on the Frisbee golf course with me every day. Right. That's part of that, that space that's carved out for me. So that's really why we call it 80, 80 is that there, there is something really powerful and important about our own individual pursuits that we want to preserve. Yeah, we definitely have a few of those, but,

But coming back to the 80-80 part, and at the risk of needing to mark this episode explicit, at least with iTunes, I want to touch on the topic of sex. You have a whole chapter on the book about it. You haven't mentioned it once. You could have easily written this book without dedicating a chapter to it. So I'm really curious. You mentioned a few things about scheduling intimacy. Not everything has to be spontaneous. Would you talk about that chapter and what led you to put it in the book?

When we thought about writing this book, we realized sex is an essential part of this whole equation. And we have used the word intimacy, which is kind of a code word that we've been using, but now we're going to go full out, call it sex. And what I would say just to set this up is that we live in a culture where the predominant viewpoint on sex is that if it's not good or you want to have more and better sex, you need to resort to all sorts of tactics, right?

I think Cosmo Magazine is a great example of this. They have all these articles about five ways to have sex in a pool and five ways to pleasure your spouse, right? And they are selling a worldview that says basically the only thing holding you back from amazing intimacy is a bunny-shaped vibrator or an orgasm cream or some tantra class. And I think that there is a sliver of truth in that.

But we take a very different perspective, which is that sex is a reflection of the rest of your life. So we have a line in there from a sex expert we interviewed where he said, the way you do sex is the way you do life. That it's like a mirror image. And what we think that means is that if you are living a life that's very unconscious together, where you feel constant resentment, that is going to show up in your sex.

And likewise, if you're able to make this shift to more intentional structures and a mindset of radical generosity, all of these things that you're doing on the mindset and structure side of 80-80 are also going to show up because you're going to be more connected and that will be mirrored in your intimacy. And so there are some practices there. Do you want to jump in? Well, I was going to say mostly the exact same thing.

When we're thinking about sex and the reflection that it is on your life, it's really interesting to just do a quick survey of how you're showing up in the line at Costco. Are you laughing? Is it playful? Does it feel like each of you knows what you're doing? Do you care how your partner is feeling? That that will get reflected, that there can be, and in the book we talk quite a bit about this, there can be check the box sex. It's Thursday. We should probably get that done.

versus, hey, you're the person who I want to be with. And on our date, we're talking about things that matter and there's attention and care, then it's much more likely you're going to have attentive and caring sex.

I think there's some tactics too, because that's what you're asking about. So this is a really interesting tactic that's out there in the Instagram world and marriage and relationships that a lot of people swear by, which is these sex challenges. So a lot of couples will commit to having sex

seven days in a row for a week or a month, or some couples have done it for a year. What's interesting about that is it takes away the question, are we going to do it? It's just, oh, we're committing for seven days, we're going to do it. So that's an interesting tactic. The other one that I think is really important is just

A big issue around intimacy for most couples is drive discrepancy. And there's actually there's a technical term in psychology for this sexual drive discrepancy, SDD. What that means is that in most couples, there's a high drive and a low drive partner. And there's some really interesting power dynamics there.

around who's initiating, who's saying no. And so one of the things that this sounds insignificant, but it's really powerful. If you are the higher drive partner and you're trying to initiate and your partner says no, there's a sting to that. But if your partner says not tonight, but tomorrow night, yes, that shift between a pure no

And a no with a plan can be like life-changing. I mean, it just lands very differently for the high drive partner. So that's another tactic that couples could consider is like, how do we play with this power dynamic of high and low drive? There's also just the ways that you signal to each other. So if you're having this conversation in front of your kids, you can develop a code like...

Hey, do you want to have tacos? And if your kid over here is, they're like for dinner on Saturday, why, what were you talking about? But it gives you a way to start to initiate the conversation or use signals with each other. Hey, did we light the candles in the room?

That might be a signal to your partner so that they can start to get excited. We also really like the idea of signaling to your partner as early in the day as you can. Send them a text. Start the feeling set around sex early. So it's in some ways like extended foreplay. So if you can go from relationship advice to sex advice,

And you're clearly the types of people that optimize, right? You wrote a whole book about it. You interviewed hundreds of couples. I got to ask before we wrap, what other aspects of your life? We've talked a little bit about time management, but maybe there's a few others, whether they're hacks or routines or tricks that you'd like to share that you guys use to be happier or make your lives better, whether it's together or individually.

For me, mindfulness is a central practice that I try to weave throughout my day in a number of different ways. So I think about it as it's a formal practice, but also an informal practice. So what that looks like for me on a formal level is every day I commit to 25 to 30 minutes of just

Some sort of mindfulness practice where I'm sitting, I'm either following my breath or doing more of an open awareness practice. I find that's like planting a seed at the beginning of my day. That's very different from the seed of Instagram or the seed of news binging or any of the other things that I find myself drawn to. So that's key. But then there's also the informal moment to moment practice that goes along with that.

Of just trying throughout the day to build in these moments of mindfulness, especially around what we were talking about earlier, discomfort, emotions that I don't want to feel. Just trying to use those as opportunities to really open to an experience that would otherwise feel unpleasant and I'd otherwise want to close to or run away from.

So I think for me, like that's other than the relationship marriage stuff, I spend a lot of my time and mental energy and attention on that particular set of hacks. It feels in some ways meta relationships are my hack. And what I mean by that is I learn things because people I care about send me a podcast or send me a book to read. And then I internalize them because we talk about them.

I exercise most often because I'm walking with a friend and I care about that relationship. And so I use how much I value being with other people as a way to do some of the things that I should in my life, because in some ways I've bribed myself with a person or a relationship I care about. You just mentioned other people. So I have one follow-up, which is,

Of all the things you learned about relationships in marriage, right, are there things that are lessons that apply to relationships with friends or family that can improve those relationships or even at work? 100% that 80-80 works most naturally in a committed relationship because the idea of being a team and shared success is in some ways implicit in the relationship.

But the tools themselves, that notion of what's your mindset with this person and do you approach them with radical generosity works absolutely in friendship and with family. One of my best friend's favorite things to text me is 80-80 because in our friendship, that's a mindset that we've really adopted with each other. It also works really well in teams and organizations, particularly the structure piece.

But if you can establish enough rapport, enough relational capital that your mindset is that of assuming positive intent, which I think of as the corporate version of radical generosity, then it makes a ton of sense to set up your values, your priorities, your boundaries, your roles. All of those structural components work really well in professional settings.

You just have to take the sex piece out. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Very important. Pro tip. Pro tip. Best hack of the episode is take the sex out of your work and family relationships. Certainly removes the complications. Kaylee and Nate, this has been phenomenal. Aside from your book, where can people keep up with both of you online?

Yeah, we have a website, 8080marriage.com. And we have like free epic date night guide there. And we do a newsletter every week where we just come up with random practices and ideas for couples. So that's one place. And then Instagram is the other main place to find us, 8080marriage on Instagram.

And so this is really funny. I was recently on a podcast where he said that they transcribed the interview. And every time I said 8080, it translated it to ADHD. So just to be really explicit, it's 8080. There's no slash. There's nothing else. It's not attention deficit. Find us at 8080, that 8080 version.

I actually read one of those transcripts, so I was very familiar. Okay, last thing is, can you leave everyone with each of you one epic date recommendation or suggestion? I would highly recommend Ditch Day. We wrote our most recent newsletter about it. I had a crazy experience a couple of weeks ago. I was supposed to be in New York. Flights got canceled. I ended up at home. I persuaded this one to do a Ditch Day with me and it was epic. And my tip would be,

Don't just talk about the weather.

which is the way we describe a lot of conversation that couples have, which is, "Hey, what's the weather like today?" - That's really cool here. - It was negative seven this morning. That was crazy. - Did you see how much snow there was? - So instead of talking about the external world, ask questions that invite the other person to talk about their internal world. How are you really doing? What's exciting for you right now? What are you afraid of? Just ask different questions would be my main tip. - You guys need your own 80/80 card, deck of cards with questions. There's your next product.

There you go. Okay, this is awesome. Thank you guys so much for being here. This was so much fun. Thank you for having us. Thanks so much for having us.

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it, especially Spotify, since they just added podcast ratings. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.