It’s Called A Partnership For A Reason

A man with dreams needs a woman with vision.

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Back in college, during a lecture on how to manage Architectural Firms, one of my old mentors shared with us the secret to finding good business partners. Instead of gravitating to like-talented professionals, you should try to find your counterparts. If you’re good at designing, the others must be good at production. If you’re good at marketing, the others must be good in accounting. You might have the best product in the world, but without someone to sell it, it’s useless. You might have the best hustlers in the world, but without something to sell… you get the idea. When you understand how each person contributes to the partnership, you understand where you have duplicated efforts, what bases are left uncovered, and if you have expendable freeloaders. Only when you can cover all the bases between all the partners, can a business be stable and successful.

He concluded the lesson by emphasizing how this mentality goes into any partnerships, especially marriage.

We live in a society that promotes self-reliance and autonomy. We are grilled by life into avoiding at all cost relying on others; all thanks to failed group projects, bad roommate arrangements, and the ever constant posts about life’s “givers and takers” or about “reachers and settlers.” By the time when we’ve been properly indoctrinated into a self-sufficient mind set, we end up unable to understand why marriage is so difficult.

During that entire process of independence, we’re never taught to open up to others or to actually trust and depend on them. We are told that “love overcomes it all” as if love, a wonderfully ephemeral sentiment, was enough to overcome some very practical issues that happen within relationships.

Let me make something clear here. No matter how “complete” and well rounded you are, you have your strong points and your weaknesses. We want to believe that we’re so “complete” that sometimes being with someone with a different skill-set or a different mindset just exposes our shortcomings to ourselves, a mirror into our “weakness.” The insecurities then tend to flourish as we become defensive of our weak points or arrogant with our strengths.

You need to view your relationship like any partnership. You bring into the union your own personal weaknesses and strengths and hope they play well with those of the other person. It’s about moving past our inability to accept our short falls or dismissing our partner’s strengths. Instead, start looking at how you balance each other out and trust your partner to have your back, even if that means keeping you in check.

The dreamer needs the realist to ground him, while the realist needs the dreamer to fly. Maybe that successful person is constantly in business mode, yet what they need and crave in a life partner is a free spirit, someone that reminds them that life isn’t all work, that play is important. Maybe that “smart” person needs someone who reminds them that life can’t be overanalyzed, that some things simply are. Or that imaginative and creative person needs a pragmatic and logical partner, who can give them the necessary focus to fulfill their dreams.

It’s amusing how we are willing to understand this concept when we speak of businesses, as the social savvy marketer will partner up with the economy savvy number cruncher. Each realizes the strengths within their partner and weaknesses within themselves, so the power and command constantly shifts and flows between them depending of the situation and the needs. If this is so easy to understand as a concept when dealing with business partnerships, why is it such a hard concept to embrace when speaking of romantic partnerships?

We don’t need someone to complete who we are within a relationship. We need someone to complete the relationship based on who we are. We need a partner who can pick up the slack left by our own weaknesses, helping us to excel in our strengths. We need a partner, who can see what we can’t see, who can give a different perspective than the one we have. And we need to trust this person to hold their end of the bargain and that is willing to let us do the same for them.

The Response Waiting Period

If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.

Groucho Marx

In many places, where civilians are allowed to own a firearm, the government requires that there be a waiting period between the time when the weapon is purchased and the time it’s handed over. Although this time varies from location to location, the general explanation given is so that the government can do a proper background check on the person. Yet, with today’s hyper connected society, a background check can be done almost instantaneously. Even without the government’s resources, as an individual you can Google anyone's life history in less than an hour to know what kind of a person they are. So, with that understood, why would you have to wait 24 hours, 48 hours, or even a week for a background check?

Because it’s not about doing a background check. It’s a cooling off period. It’s giving you enough time to think about why you are getting a weapon. It’s giving you enough to keep you from doing something you will regret the rest of your life. So, if we can understand the logic behind a cooling off period to keep you from your own stupidity, why don’t we use that same logic in any other moment we need to keep ourselves from “doing something you will regret the rest of your life.”

Be it your spouse, your kids, your parents, your boss, or anyone else, comes up to you with the dreaded “we need to talk,” they probably already talked about the issue with you. You just weren’t present during the discussion. We all do this, as we review how to discuss any difficult issue with someone. We review what we want to say and how we will say it. We consider any reply the person might have, practicing what our response to these comments will be. And we do this for days, even weeks. When we think we have every base covered and every scenario pre-rehearsed, we confront the person. Then, even if it took us weeks to get ready, expect the other person to be able to respond instantaneously.

And the other person probably ends up doing something stupid.

As the ability of people today to do constructive criticism has lessened, and our ability to receive ANY kind of criticism is slowly lost as a result, we will probably react to “we need to talk” as a challenge. In this case, it’s within our nature as humans to revert to a fight/flight when confronted. Your reaction will either be to win the argument, however possible, or to run away from it, again however possible. By this time, the conversation has turned into a win/lose situation, where it stops being about understanding, reviewing what is being called out, or even finding common ground.

As communication and openness is crucial in any social interaction, how do you handle this kind of situation, how do you keep it from turning into a power struggle? First, the person bringing up the issue, the one who had enough time to prepare for the exchange, has to give the other person the same consideration of time to review the issues brought up. Second, the person on the receiving end has to listen and consider just what is brought up, not as an attack, but as something they might not have considered.

All Relationship, be it familiar, friendships, romantic, or even business, must be about a balance and a partnership. It should never be a power struggle where one dominates the other. It should be about creating an environment where both persons benefit from each other. By giving a person the space to explain what they are going though and how they feel, you are offering them respect. By giving the person the time to consider what was told to them, you are offering them understanding.

And isn’t that what all relationships should be about? Respect and understanding?