Identity

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👋 Welcome back Ladies and Gents,

We were sitting at the kitchen table having coffee when Aaron said, "I gotta read you something." 

He began reading about an entrepreneur who hit it big within the tech and design space. This wasn't his bio; it was a newsletter he wrote about the dissolution of his marriage. The experience was liberating and awesome because of 'everything that came after.'

I found myself getting irritated and jotted down a few things in my notebook while Aaron was reading it to me:

I kept coming back to that first bullet point. Oftentimes, the most successful people in business have the lowest agency relationships. 

However, is the partner always the low-agency one? 

I kept returning to this question. What if you could be high-agency in output, but low-agency with your emotions?

I did a quick search online: the entrepreneur's name + parents to see what would come up. I was curious what his parents did, and if they were divorced or still married. Come to find out, his parents are no longer married. They had a pretty argumentative marriage over finances, and neither of them was happy. All of this led their entrepreneurial son to leave home at an early age, foster extreme independence, and no doubt be in search of something to make him happy.

I asked Aaron to forward the email to me so I could read it.

While I was reading it, this surprised me: "We had years of genuine love and laughter. I became who I am in part because of that relationship."

So there was love. What happened?

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He went on to say that it wasn't anything dramatic. They just changed. Grew into different people. Their interests and preferences weren't the same, and they didn't 'like having their lives intertwined.' 

Which I think is so sad.

When I read this, I thought: yes, high-agency entrepreneurs can be low-agency in their emotional regulation.

I did a quick search: Can you be high-agency in output and low-agency with emotional regulation? This is what I found: 

An interesting inverse listed is Gordon Ramsay whose on-screen persona is about transforming failing businesses, while screaming and swearing at restaurant owners and employees to get their stuff together. What we see today…a completely different man. A man who seems to be self-regulated with no extreme blow-ups, a devoted, loving husband and father.

Regarding that entrepreneur, I realize that I only have bits of information pieced together. Is it possible I was reading through the lines? Maybe. But what I do know started to make sense to me.

Did they grow apart from each other? Yes. Could this have been avoided? Also, yes.

What looked like growing apart has a biological explanation running underneath it the entire time. 

When a relationship lives in an unresolved state, the body treats it as a chronic threat. Relational uncertainty produces increased cortisol reactivity and disrupts cortisol recovery. The body doesn't know the difference between an unresolved business problem and an unresolved marriage. It just stays activated.

Aaron and I have a different outlook.

We made an agreement to “do life together” whatever happens. We love each other and are committed to each other until death do us part. We love being together and experiencing new things together. But in looking at this entrepreneur's example, we see what would have helped his relationship.

We don't have all the answers.

What we have is over twenty years of choosing each other, watching others navigate this, and being honest enough to look at our own deficiencies. We aren’t tooting our own horn. This is what happens when you stay committed to figuring it out together.

So what was actually missing?

Before we go further, this isn't marital advice. We can't tell you to stay in a marriage or leave one, and that's not what we're here to do.

What we can do is look at a real-world example and apply science and evidence-based research to ask a different set of questions.

What adjustments could have been made earlier?

What did each person's nervous system need?

How was their diet, their sleep, their stress load?

And underneath all of it: what made up their identity, what was their outlet, and how did those things, or the absence of them, shape who they were showing up as in the relationship? 

Those questions are worth asking regardless of where you are in your marriage. They make you a better person, and that makes you a better partner.

That entrepreneur wasn't missing love. He said so himself. What he was missing was the infrastructure that keeps love from pressurizing into resentment.

It made me think back to a podcast I listened to this week. It was of a CEO and co-founder of a telehealth company who said something pivotal that I think translates well to relationships.

He was talking about the cure for burnout, and he said that you needed two things to overcome this:

He went on to explain that you need to “consciously cultivate different identities in your brain that are not correlated to your job”. Because when things go wrong, which they will, you won't be as prone to crumble and crack.

For him, his three identities are:

When you encompass such identities, it makes it easier to do these two things:

He said his mindset is that of an athlete (he does a lot of endurance sports), which enables him to be resilient as a founder. Regardless, he transitions into these identities to alleviate stress, show courage, and be present with his family. 

His framework was about founding a company. But we heard something else altogether. What keeps a founder standing when everything falls apart is exactly what keeps a marriage from quietly collapsing under pressure.

Three takeaways:

These three name it precisely: without identity and outlet, the relationship consumes everything. And a relationship that carries too much weight stops being a partnership.

It becomes a pressure system.

The antidote isn't distance. It's two people choosing each other every day, with ego checked at the door and love as the operating principle.

With care,

💛 Jaylene & Aaron, Sync & Thrive Team

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