Grant Wattie talks to entrepreneurial couples who built successful businesses but lost their marriage. He argues that partners must each become their best self independently, not through couple's projects or schedule fixes. His own reconciliation with Christine started when they both pursued personal excellence separately.
You built a successful business together, and somewhere along the way you lost each other. This is one of the quietest crises a couple can have, because from the outside there is no crisis at all. The business is thriving. You look like proof that partnership works. Inside the house, you are 2 capable people running parallel lives who used to be married. Success does not protect a marriage from this. It often hides it. A thriving business is very good evidence to yourselves that everything must be fine. Here is what usually happened. Somewhere in the building, one or both of you stopped working on yourselves and started only working on the company. The company got your growth, your development, your best thinking. The marriage got whatever was left over. By the time the business is successful, that is not very much. The way back is not another shared project, and it is not a schedule fix. It starts with a question we ask every couple in this exact spot. Are you personally becoming your best self right now, independent of what your partner is or is not doing? Not your best business self, your best self, full stop. 2 people each doing that work is what we call best me times 2. It sounds too simple to hold a whole marriage up. It is the actual mechanism, because a marriage cannot be better than the 2 people inside it are willing to become. Christine and I built something successful and nearly lost each other doing it. Getting each other back did not start with a plan for us. It started with each of us choosing to become our best self again on purpose. If your business succeeded and your marriage quietly did not, we built an 18-minute training on exactly this at grantwattie.com/marriagetraining.
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