What If There Was a Magical Marriage Trick?There Just Might Be

Hi, there it is. Susie Welch, and this is becoming you. The podcast where every single week I endeavor to do the impossible, which is help you answer the question, what should I do with my life?

And obviously, I don't think it's impossible, because otherwise, why would I be here every single week? And why would you? And thank you, by the way, for being here. This is a different podcast, actually, because I'm not talking about careers so much as I am talking about marriage and whether or not you can have a successful career and a happy life without or with marriage. I know it's all related, and I have some different views on marriage, to tell you the truth. I think a lot about marriage now that I am a widow. I think a lot about my own marriage, and I think about the marriages of the people around me, and I'm surrounded by people who are dating. And frankly, just in all my years, I've just kind of thought a lot about marriage as it relates to. To values and as it relates to the becoming you process. So if you're thinking about marriage, if you're in a marriage that's happy or maybe not so happy, and you want to relate it to the becoming you methodology, or if you just want to hear my thoughts about it, stay here. I think that this might be very helpful to you this episode because I have a theory of how marriages work when they work well, and I'd love to share it with you today. So this podcast about marriage started because I got a question from a listener that just set my hair on fire. I know if you're visualizing me, my hair seems to be on fire quite a lot. But she wrote in. Take a listen to her question.

Hi, I'm Gurmahal and I'm a writer. I've written two books. I'm also a political strategist, and I hope to maybe get into active politics myself eventually. I come from a nice city called Jalandhar in India, and the question that I'm looking at is whether a feminist can be married. And I think it's a bit tricky for me because I grew up with my mom, who's a single mother, because my father passed away while he was serving in the military. And both of them had one of the most beautiful marriages, romances, very Bollywood that I know of. However, I did grow up in the matriarchy. We've always only had women at home, and I've essentially grown up without a patriarch at all. And of course, got introduced to feminist literature. It made a lot of sense for me. It made a Lot of sense of my life and how I've lived it. However, now that I've reached this fine, ripe age of 28, I am beginning to wonder because one, I think, think I see this ultimate, beautiful, gorgeous love story that my parents have had. On the other hand, I think there is that question of would I ever want to be a part of an institution that's so oppressive, and if I've not experienced it, would I really want to? I don't know. I don't know. I think it's a bit of a back and forth also, what it might mean for my career, what it might mean for a woman in public life. On one hand, it's tricky to be a single woman and be a part of the public life, and it's apparently beneficial to have a stronger structure behind you, which an institution like this provides. But on the other hand, all the brilliant leaders, female leaders, that I've seen around, especially in South Asia, have always been single women. I am debating it, I am questioning it, and I think it's something that's. That's been on my mind.

Thank you so much for reaching out. Thank you for bringing this question to me. And I heard it from a student just this week, and she's a fine, fine student. And she said, you know, we're doing our area of transcendence. We're doing becoming you together. And I'm looking at this spectacular life. I'm deciding for myself and designing for myself. And a man doesn't fit into it. A relationship, a marriage doesn't fit into it, so I should just lop that part off, right? And I was like, hold on a second. And I kind of filed it away. And I thought, how interesting that this young woman is just sort of saying, I'm going to make this early decision not to have a relationship. And then this person wrote. And actually, I want to say that this is a conversation that I have with the wonderful young women who work on my team and both of my daughters who are not married all the time about this idea of marriage. And I have really strong opinions about it, but also an unbelievable tenderness for the doubts around marriage. Why? Because the world, all you have to do is look around and we're surrounded by people who have terrible, hurtful, oppressive, complicated marriages, and you would want no part of it. But you know what? That's not new. Marriage has always been hard and complicated, but also from the beginning of marriage, marriage has been great. I had a great marriage. Jack was like, for the first time in my life, I knew what it felt like to have a team. Susie. And he used to say this crazy thing to me. He used to say, I'm always in your pocket. And at first I thought, that's so weird. Who would ever say that? But that was the truth. He was like always with me, no matter where we were. And we had a marriage, but we had a theory of our marriage. And we had a theory of marriage, which I wanna share with you because I think not enough people have it. But I wanna answer this question directly, which is that here's somebody who's written two books, I think she' 28. She's written two books. That's spectacular and incredibly impressive. She maybe wants to go into politics someday. And it's sort of an interesting conflict. Cause she saw her parents amazing love story. But she also, as a feminist, as she describes herself, understands that the institution of marriage can be incredibly oppressive. And she said, you know, should I just lop this out of my life so that I can be the successful woman I want and need to be? And so my answer to all of this is that it's very easy to make pronouncements about marriage in the abstract, okay? And if you were just to go up into the abstract, yeah, marriage can really close you down for both men and for women. But marriage has been an institution that has stayed with human beings since the beginning of time for a reason. If it was just only oppressive, it wouldn't have survived this long because it also can be spectacular. You know why? Please get ready for your, like, major cringe alert here. Because love is great. Love is great. Unconditional love, which is what goes on in a good marriage, is great and nothing might be better, okay? That's why people like their dog so much. Because that's where they're getting the unconditional love they're not getting in their marriage, but a good marriage. And I want to say this to my listener who wrote in, and I should have said it to my student, but it was crossing a boundary that I didn't want to cross with a student. But I say to my daughters and I say to the women who I work with every single day, you cannot and should not have a marriage that is not built on the foundation of shared values. And too many people go into marriages based on, like, love and chemistry and fun and society saying, ding, ding, ding, time to get married and are your families know each other, whatever it is and. Or this is as good as it's going to get, I'm going to do it. I've had this image, this identity of getting married. And they have not ever, not ever looked hard at each other's values and seen if they have the same values. DNA profile. And I have to tell you that when I invented the values bridge, which is my digital tool, which helps you figure out what your values are in, like, 20 minutes flat, I was testing it the way I tested it at the beginning. You know, I'm just such a fun girl. The way I tested it was I had dinner parties with my friends who were mainly married. They're other faculty members at NYU Stern School of Business. I had them over. They came with their spouses. And I would say, now that we're done with dessert, I have a digital tool I'd like you to test. And I would take out the. And they were good sports. And they all took the values bridge sitting next to their partners. And then they wanted immediately to compare their values to their partners, and they wanted to compare the variance that they got, which is the gap between how much you're living your values and how much you're not living them. And there's sort of a number, a gap, a variance that shows how close you are to living the life of your dreams. And I can tell you, I could tell immediately the happy and unhappy couples in the room, because the ones were like, yep, yep, we have the same values. Yeah, we knew that. Every happy marriage, in my experience, including my own, is built on an understanding of your partner's values. In the best case scenario, shared values, but where you don't share your values, that you have respect and you. And you have an explicit understanding that your values are different.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. More in a minute.

Let's get back to the topic at hand on this episode.

Let me just make an example of this here, okay? I call eudaimonia the divorce value, okay? Because it's where I've seen more divorces occur. Eudaimonia is a Greek word. So this is a very old tendency in human beings, a proclivity for. For, well, being fun and pleasure, okay? And some people have a ton of it, and some people, like me, don't have all that much of it. This is why I'm such a boring person. And. And that I just. I don't really care about fun. I care about work and achievement and a whole bunch of other things. I would say, actually, we just have a different level of eudaimonia. Okay? Actually, in high school, I knew this guy. His name was Anthony. He was the biggest eudaimonia person I'd ever seen in my life. He was the party. I actually bailed him out of jail once because one time at a party in college, he took out a samurai sword and thought it was hilarious to sort of go around acting like he was a. Well, he was a little bit inebriated, but who wasn't at that party? Well, I wasn't. That's for one thing. Everybody was laughing. And then somebody called the police, and off he went to jail. He thought it was hilarious. He went on to have a magnificent career on Wall Street. Why? He went into sales, all right? And he just was the. And he just entertained the clients. And he was able to combine his high eudaimonia with work. Well, then, oops, 2008 came, and all the fun went out of Wall street for a few years. And what did he do? He left. He went back to France. He was French, and he opened up, like, a bar on the Cote d' Azur or whatever. I remember one time sitting in a car with him in Paris. We were visiting with him. Why? Because he was so much fun. And we were sitting in a car at a stoplight in Paris. He was single at the time. He had been married and divorced. And there was, like, a woman in the car next to us, and she was extremely attractive. He looked. He put his car in park. He got out, and he asked her on a date at the stoplight, and they went on a date that night. He blew us off and went on a date with her. This was him. Okay, so the problem was that his magnificent, intelligent, deep, poignant wife, with whom he had two magnificent children, did not value eudaimonia. She valued work, centrism and achievement and affluence. And they got divorced by the same token. I know a couple. They have many things in common. She's much more introverted than he is, but he very openly. We're in a small community together, and I'm gonna be very discreet here with the details where he had an affair and he cheated on her. And everyone knew about it, and everyone thought, well, it's over for them. And they had four children, and everyone was really sad about it because they had been a wonderful couple. And I remember saying to a good friend, they're the last couple I thought would get a divorce. And they made it. They made it. They survived. I just had dinner with them recently. They made it because they had the same level of eudaimonia. They loved fun, and they love the exact same kind of fun. So even though he publicly humiliated her to use her words, by cheating on her with someone that we all knew. They went and they did, like, five things that they loved doing together at the same level. They, like, went on a trip to the Bahamas where they went jet skiing, and they just did a bunch of different things. And I just would be, you know, something that starts with X and ends with ey was very important in their relationship. And that's part of eudaimonia. And they just sort of redoubled it and they got their marriage back. Okay? And they did it because they shared this value of eudaimonia. So I would say that when a couple is having trouble, sometimes it's because one has a lot of eudaimonia and the other has very little. And you know what? The same thing is true about work. Centrism. One's got a lot, one's got a little radius. Beholderism. So any good marriage. I know this sounds like a tangent, but it's really not. I am going someplace with this. Just bear with me. Any good marriage is built on a shared understanding of what values are and what each individual's values are and how much they have of each one of them. And frankly. And this is just sort of. I wasn't actually even planning on talking about. This is why I'm going to start doing becoming us, which is doing becoming you with couples. Because every single time I do becoming you, my married students say to me, can we do this with my partner? And you know what the answer is? Yes. Because I see so much value in it that you could do it and actually get a language of value. So that when you are having problems, instead of saying, you're this, you're that, you can talk about the value and depersonalize it somewhat and say, okay, here's this value of achievement. Here's how much I've got here. Much as you've got. Can we bridge that gap? How do we do that? Or can we just respect our differences around it? I've been divorced. I know how devastating unhappy marriage is. I remember when I realized there was no more hope for me and Eric. And I love Eric, and I love his partner Siobhan. And I have no hard feelings. We were not meant for each other. But I remember when I. That day, I. It was not gonna work. I was driving to this store. We had four children. I was driving to the store to get milk, and the Bonnie Raitt song came on. And I'm telling you, this was 30 years ago or something. The song was, I can't make you Love me if you don't. And I had to pull over to the side of the road. I was crying so hard. I know how much a bad marriage can hurt. I get it. So I'm not speaking lightly here. But a great marriage is the other side of that coin where it can give you joy and fulfillment and a sense of complet. Complete list completeness that almost nothing else. If you're not talking about values with your spouse, you should. Jack and I talked about him constantly to the outside ears. And I'm like, God, they're obsessed with values. Yeah, we were. We were. But we had a great marriage. We had a great marriage. We really did. And there was one other thing that Jack and I did in our marriage. This is going to sound a little wackadoodle, but I'm just going to go with it here, since I'm on this rant about marriage, which I actually, just to underscore, in case you haven't picked it up already, I really, really believe in. So the final tip I'll give you here is this. That Jack and I did this crazy thing. We talked about our marriage as if it was a member of the marriage. So we would say, there's Susie and there's Jack, and then there's Susie in Jack's marriage. And every single time we had to make a decision, we first asked, how does it affect the marriage? We never, never made a decision where we said, well, this really affects Susie and this really affects Jack. That way, let's decide between who's getting affected more and who's getting affected less. We would say, what does this do for the marriage? The marriage was this holy, reverent thing that we held up as the most important thing to both of us. And we did everything in service of that thing, the marriage. And we talked about the marriage like it was an entity. And every single time something came up, I remember Jack saying to me, we were deciding something about vacation. He said, well, should we just consult the marriage? And I said, yes, let's bring it into the conversation. And then we like, like, pretended the marriage was there. I know it sounds kind of wackadoodle, but one time Jack was asked to give the toast at the wedding of another couple. And he got up and he gave this impassioned speech about how we did that. And people were like, what the earth? But that couple took it to heart. And the wife often says to me, we still do that thing with the marriage. And you know what that is? That is actually placing a value and considering your marriage Your marriage, your value. You tend it and you love it and you care for it like it is more important than the two of you. That's pretty powerful stuff. It was for us. And can you do this if your marriage is already sort of rocky and bumpy right now? Yeah, you can retrofit it. You can. I've seen terrible marriages get fixed. It can happen. A marriage is worth fighting for. One of the greatest gifts you can give your children is a happy marriage. I have always believed that. And it pained me when I got my divorce from Eric because we had four children. And when I met Jack and we had a happy marriage, the children healed along with me. So this is a. Gosh, this is a long answer to you. I'm sorry, but I, I feel passionately about it. Don't give up hope on marriage. Maybe you will not find the person who allows you to have the unoppressive marriage that you see, but you might, because the person who you find who respects you and your views about marriage might be exactly that partner you need. There's great things about being single. I mean, this is the first time in my life since I've been 14 years old that I've been single. I met my first husband, Eric, when I was in high school, and I really, basically, except for the short period where between Eric and Jack, four or five years, that I've been married my entire life. And so then I've become a single person again four years ago. And I have a huge amount of freedom and agency and voice, and I decide what time I want to go to bed, and I decide, like, when I want to eat and a whole bunch of things I never had ability to make unilateral decisions around where I go on vacation. And I, I'll still say this marriage still is great. I mean, I, I, I would never trade my memories of it. I have no regrets about one aspect of it at all. I love the things I have now. I love the new life I've built. But I'll always have an incredible reverence for marriage. And if you can find one that you can have shared values with, it's worth looking for. It's worth fighting for it. Don't give up.

That is it for our episode today. Thank you for being here. Hey, I love hearing from you. I don't like it. I love it. So please write to me and connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn. Please come back next week for another episode and just keep on becoming you.