Working with your wife? That sounds painful…

Those were the words of someone I met a few days ago. I smiled, then kinda laughed then realized he was dead serious.

Ok, so a few years ago, Annette and I were sitting with the plans for one of the suites at Santerra.

I was thinking about the structure. Load-bearing walls. R-Value. HVAC. The architecture of the thing. The big, obvious bones of a room that can cost a lot of money and take a long time to get just right.

Annette was thinking about something else entirely.

The weight and texture of the bedding. Offering a pillow menu. The angle of the morning light. Where a guest’s hand lands when they reach for a glass of water at 2 a.m. The personalized smell of the suite before you open the door. Offering one robe for single travelers instead of just two hanging there.

I was building a box. She was building an experience that came with feelings and eventual memories.

And sitting there next to my wife — who had spent years as an ICU charge nurse watching people at their most vulnerable — it hit me: she sees what I don’t see. Not because I’m blind. Because she’s built different. And the project is going to be better for it. Not marginally better. Unrecognizably better. I felt smart for marrying her, dumb for not asking her input earlier on.

The story we’ve been sold

There’s a story about entrepreneurs that gets told a lot, and unfortunately the numbers back it up.

Studies across multiple sources put the divorce rate for entrepreneurs between 43 and 48 percent — higher than the general population, and higher still for dual-entrepreneur couples where both partners are running businesses.¹ A University of California analysis of 3,900 married business owners found nearly one in three entrepreneurs divorced — roughly double the rate of non-founders in the same age bracket.²

So the story goes like this: building a business and building a marriage pull in opposite directions. Pick a lane. Protect what you can….and good luck.

The two camps that form around this are deeply entrenched.

Camp one says keep them separate. Don’t mix it. Don’t work with your spouse. Protect the marriage from the business by keeping a wall between them.

Camp two says grind together. Power couple. 24/7 co-founders. No separation, no difference, just one blurred life.

I think both of those can be ditches with tragic endings. They’re arguing about how much to mix work and marriage. Neither is asking the better one: what does each person see that the other can’t?

The part no one talks about

Here’s the piece that the hustle-harder crowd quietly buries.

Harvard Business Review defines cognitive diversity as differences in perspective and information-processing styles, and the research is consistent: teams with it solve complex, ambiguous problems faster than teams without it.³ Not because they’re smarter. Because they see more of the problem.

A good marriage is the most cognitively diverse team you’ll ever be on.

Annette doesn’t need to sit in every Santerra meeting. She needs to sit in the right ones. She sees the guest’s first ten seconds. I see the ten-year pro forma. Her input a guest will remember, mine they will never know about.

Put us in the same room and the suite gets better than either of us would have built alone. Pull us apart and it reverts to a concrete box in the desert likely that only attracts extreme cold plunging bros even though 80% of wellness travelers right now are women.

The founders I know who are killing it quietly — not the ones posting about it — almost all say some version of the same thing. My spouse saw something I missed and the business is still here because of it. They don’t put it on LinkedIn. But they know.

What the marriage is actually doing

The Gottman’s have spent decades watching couples in what they call the Love Lab. Based on their own lab’s observational research — disclaimer: it’s their own team’s findings, not independent replication — they claim they can predict divorce with about 94 percent accuracy, and it doesn’t come down to big fights.⁴ It comes down to what they call “bids for connection” — the small moments when a partner reaches out, even sideways, for a flicker of attention.

Couples who stayed together turned toward each other 86 percent of the time. Couples who divorced turned toward each other 33 percent of the time.⁵

The sigh at the sink. The joke that didn’t land. The tired “how was your day.” The half-question thrown from the other room. Entrepreneurs miss these at scale. Not because we don’t love our person. Because our attention is in the spreadsheet, the deck, the call, the text, the next thing.

Every missed bid is a small withdrawal. Every answered one is a deposit — Gottman calls it the couple’s “emotional bank account.”⁶ A marriage runs on the same accounting the business runs on. The difference is no one’s watching the books.

This is where the “competitive advantage” talk gets serious. A spouse who’s still turning toward you after twenty years (at least that’s our anniversary number this year) of you being half-there isn’t a coincidence. It’s a gift, and it’s the most underpriced asset in your life.

Takeaways

Working together is hard, but can be very valuable as long as you have clear lanes and no one is working for the other person.

If you work with your spouse or know a couple who work together, here are some great actionable to do items.

1. The Lane Audit. Sit down with your spouse. No phones. Ask two questions: What do you see in our life that I miss? What do I see that you miss? Don’t defend. Don’t explain. Write it down. You’re not assigning chores. You’re mapping sight lines. If you’re lucky, you’ll find out your spouse has been carrying an entire layer of your life you never thanked them for. Another way to get into the weeds is to talk about something you both like and ask ‘what do you like/dislike about this?’ It is amazing what you will discover.

2. The One Meeting. This week, invite your spouse into one business decision you’d normally make alone. Not all of them. One. A hire. A copy choice. A room layout. A price. Ask for their read before you decide. Watch what happens. Most founders are shocked by how much value they’ve been leaving on the table.

The reframe isn’t that marriage is hard for entrepreneurs. It is. The reframe is that the right marriage, run with any intention at all, is the single greatest competitive advantage you can have — and the one nobody in the founder world is tracking or talking about.

Annette designed something in the suites I couldn’t have designed alone. And if I get honest, she brings the color, the spice, the pizazz to the party. Sometimes I just need to slow down enough to realize it.

No pressure, I’m learning. 🙂

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

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