Startup Life: Advice Column

    Q:  Dear Amy: 

    In Startup Life:  Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur, you talk about scheduled communication on a daily (Four Minutes in the Morning), monthly (Life Dinner), and quarterly (QX Off the Grid) basis.  All that scheduled time doesn't sound very romantic.  Where's the romance?

 

    A:  The most important point about having regularly scheduled together time is that scheduled romance in no way precludes spontaneous romance.  If your days are full of unexpected bouquet deliveries and sleeping in late on Tuesdays after long bouts of lovemaking, maybe you don't need the commitment of time set aside just for the two of you to connect.  However, I suspect that if you measure the rate of spontaneous romance events, you will likely find that you may not be having much spontaneous romance anyway in the startup phase of your entreprenurial endeavors.  Having calendar appointments gives you something to look forward to during times when your entreprenurial partner is completely occupied by work. 

    The other really important point about romance is the very definition of the term.  What's romantic anyway?  This is an important and ongoing conversation to have with your partner.  It can be an exciting and intimate journey to test what works for each of you over time.  Brad and I don't find much romance in the images created by television commercials by diamond companies, but find romance in the daily moments we share together.  Different couples have different ideas about what constitutes romance for them.  I personally love the intimacy of the morning and evening routines in the bathroom, brushing and flossing and washing, but we have friends who use separate bathrooms to keep the mystery alive.  Figuring out together what feels romantic to you can be an exploratory and very personal part of your relationship.

 

    Dear Readers:  What feels romantic to you?  Do you find that having a regular date night increases or decreases other spontaneous expressions of romance?  And I'm taking other Advice Column questions that lots of people seem to share.  Ask away! 

 

 

Comments

[Drew Williams]

I'm half way through your book, and am enjoying it thoroughly. I've been an entrepreneur pretty much all my life. My wife started her business 11 years ago this month. We don't always pull this off, but here's an approach that's worked for us over time: Stephen Covey's "rock in a jar". If you go back to "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", Covey talks about having an empty jar and filling it with big rocks. If you were to ask someone, they'd tell you the jar is pretty full. Not to be outdone, Covey then pours smaller rocks into the jar to fill the spaces. "Is it full yet?" he asks. He goes on to put gravel, then sand, and finally water into the jar until it is undeniably full. So. What's the point? It's not how much you can cram into a jar. It's how much you can cram into a jar after you've put the big rocks in. The big rocks are the things that really matter. For my wife an I, that's our relationship (having both failed at our first marriages). We book two or three good blocks of time together each week to do whatever we want and, amazingly, there's still room for all the other stuff that has to happen. But nothing moves those big rocks. They're too important.

[Jeffrey Hartmann]

Amy,
My wife and I are in the middle of my entrepreneurial journey and it is definitely hard to have spontaneous romantic time when so much of our life is centered around my business right now. We have found that there are lots of little things that can be very romantic and they are really helping us bond at a deep level. One of the points you and Brad make in your book is that there are lots of hours in the day, so even if you work an extraordinary amount you still have time which you can use deliberately. I get my child ready for school in the morning and take him to school, and read to him for 30 minutes to an hour every night. In my micro breaks between coding I do some laundry and dishes to help out, and have been trying to be better about not being messy (my wife calls me furacao, the Portuguese word for hurricane.) We also try and sit down at least once a week and just talk. This deliberate action to connect and the help I give her, even in the face of our startup life is what is romantic to us.

-Jeff