When we got married on our wedding day

Uh-huh.

If you remember, it was so, like, stunningly beautiful, and we're sitting on this tennis court and this weird music that we had chosen was playing. And you got to the top of the aisle and nobody stood up because they didn't know what to do with it. Like, they they were like, we're having an outer body experience here, and you were like, are you gonna get up? It was remarkable. You walked down the aisle, and 2 of our friends spoke on behalf of us.

And they talked about how you were the tornado and I was the rock.

Gwen Bethel. Shout out, Gwen Bethel. And Dartmouth College roommate. Love you, Gwen.

Even you calling upon everybody to stand up for you is sort of it's I liken that to some of your incredible energy, but certainly tornado like at times, just like all the things that you've been describing. But I hated being The Rock.

What?

I did not embrace that. I I didn't internalize being The Rock in the way that I can comprehend it today. It actually sounded really freaking boring and dull and, as you say, introverted or whatever. Just what's more useless than a rock? What?

Is literally how I adopted that.

You needed therapy back then. That's all I'm gonna say. If that's what you thought, because I heard a totally different thing. I literally was like, the whirlwind is the nightmare of the relationship, and the rock is the foundation, the strength, the certainty that holds it all together.

That the tornado is fun and the rock is boring. Woah. And so but I did I did internalize the rock probably too much.

We've never talked about this.

In this context of, stability, strength, reliability. And so, of course, naturally, as a guy, that really started to especially once we started to have kids, was all about the money. And this natural inclination to think that a good rock, it can be relied upon for the money. And when you and I actually made a decision to not be running a zone defense on our family, but instead you were gonna focus on career and the money, and I was gonna focus more on the family.

That This was like 10 years ago.

That was certainly the best decision we ever made. And that your relationship to money and your creativity around it, your freedom around it, it became so apparent after we made that call. And it also was apparent that my own relationship to money was distorted, and I had beaten myself down and convinced myself that I was not the reliable rock that I was supposedly called out to be.

Because you didn't make money.

Well, I it was never enough. I think, of course, I internalized the fact that not only had I not made enough, but our predicament was largely the cause of my own. And I neither here nor there, the that that ability or sort of our own willingness to actually stop and consider that maybe we had a different opportunity to play different roles in our household, I think, was monumental.

Yeah. I wanna I wanna widen this out a little bit because I think this is an issue that you and I have struggled with that so many couples do, which is how are you dividing up the labor's the wrong word, but the responsibility in a relationship and the weight that society puts on your shoulders based on traditional roles that people have played in a relationship. And when Chris and I first met, we were both working, and we contributed equally to our joint income. And we've always had a joint checking account. I've never quite understood the philosophy behind, I got my money, you got your money, we put it in together.

Like, I that never felt like a thing that felt empowering to me because I really wanted to be in the boat, so to speak. And dividing those things, I think, sets up resentment and puts you on a different side from 1 another. Combining, if you do it in a way that's empowering, forces you to have to have conversations about money. And so we were always both working, both throwing our money into 1 big pot, both trying to figure it out, and then you started to out earn me. And what's interesting in a relationship is there is an implied power dynamic in terms of who's making more money.

And when you were making more money, I felt like you had more power in the relationship. And then and I'm not saying that this is right. I'm just saying it's this unspoken thing. And

In addition to the value that 1 might perceive themself to be bringing to the relationship.

Yes. And we don't value, psychologically or as a society, the role that a primary caregiver gives. There is a massive economic value to that that is not credited on the balance sheet of a relationship, and it should be. Because if you don't do that, you do not value in the relationship the contribution that the other person is making by literally being home, taking care of things, making sure you're the stable person that is getting the groceries and doing the laundry and providing the care for children and that rock presence that you're talking about. And so we kinda ham and egged it together all the time.

And then when you went into the restaurant business, I think it's really important to note that 1 of the desires that you had in your heart when you went into the restaurant business is you told me that 1 of the reasons why you wanted to start a business in our community is because you grew up with a father that was never home. He was always on the road. He was always climbing the ladder. He was always chasing the money and the career, and he had a very big career as a result, but you didn't have a dad present. And that you hoped that by starting a small business in our community, you would actually be around more.

Now I'm gonna tell you, I kinda laugh behind your back because I'm like, dude. Delusional. You've clearly never worked in a restaurant. I have. Been in the front of the house, the back of the house, the fry cook, the this, the that.

What do you mean you're gonna be around?

Yeah. You're an idiot. You should've said something.

But no. You wouldn't have listened anyway. So I so when you went into the restaurant business, we were still in a state where the little bit of income that you and your partner were taking from the restaurant as you were trying to get it off the ground and as it was running, I was making about the same, and so we were even steeping. And then the financial crisis hit, and the business started to struggle. And the fact that we had leveraged ourselves and, by the way, that was a joint decision.

We made the decision that we would take out a home equity line, that we would max out credit cards, that we would liquidate a 401 k and the kids' college savings. We did that together. And when the crisis hit you wanna talk about a freaking storm? Try experiencing the stress on your relationship when you can't pay for the town soccer program for your kid. Try like, I can't like, struggling to get gas in the tank of the car.

Checks bouncing over and over. And it wasn't wasn't even just payroll checks bouncing in the restaurant. It was you're not getting paid. And this is now 2,007, 2008 when the huge financial crisis and housing market turned upside down, and it was just 1 tidal wave after the other. I don't even know how the hell we made it through that.

Like, we we were floating on shards of wood trying to keep our children above the water and hold on to everything that we had worked so hard to build as it appeared to be shattering around us. And I guess maybe we made it through because we were both alcoholics at the time and were drunk when we were around each other. I mean, there were there were days where the kids would wake up on their own and come downstairs, and I'm ashamed to say Sawyer, our oldest, who's now 25, remembers this. And she would find Chris and I asleep in the chairs in the living room because we had passed out from all the bourbon we had drank. And why were we drinking?

Because we had a negative balance in the checking account again, and we were racking up banking fees because the freaking checks kept bouncing. Like, it's hard enough when you can't actually clear a check, but then the bank hits you with 25, 50, $75, and the bills that sat unopened on the counter.

Evidently, we made sure to have enough alcohol on the boat

when we first got around that. Budget, man, because you just steal it. I'm just kidding. But where I'm going with this is if we were gonna keep the house and pay our bills, 1 of us had to do something. And you are not psychologically in fight mode.

You are in freeze. And so I leveraged that rock bottom. And, honestly, if I'm being honest, my anger at myself and at you for being in this situation, and I just became like, I'm thinking about the the Tasmanian devil. I I did whatever I had to do to make money. And when, thankfully, I started to make money and things started to change, whether it was, like, the small radio show on the weekends going to a Sunday night show on WSB in Atlanta, to a 5 day a week show in Orlando, to taking on odd jobs here and there, to all kinds of, like, just yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. You left the restaurant business, hadn't paid you in 6 months, couldn't afford 2 partners anyway. And in 2014, you became the primary parent, and I became the breadwinner.

And it was not something that you wanted to do. I know it was crushing for you to sit in the car and drop the kids off or be in the pickup line and feel like you had failed in your career while your wife was off giving another speech to try to pay off the debt and pay our bills, and that you really wrestled with that. And I know the dynamic in our relationship swung in this really toxic direction where because I was now making all the money and you felt like a failure, it seemed like I had more power. And the thing that, and I'm pointing this out because I think a lot of couples struggle with what they do with their money and who makes the money and whether or not you get a vote or if your vote counts. And what I personally found interesting as a woman is that I started to take on the mindset of what I would believe is a very chauvinistic male.

I felt entitled to make the call because I was making the money. And if there's something that I would take back, it's the way that that power dynamic shifted our ability to truly be in the boat together, working together. It's not that I didn't value everything that you were providing because I knew that I could not be on the road. I couldn't do what I was out in the world doing or make the money that we we desperately needed without you at home because I value our family more than anything. It is so sneaky how money and the power dynamic changes you as a couple.

Like, I've never understood how a relationship can survive without full transparency. What I love about how the universe or God or whatever you believe shuffled the deck and how we ended up is you never ever ever would have said, you know what I think my calling is? I think my calling is to be the spiritual rock for our family, to be the world's most amazing parent to my children, to pursue a master's in spiritual psychology, to start a men's retreat, to become a death doula, you never would've found your actual path in life without the universe just taking a sledgehammer to this idea that you should be go climbing a ladder and making a lot of money. You have never been motivated by money. You don't care about it.

You would live in a yurt if I wanted to live in a yurt, which I do not. I just wanna go on the record and say we're not doing that. You can do that, but, you know, I'll meet you on the weekends. But you started the restaurant business because you thought it would allow you to be present with our kids. And the irony is it worked.

It just didn't happen the way you thought it would, but it led you where you were meant to go. And the beautiful thing that has happened in our marriage is that our kids have seen a relationship where we have constantly been ham and egging it and switching roles, which opens up this possibility to think about who you could be or what your relationship could be or the fact that a relationship that goes the distance requires 2 people in the boat who both want to make it to the end of the journey together. And that means sometimes you're behind the wheel, sometimes you're rowing, sometimes you're bailing, sometimes you're reading the map, sometimes you're below deck resting and taking turns, but there's lots of different positions that you have to play. And I'm very proud of the fact that we have been passing the baton back and forth, and I definitely could have done a better job in my own kind of emotion management and really being more loving and supportive instead of frustrated and entitled during those years. But I always knew that I would never be able to do what I was doing without you and valued everything you were doing.

It's an interesting thing that you bring up about The Rock and the Whirlwind because unless you talk about it with the person that you're with, you probably just assume that you're on the same page about the value that you bring. We each came to the table with 3 things that have made a difference in our marriage.

I hated being The Rock.

What? We spent years fighting out the dishes and the this and the dog and the who's doing this and who's on first and who's on second and we completely ignored. Do you have the other person in mind?