The Proposal
As the boundaries between our work and personal lives become ever-more blurred, some couples are embracing the cross-over and employing business strategies in their relationships.
Bringing the boardroom into the bedroom may sound un-sexy, but for many couples, office inspired productivity-hacking communication strategies help them express their frustrations and desires in an objective way rather than in the heat of the moment.
Venture capitalist investor Ben Lang recently posted on X that he uses the productivity tracking tool Notion to organise his marriage. “My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our day-to day life,” he wrote on X. “I turned this into a template, let me know if you’d like to see it!” Other couples are uploading their household to-do lists and admin into Slack channels.
Lauren and her partner, Kurt, both work as product designers for two of Australia’s biggest tech companies. They’re used to holding SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analyses, stand-up meetings and hitting their KPIs during business hours.
In the middle of the Covid lockdowns, they decided to bring those techniques into their relationship.
“We’d been living with my parents and feeling a bit of tension, and it’s not like we could really hash it out in the kitchen anymore,” Lauren says.
Every second Friday at work, her team would take part in a ‘retrograde analysis’, an agile business approach to problem-solving that was originally a method for assessing chess moves. A ‘retro’ meeting involves analysing past events to plan for the future. Lauren and Kurt decided to adapt it for their relationship.
“We were in my childhood bedroom, and we stuck a piece of paper on the mirror and did our first relationship retro on the past month,” she says. The basic premise is to have three categories that sum up the good, the bad and what needs to change, but name them in a way that suits your situation. Lauren and Kurt decided on ‘liked’, ‘lacked’, ‘learnt’.
“Liked would include things like, ‘I liked that you made dinner with me on Wednesday night,’ Lacked might be, ‘I feel like we’re lacking some time together after work, would you be open to going for a walk before dinner?’ and ‘learnt’ would be like, ‘I learnt that you need to unwind alone after work so it’s not the best time to go for a walk.’”
Lauren describes how the retro forced them to write down their feelings in a business-like way, which removed the heat of tension. “When you talk to someone at work, you can’t explode at them, you have to be really deliberate with your feedback, so taking the same approach to our relationship was really helpful to just take a step back and reflect on things.
It also helps that there’s a compliment there. “You’re putting a negative physically next to a positive – the reason you love each other is right there,” she says.
They also found that it helped to be working on a project together: their relationship. “We would keep the piece of paper and reflect on it the next month to see what had changed. It was measurable, and it had less negativity than arguing about the daily things.”
Lauren says she’s not the only person at her work taking a similar approach. “When you’re working every day, the techniques start to come naturally. One of my colleagues does a retro session with her partner every Sunday.”
This approach to communication isn’t dissimilar to the advice couples therapists suggest: use “I” statements, avoid hyperbole (never say “never” or “always”), and talk about conflict once the moment of tension has passed so you can reflect, heal and adapt.
But it’s not surprising people are taking a work-like approach to their relationships. Even when we talk about our love lives, we compare them to work.
As Jay Shetty told Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast last week, “If a first date is like a job interview, a breakup is like a firing.” It stands to reason then that the time spent in between is when you’ve got the job, and your goal is likely career progression (marriage, kids, house).
At the more extreme end of mixing business and pleasure, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) have reportedly left the realm of the rich and famous (and scandalous) into the relationships of everyday people who don’t want their dates or partners to divulge their secrets or embarrass them on social media. (There are doubts as to whether these documents would hold up.) A hot tip: a key feature of an NDA is that there has to be something in it for the person signing, so if your potential date suggests you sign a contract, you’re well within your rights to ask for monetary compensation.
Some couples apparently set KPIs for chores, sex and date nights. Other couples come up with relationship agreements, such as documents that track who does which chores around the house. Lauren can understand the appeal. “If your partner doesn’t take the garbage out like they’re supposed to, you can negotiate through the contract rather than an argument,” she says.
Michelle Law recently wrote about ditching the spreadsheet she’d created with her boyfriend when they moved in together. “This involved assigning specific chores to ourselves, as well as the mental planning that would lead to those chores being enacted. It was incredibly sexy stuff, and Dave absolutely loved it. (He did not.),” she wrote.
It worked for a while. “Over time, we’ve stopped using the spreadsheet and neither of us ‘owns’ chores anymore; we’ve naturally struck a balance,” she wrote. “But I’m convinced that we only got to this point because we made the spreadsheet.”
Likewise, Lauren and Kurt no longer have ‘retro’ sessions, but the lessons they learnt about each other have stuck. “We still talk to each other in that business-like way when there’s conflict, and it really helps us work through it.”
Maybe there’s something to bringing the office into your romance after all.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
