On marriage and mindsets
When two individuals decide to get married and live as a couple, a lot of things aren’t clear right away. In the honeymoon phase, everything’s all fun and games—the ultimate joie de vivre—and problems seem to have a way of resolving themselves on their own. A couple years down, things start to get a little tricky.
Is marriage supposed to be 50/50—meaning the husband and wife put in fifty percent effort each totaling one hundred? One Christian pastor clearly didn’t think so. In fact, he said marriage should be 100/100 since each spouse should be putting their one hundred percent into the marriage. I’ll be honest. At first, I accepted both of these statements as true—received wisdom, as they’re often called. I mean, I’ve heard them so many times and they’ve been passed around so much that they have to hold true. Well, that’s what I thought.
One thing you’d quickly notice about the two approaches above is the expectation that each spouse puts in the equal amount of effort—and may the good God have mercy on you if you were ever found lacking. That’s how Nouelle and I lived out the first couple of years and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this would eventually take a toll on our marriage.
Instead of giving our best and having each other’s best interest in both heart and mind, we were constantly policing and checking whether the other is being fair and putting in the same amount of work, or effort. We were quick to call each other out whenever one of us is found to be half-assing something. It became a game of pointing out mistakes and nitpicking on each other’s faults. It wasn’t healthy and we needed things to change, and quickly.
Reading this, you’d probably figured out this story has a happy ending, right? I mean what’s the point of writing something if there wasn’t some sort of lesson at the very end. So, yes, we were able to address this but it didn’t happen fast. It took a while and a lot of reading. One of the books I attribute most of the improvements we’ve applied in our marriage is Mindset by Carol Dweck.
To people with a fixed mindset, success is about proving they’re smart and talented. It’s about validating themselves. The growth mindset, however, over-indexes on admitting one has room for improvement, thus having the desire to surround themselves with people who will find their faults, challenge them, and encourage them to learn new things. They don’t put a premium on validation as those with a fixed mindset. “This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts,” Dweck explains.
Which brings us back to the 50/50 and 100/100 rule of marriage. Had we both stuck with our fixed mindsets, we would’ve continued down this path of always being on our guard and hypercritical of the other whenever they slip. Rewiring our brains to favor a growth-mindset-type of thinking, we started to become more curious and started questioning conventional ideas and tradition—and whether they were still serving us in this day and age.
Starting our own business this year saw me become more and more busy jumping from one task to another. Since it wasn’t a fixed nine-to-five, work usually creeped into what supposedly was family time. There were times when I found myself stretching myself too thin and having almost nothing left for the family when work concluded for the day, if it ever did.
Things would’ve swiftly gone south had Nouelle and I carried the same fixed mindset with us, but praise God for how much we’ve both grown during the past couple of years. Constant communication and making time for one another—and keeping that time sacred—really helped us develop a better understanding of each other’s needs. A telltale sign of a developing growth mindset.
This led us to finally cracking the correct split of effort given when it came to marriage. It wasn’t 50/50 and it sure as hell wasn’t 100/100. The former reeked of mediocrity and the latter just didn’t make sense at all—both mathematically and logically. As much as everyone, especially upper management, hates getting this answer, the right one was: it depends. It depends which life stage your marriage is in and each marriage, obviously, is different.
Our marriage called for a 30/70 split during this life stage we’re currently in. I couldn’t give as much given all the workload and it called for Nouelle to put more into our marriage. I’ll admit—sometimes I can’t even hold up my end of the bargain because I was just too exhausted. While that might seem unfair, it actually is. Easy? Definitely not. But fair? Yes. As I’ve said, it will depend on the life stage you’re in. This life stage, as well as this split, are both temporary and that’s what makes it work.
My wife pointed out that the above can be prone to abuse which is why I needed to add some sort of disclaimer, emphasizing what I already mentioned a couple of paragraphs before. Constant communication and making time for one another should be the the bedrock of every marriage. It is by this foundation that we’re able to fairly distribute responsibilities to one another whether it’s a 30/70, 80/20, or sometimes even a 60/15 split—if it calls for that (my obsessive-compulsiveness almost didn’t allow for this).
We know there will be a time when Nouelle will be called to be more busy—perhaps in another venture we’ll partake in—and when that time comes, I’ll be more than happy to scale my busyness down to give more to our marriage. We realized that how much we put into the marriage will depend on the ebbs and flows of life and we need to be adaptable enough (hello, growth mindset 👋🏼) to make sure we’re both working on us as a couple no matter how busy the other person becomes.
