 All right. Welcome to the show, Abby. Great to have you. I'm delighted to be here. Now, we'd love to get started just talking about why you and your co-author decided to write a book on such heady topics of money and love, especially for many in our audience, their tough decisions that they're facing right now in their young adult life. They're huge decisions. And when I was in my early and mid-20s, I really struggled about how to know if I was making those decisions in the right way. I mean, like many people in that age, I was deciding where to live and moving to cities, even though I didn't have jobs there. Trying to decide if the person I was dating was the right one and how serious should we get and what does that mean? And it didn't stop me from making decisions on these topics, but it did just cause me to wonder why it was so hard. And I got a chance to take my co-author's class when I was in business school. She pioneered this class and taught it for over four decades at Stanford. And it was a light bulb moment for me being in that class and realizing that the reason I found these decisions so difficult is that the conventional wisdom, the way that we're taught to make these decisions is completely wrong. We're taught to not let love influence our decisions about our career and money and really use our heads when we think about those decisions and not to let our brains influence how we feel about relationships. Just think about how you feel when you're with that person, right? And the truth is that money and love decisions are so profoundly intertwined that if you compartmentalize them, you're really missing a whole huge area that you should be taking into consideration. And so the class affected me in really profound ways. I actually took it with the person I was dating at the time. We met when we went to graduate school. We had only been dating for about a year. And because of the class, we were forced to have really awkward and uncomfortable conversations about like, where do we want to look for jobs after we graduate? And if we end up in the same city, do we move in together? And, you know, those would be hard at any stage of a relationship, but certainly after only a year, they're tricky. And but with the encouragement of Myra Strobar, my co-author and our professor, we had the conversations and they became the foundation for it's now been 13 years of marriage. We have two young kids have navigated lots of career changes. And so Myra and I wrote the book together because she and then my husband and I actually went back as guest speakers in her class for over a decade. And then when she retired, we realized, wow, this class has affected us so profoundly and no one will get a chance to take it again. And Myra and I had lunch one day and she said, I'd love to write a book about the class. And I said, you should, that would be amazing. And she said, well, I retired last year. And for some reason, I just haven't made progress on it. And I had just started the first employee resource group for working parents at GAP, where I worked at the time. And I couldn't have done it without another working dad who was a lawyer there. And I said, well, maybe you need a accountability partner, you know, someone to motivate you and help you kind of keep going. And she said, actually, I need more than that, I need a co-author. And would you do this with me? You've been road testing all the concepts of the class. And I think you'd be the perfect person to write the book with me. And so that's the journey we've been on since then. The other thing that I've noticed, and it's apparent in reading the book, and you all went out of your way to show the complexity of modern life, we have more choices than ever and to live our lives. So these, these decisions were much easier three generations ago. And we're living in a time right now, where in the last three generations, the world that we live in has changed, has evolved so much that all of us don't have clear cut paths laid out in front of us anymore. And the world is open to us. And technology that we are using to do this interview right now is opening up so many opportunities and so many different pathways. And one of the things that we have noticed over the years is the more complex the technology is that is supposed to ease our life and it has made our life that much more difficult opening up all these different pathways. And we have noticed due to that is the paradox of choice with all this choice, we now have paralysis. There is no clear cut right answers. And for a lot of analytical people, they will do research upon research and upon research, the find that the glowing right answer that's just going to pop out and go this is the path that you need to take. But it doesn't work like that anymore. The more research you do, the more choices you get. I love the frameworks that we're going to get into all the framework that you all put together in the book to help with these decisions. I thought it got right to the point so that you can then take what's in your mind circling around on the paper and you can see it and read it and make your clear cut decisions from there. And I think two points that Johnny brings up that are important for our audience especially is with that many of these decisions we go to our parents, our family members for and they give us advice and their advice is colored by their own experience. It's not colored by science. It's not covered by what we're going to talk about next, the two systems that we operate in in terms of decision making. And on top of that, now we're adding in this other thing where all of a sudden with this paradox of choice in action has a cost. So whether you're a woman thinking about having kids, there's the biological clock, whether it's moving to a new town or passing on that job offer, all of these inactions by this paralysis of choice also have a cost that we often don't think about in our decision making process. So I think we should jump into the system one versus system two just to sort of set up what's going on in our brain and then we can talk about the framework and all the different decisions that you discuss in the book. Absolutely. And yes, I will say that often people give advice to confirm their own choices. And so you have to be very careful about the way that you frame those requests for advice and who you ask and that can vary depending on the type of decision. But I can share a little bit about Daniel Kahneman's system one and system two because it is such a crucial piece of research and something that is helpful for everyone to understand before they understand the framework. So we actually have two systems that we operate in. The first is system one, which is instinctual. It's very quick. It's what we did maybe in the prehistoric days when we had to run away from a mastodon. And it's something that we don't really even know that we're doing and it's a shortcut almost if we're tired, if we're upset, if we're even in a good mood and we just want to go with it. We rely on system one thinking. System two thinking is much more deliberate. It's intentional. It's slower. We have to really work to engage system two thinking when we're making a decision, especially when that's high stakes, right? Because that's when the fight or flight and kind of let me just get to the other side of this decision instinct kicks in. And so a lot of what we advise in the framework that we developed is to help people get into that system two thinking that is harder for us to access because it is not as the default state as system one. In our training programs, we spend the first bit of it getting our clients to understand when they're in a heightened emotional state so that they can choose between system one and system two and know that because I'm in a heightened emotional state, the likelihood that I'm going to make a decision out of system one is more probable than system two. And if I want to be making this decision in system two, I'm going to need to go through a coming down process of this emotional high in order to think through my decisions. And many of these decisions, love and money, are emotional, even though we like to think that we're using our logic. And I've had this discussion around buying a house with friends. Of course, they back up their emotional decision with logic and oh yeah, it's walkable and oh yeah, it does have great skills and it's going to go up in value. But oftentimes it was an emotional decision, whether you like to believe it or not. So let's talk about the five C framework because it's so beautiful as we move through these money and love decisions that we're all going to encounter as we go about life. The five C's are clarify, communicate, consider a broad range of choices, check in with trusted resources and explore likely consequences. And the first one is the one that is so crucial. And I listened to a few of your episodes and I know that that you advocate for being very clear about what's important to you, what your values are, what is your North Star and that is really the first step of making any big decision because you can go through all the research and all the spreadsheets and analysis that you want. But unless you have that clarity about what is important to you and what you want out of this longer term decision, it will be you'll get stuck in that analysis paralysis and you'll be very hard to find the path forward. And so I love the clarify step. It doesn't come easily. But once you get that clarity, it enables everything else to it's like dominoes, right? Once you have that clarity, and if you don't have that clarity, it's like you're just stuck in the in the goo and unable to move forward. I'm always amazed when people have hard decisions to make my first question to them always is, well, what is the result that you're looking for? When I hear, oh, I never, I haven't thought about that. But I was like, well, how can we make a decision if you don't know what you want to move into? And that's a crucial step. And I remember I had to go through all of my 20s to learn that myself wasn't I wasn't able to actually make headway into my life and career until I realized what it actually was that I wanted without clarifying, you can't communicate it. So oftentimes, we'll have clients come to us with an issue or decision that they'd like to make, but they can't even communicate it to us because they haven't clarified it themselves in their own mind. So it's like, well, I know I need to do this thing. But I don't know why I don't really have a North Star guiding me in that way. And I think we'll talk about this a little bit later around choosing a partner, how sometimes we can be clarifying on the wrong things, which can lead us to stray in our decision making as well. Communicate, obviously, Johnny and I are huge on and of course, many of these decisions that we're going to talk about, well, there's usually a partner involved. There's someone else in your life involved when it comes to love. So communication is definitely key. I love that. And my co-author and I did the same thing before we after the lunch where we decided to write the book together, we went away and we actually worked on a document together about what is it? Why is it that we're writing this book? What do we want out of it? And we are also almost four decades apart. So we're in very different places of our lives. We wanted very different things about this book. But the truth is that ultimately, we wanted to help people find more purpose and meaning in their lives through writing the book. And once we had that clarity, then it was easier to resolve the other differences that we had along the way. And it's not to say that there weren't differences. I mean, she's an academic, I worked in the corporate world for a long time and we just had different approaches. But because we had that touchstone of the document we developed together, the clarity on why we were doing this together, it was easier to work through the inevitable bumps that came up in the road along the way. Absolutely. And that leads to the third C, consider broad range of options and outcomes, because I think without the ability to communicate and have the relationships or the environment available to you to get those broad options, it's very hard again for you to see the full picture. And when I think about my career decision to leave graduate school to start the podcast with Johnny and to create this company, my family certainly thought it was a terrible idea. Why would you leave graduate school to start a podcast 15 years ago when no one had heard of podcasts? And even some of my fellow grad students, they were so wrapped up in this idea of becoming doctors and getting their PhD, that decision was foreign to them. And they were advising me to stay even though I hated the research and the work that I was doing. And then I had some other faculty that I was able to talk to. And some of them intimated to me like they had dreams and aspirations outside of it. And they kind of wish they would have followed a different path. And they advised me that you could always come back to academia if you want to. But if this is something that's really burning inside of you, why not scratch that itch while you're still young? And I was so happy that I got that perspective because I wasn't getting it from my family and I certainly wasn't getting it from others in the lab that I work closely with because they were pretty hung up on their own views of success and what that looked like for them. Well, it sounds like the check-in step was helpful for you too in talking to a variety of people because you're right. There are some people who are going to want to give you advice to confirm what they did. There are going to be other people who want to tell you what you want to hear maybe and say, oh, well, you seem really unhappy. Maybe you should just follow your heart. But it's very helpful, especially given the type of decision. So there are some types of decisions where it's helpful to have more check-ins. So I think about the research behind finding a job and showing that weak ties, the people who are not in your inner circle, but your friend's dog walker's roommate is going to have a very different network than you are. And so when you put the idea out there that you're exploring a new path or you are just starting a podcast, they might just know someone who could help. There are other decisions that are deeply personal where you might not want to ask such a broad range of people. The decision to have a child or when to have another child. They're very unique in terms of your particular situation. And so there are people we talked to as part of the research for the book that said, actually, I did not want to ask everyone. I have a check-in with everyone about that topic. It was so personal. And I just asked a few people whose opinions I really trusted. So it can really depend on the type of question. And then the framing is so important. So I imagine, AJ, that when you were making that decision to leave graduate school, you would have gotten a very different answer if you said, hey, what should I do to just the various people you met as opposed to, hey, I noticed you made a big career pivot. Tell me how you thought about that. Tell me what the types of things that were going through your mind were when you decided to leave X to do Y. And then you can kind of get at, you can access a different set of answers than you might if you just were asking, hey, what should I do? Yeah, that framing is so powerful in the way we communicate our own decisions, but also the way that we allow others to unpack their decisions for us. So you get more to how they thought about it, less about the outcome. Because again, we kind of get tied to the outcome of the decision. And then there's a lot of confirmation bias that gets brought into the equation there of like, well, of course, it was the right decision because no one wants to admit that they made the wrong decision when we talked to Daniel Pink about regret, you know, not very many people want to just explicitly open up about their regrets unless you're really close to them. Absolutely. And it helps you get perspective too, right? Because when we're in the thick of a big decision, we tend to get tunnel vision. And we think about like, oh, it's just this binary choice of like, do I stay in graduate school or do I leave to start a podcast? And the truth is there are actually lots of shades of gray in between and sometimes checking in helps put an option on the table that you might not have considered before. And suddenly you're like, oh, you mean I could take a pause from my graduate school and not leave completely, but just go try this on for size for a little bit. And then if it doesn't work out, go back, right? That's a way to almost have your cake and eat it too. And the check-ins sometimes help you expand your set of options, which is very helpful to get out of that, like binary is it one or is it two only? The consequences piece, I laugh a little bit with Johnny because many of our clients who joined the X Factor Accelerator program, they've reached a milestone in their life, like they just turned 30 or they just turned 40 or they just had a divorce. And a lot of times these milestones and these massive events really force us to think about consequences of our decision and sit with, well, what happens if I spend another year living the same life? I haven't made any new relationships. I haven't tried that thing or my career has basically stayed the same. And enforcing those consequences around these milestones, they'll reach out to us and say, you know what, I'm ready for coaching. I'm actually ready to take action in this area because I know the gravity of the consequence of indecision. Like I know the last three years I've been thinking about coaching. I've been listening to the podcast and I turned 40 and now I know I can't live my 40s like this. I can't go this long without that peer group or not having success in my dating life or feeling like I'm just missing out on that next step in my career. But we like to say to all of our clients, well, what are the consequences? Have you really weighed them? Have you looked at them thoroughly, both the good and the bad of what's going on? Because sometimes we also hear consequence and we just get that negative connotation of like, oh, well, those are the bad things and I'm making a decision. I don't want to think about the downsides. I don't want to think about the negative. Like I want this to be a great positive decision in my life. So how do you think about consequences? How do we impact that to make it a really valuable C for those who might not be confronted with them normally when they're going about their decision-making? Well, as humans, we have this bias towards short-termism, right? So we very often really overweight the short-term consequences of a decision and we underweight the long-term consequences. And so if you're considering moving to a new city, for example, you might think about how hard it's going to be to make friends, how tricky it's going to be to find a new job, even finding a housing, right? But it turns out that, yes, those are consequences but mostly short-term. I mean, you do tend to meet people the longer you live places. You get to know a broader set of people and it turns out actually, in the long term, there could be a lot of benefits that you are not thinking about. My older son just switched schools this year and so he's turning 10 next week. He was devastated. He did not want to meet new people, get to know a whole new situation. He was like, what are you doing to me? But it turns out that his school that he went to before only went up to fifth grade and this new school goes up to eighth grade. And so we were trying to help him see the fact that actually over the long run, you will have to make fewer transitions over the next few years if you go to this new school. And so it took him a while but I think he got there and I think that's a helpful way to force yourself to overcome that short-term bias and think about the positive and negative effects, as you mentioned, of a decision over we recommend three time frames, right? Near term meaning kind of within the next six months, medium term maybe six months to two years, and then long term beyond two years. And just even forcing yourself to kind of sketch out the possible outcomes that way might help you consider some of the long-term benefits or negative results that you might have not considered naturally. Yeah, I like that looking at it in those three time periods because it again forces just a deeper level of thought. And oftentimes to think about that, you got to like write it down. You got to get it outside of your head to really process it thoroughly. Finding a partner is definitely one of the reasons we started this podcast 16 years ago as a dating podcast, and it's on a lot of our audience's minds, even if they're in a relationship, is this the one or they're single. And as Johnny said, they're now presented with more choices than ever. So oftentimes we would go to our family around this decision and well, if we look a couple generations back, you tended to marry your high school sweetheart or the person you met in college because you settled in your career and you had longevity. You probably weren't moving around as much as we are with these trends in technology and work. But at the same time, a lot of times there are some biases that we bring to the equation of finding a partner that I'd love to unpack. And there was one in the book that I thought was so powerful is this idea of simultaneous choice. Because when we talk to a lot of our clients, they're very much like going about dating in a systematic way. They tend to be analytical and they want to check every box and imaginable, but oftentimes going about it systematically actually robs you of this opportunity to see truly what you really like in a partner. So I'd love to unpack simultaneous choice and how we can bring this into the equation when it comes to finding a partner. Absolutely. Well, this idea comes from the research of Professor Babashiv, who is a marketing professor. And he is from India. And in his culture, it is not unusual to have arranged marriages. And so I got the opportunity to go to China with him when I was in graduate school. And he told the story about how when he was ready to find a partner, he told his mom and his mom arranged for him to meet three women who were suitable partners. And he met them within the space of a couple months. He found the one that he felt like he clicked with the best. And he told his parents. Fortunately, she also picked him. And they have been married for decades now. And he talks about how having simultaneous choice, meaning you're evaluating a set of partners in one bounded time period, as opposed to sequential choice, meaning you're endlessly swiping on a dating app and feeling like, oh, the next amazing person could be, you know, just to swipe away. But truly that gets back to this paradox of choice, where you're feeling like you don't have any criteria to sort of evaluate the set because the set keeps expanding. But as everyone knows, making no decision is itself a decision, right? If you're sort of constantly dating and you're not actually settling with someone and choosing someone, then you are continuing to be single. And so it is a powerful concept. And I think one that we can apply to lots of avenues of our life, but I agree that the dating is so powerful. And that, you know, and the truth is that many of us, when we get to a certain age, do tend to use a little bit of the simultaneous choice concept if you're like, okay, well, I feel like this is the time in my life, I should be doing this, but we don't know why. And so I think what's helpful about this research is that it's naming it. It's actually encouraging you to set the timeline, you know, even if you're not going to have an arranged marriage, you could operate the same way, right? Just to say, I am going to meet a certain number of partners in this next six months. And then in those partners, I am going to find the one that checks the most of my, not the boxes that I thought I wanted, but the kind of the, again, if you've done that clarification and you understand what is truly important to you and those values that you hold, find the person who also holds those values that you could see building a life together. My co-author was married for many years to a psychiatrist, and he, and she was divorced. Her first marriage ended in divorce. And so her second marriage was to the psychiatrist, Jay Jackaman, and he taught her, she talks about this, intimacy could be, you want the other person to see into you, right? So into me see. And the only way someone else can see into you is if you share emotionally vulnerable things with them, right? It's not enough to have conversations about politics and the World Cup and, you know, some of the other events that sometimes takes up so much to borrow attention, but really putting out your deepest dreams to someone and having them see those dreams is very vulnerable. But that is the best way to build transparency and connection. And that I think is why the conversations that my now husband and I were having were felt so awkward and high stakes when we were having them very early on in our relationship, because we were saying, you know, Hey, this is what I want out of life. I want a career and I want a family. And I don't want to be with someone who's going to make me have to choose between those two things. Is that what you want? Right? And then you're sort of waiting for the other person to say, I don't know, is that what they're going to want? Right? But you're allowing them to see your, your desires. And that is powerful. And it's also scary. Yeah. And I feel like a big problem around the sharing them is the concern that if it's the wrong desire or the wrong thing that maybe this person that checks all the boxes that has all the characteristics might leave. And on the clarity piece, this is an area where a clarify piece, this is an area where I think a lot of our clients get hung up. They'll come to us with a big list of things they want to see in their partner. And the list is characteristics. And I think about my wife and when she met me, I wasn't going to the gym. I wasn't a morning person. I wasn't very timely being an entrepreneur. I was pretty laid back about my schedule, go with the flow. Now, if her characteristics were, he has to be a gym lover, he has to be an early bird, he has to prioritize his calendar, then she would have passed on me. But a lot of my sleeping in, preferring the evening, not working out was around this core value of freedom. I wanted freedom in my schedule. I wanted the ability to get up early if I wanted to, but also sleep in if I didn't want to get up. I wanted the freedom to go explore and not tie myself to the gym. And when you start to look at characteristics, you can put together a very long list and feel like AJ, Johnny, Abby, I clarified. I know what I want in a partner. And then those characteristics can actually lead you astray in finding the right person, whereas values really allow you that alignment and that ability to see if we look in the long term of our relationship, where looks will fade, careers will change, you might have fortune of making a lot of money now, you might have some misfortune in your career of losing your job. If we just focus on those external characteristics, we think we're checking the box, but we're actually moving towards a relationship that's not healthy versus core values and alignment on the way you view the world, the way you view your social life. Do you want kids? Are you open to moving? Are you open to travel? I find even in my friends that I have friends who didn't have these conversations and now they're married and now they're with kids and they're like, well, my spouse doesn't like to travel. And I've always wanted to travel or my spouse isn't comfortable moving for a career and I now have to move. I have to make this big decision. How can we unpack those values to get the clarify more aligned with what actually helps us in the decision making and push aside the characteristics which might actually lead us astray? Yeah, it's such a good question. And my co-author would receive messages from former students, sometimes years after they took the class that said, thanks to your class, I broke up with the person I was seeing because I realized we actually didn't want the same things in the long run where, yes, we're having fun, but ultimately we want different things. And as painful as that was to realize, I'll be better off in the long run. So you're absolutely right that having these conversations early on is so important and we have in the book some exercises for people to have those types of conversations that are scary. And I know because I was there as in the middle of those conversations too and I get it, but the diving board doesn't get any lower. And the fact is that actually finding out that you don't want the same thing and out of some of the very big questions in life about kids or about where you want to live or about the role of money, you really need to find those things out early on. And if the person you're with doesn't want the same things, you're actually both going to be better off. So we don't want to find those things out because it feels like, ooh, I don't want to break up with this person. But when you do find something out that is a red flag or a deal breaker for you, ultimately that is the better outcome in the long run. Again, short term, it's painful. Long term, it's a better outcome. You bring up the next big decision is kids. So outside of choosing a partner, then the kid equation just got married over the summer. And naturally that's what everyone's asking, okay, when are you guys starting a family? And that conversation, as you mentioned, can be very difficult to have when you're just dating, can also be very difficult to have when you're newlyweds. And all of a sudden you're just off your honeymoon and you're really excited about this future. So how should we approach that conversation, especially if maybe either party hasn't really thought about it? So what I find with a lot of our clients is they're very career focused. So it's like, I got to move ahead in my career. I got to make my family proud. I went to the good school. I checked a bunch of boxes. And then there's this biological clock component for women that comes into the equation as well. So you have career, you have biology. So it's definitely a very fraught decision for many of us if we don't think about it early enough. How do we approach it in a relationship with a partner that we love if there maybe hasn't been enough thought put in this area going into the relationship? It hasn't been clear at the onset. Well, congratulations to you on your marriage. That's exciting. And yes, the box checking is so difficult. I mean, I am a high achiever. I'm a self declared, you know, for a long time box checker. And we have to be so careful of what we put on those life lists, right? There's a concept called mimetic desire that Rene Girard, the French philosopher developed, which says we want what other people want, right? We're social creatures. We want to belong. That's a fundamental human need. And as a result, we actually get a lot of what we want by looking around and seeing, oh, well, what other people want. And if we look around and all of our friends are getting married and having children and posting pictures of gender reveal parties on their Instagrams, like we're like, oh, I guess I should be having kids. But the truth is that that's not what's right for everyone. And again, it gets back to clarifying what's important to you. This is an area as you bring up where the data is very helpful to know, particularly for women. So there is data we included in the book about, you know, some of the costs and benefits of having children earlier in life versus later. I was one of those people who got really stuck around this question. I remember being in a job that I didn't love. And Ross and I had been married for a couple years. And, you know, I knew from my Riz class that I wanted to stay in the workforce when I had a kid. But I wanted it to be in a job that I loved. I didn't want to, you know, go to work and leave my baby every day if I was like, well, this isn't fulfilling and meaningful. And so I got stuck around this decision of like, do I look for a new job? Or do I try to start a family now? And I actually hired a coach who helped me get unstuck and look at, okay, well, if I do want a child, there's actually never a good time. Like in your 20s, you're, you know, building your resume and your skills in your 30s, you're getting promoted and in your 40s, you're leading. And when is a good time to, you know, add in another challenge alongside those things? Never. And so if you do want children and you're with the person that you want to have those children with, the time is now. And so that actually helped me get unstuck from the perfect sequence of events of like, Oh, I have to find the perfect job. And you know, it was so interesting is that when I let go of like holding so tightly to having to find the perfect job, I actually stayed in the job I was in, it turns out we were fortunate and were able to conceive pretty quickly. And then my dream job came along and I accepted it when I was 38 weeks pregnant. And I started when my son was four months old. And so it's like the universe works in such mysterious ways. But I knew that my parents had had a very hard time conceiving me. And I felt like I did not want to go through a lot of scientific ways of having a baby if I didn't have to. And so I thought, you know, yes, let's try not to cling to the, Oh, this is the perfect sequence of events. And then, you know, it ended up working out. And so I'm even though I'm definitely a believer of all the science and the research and the data, like the universe is very magical sometimes. Whether or not you decide to have kids, all couples go through chores, household work, and how to actually run what goes on outside of your job. And I know for many of us, we base a lot of these decisions on what we saw in our own homes growing up and the division of labor. But many of us didn't grow up in homes where both men and women were working. It's a newer phenomenon for many in our audience. So this idea of splitting household work is often something that isn't discussed. It just kind of happens in the moment. It's like all of a sudden it's piling up and careers could be moving as Johnny said much like in our dating life at different trajectories at different times. I'm sure there are opportunities where your career might have had amazing trajectory forward and your husband might not have been feeling that and in these decisions aren't really talked about in school. They're not really talked about even within our family or friends, but they are really tough decisions for us in a couple in a relationship in a household. So how do we unpack the household work? And then how do we unpack careers moving in different directions, maybe taking us to new locations and those decisions from a place that's equitable to both sides because it's a very different dynamic now than it was for our parents or grandparents and a lot of people in the past. It's true. The percentage of households who have kids that are dual career is higher now than it has ever been, even with what we saw in the pandemic of many women stepping out of the workforce. And so hopefully you have had some conversations before you added in kids and career decisions to be on the same page about what you want. If both people are very intent on pursuing a career alongside having kids or even if you don't have kids other priorities, people want to be the best aunts and uncles as possible. They might have caregiving responsibilities for older parents or other relatives. So ideally you've had these discussions early on, but if not, then I think it's important to start as soon as you can to talk about what are all the elements that go into running a house and a family if you have kids or other caregiving responsibilities. We have an exercise in the book that was actually adapted from one that Myra used to give in her course, which was she used to call it a bargaining exercise that listed a handful, maybe 10 to 15 tasks that are involved in running a household and family life. And she put that in actually because a lot of the students in her class grew up exactly as you mentioned, not seeing either one parent handle everything or if they were from a different country, they had help who were handling all of those things. And so coming now to the situation where you're being asked to divide things up equally, it's like, well, how does that work? So having these conversations to say, hey, first of all, what's important to us? Let's again, back to the clarify, if it's not important to us that our kids go to every birthday party they're invited to, let's cross that off the list. Let's just say, you can choose one friend who is a friend whose birthday party you don't want to miss. And then we're going to say, no, thank you to all the other ones. I remember when somebody said that that was their approach, it was like, oh my God, you can do that. It hadn't occurred to me that you could just decline. But again, if you don't want to spend every weekend, I have two elementary school kids, I could spend every weekend dragging myself to party after party. And the truth is, as a family, we're much happier when we're hiking. And so we have to actually clarify that value to be able to say no to things and then be able to cross things off of those short lists. And the exercise that we talk about is helpful to do, certainly if you don't have any kids, we did it in the class with a partner. And the truth is, when you make different incomes, when you have other circumstances, there are different dynamics that you need to negotiate. So having those conversations early and then checking in, my husband and I have a check-in every week on how are we dividing the pickups, the drop-offs, the other things that come up, what are we going to let go of? And then we try to have, we aren't always as consistent every year, but at least an annual, bigger picture check-in of, okay, what is feeling, is everything feeling equitable? And we used to actually go through this on the drive down to Palo Alto to be in my class to say, oh, we're about to talk about our marriage in front of students. So can we just check it on that? So no surprises come out in the class. And that was actually resulted in some of the read, some redistribution of tasks that maybe I was taking on, but feeling resentful. And he was like, oh, okay, well, I can do this. And actually, this happened when I went back to work after we had our first son, and I wanted to nurse as much as I could and that meant pumping at work. And I was in a new job, I was pumping three times a day while I was at work. And then I would come home and I was like, I just, this is absurd. I have all these parts that have to be cleaned. And like, it was very intense. And he said, okay, you're feeding him, so I will feed us. And he actually took all of the food on. So the shopping, the meal prep, the preparing the food. And just knowing that I didn't have to think about food for anyone other than my infant was so freeing. And so that could be a really powerful thing to do regularly, especially as you're in different phases of life. And as you said, career opportunities come up. And that might mean someone's less available than they were. And so not just going through with a simmering resentment that could build into something, you know, more problematic, but having a regular check-in where you talk about how things are going and what might be redistributed. And I don't know if you know Eve Rodski's book, Fair Play. I was just going to bring that up. So that concept of visible labor and invisible labor in the household. And I think, especially for guys, I can't really speak from a female point of view on this, but for guys watching my dad in the household, I saw a lot of visible labor, taking the trash out, laboring the groceries in from the grocery store. But she introduced this concept of invisible labor. And that's the thinking through strategically, well, what goes on the shopping list and how do we organize who's picking up kids where and when the doctor's appointment needs to be scheduled and how we can get that haircut on the calendar. And that's often invisible. And because it's invisible, it doesn't often make it into these check-in conversations where one partner, and it's usually the woman in this case, feels overwhelmed at the invisible labor and feels resentment towards their partner because they don't feel they're pitching in. And their partner tries to do all this visible labor. I washed the dishes, I brought the groceries in, I took the trash out, I vacuumed. And that dynamic, because there isn't a regular check-in built in, often inflames and do an argument later. And now thinking about having kids with my wife, we talk about, okay, well, what is the invisible labor that's going on here of, okay, well, how do we get to this bachelorette party and you have this work engagement out of town that you have to go to that you're going to be managing that calendar? It's work. It doesn't necessarily become visible work. You might not be talking about it at dinner, but she's helping me manage the calendar. She knows when the flights need to be booked and how we're getting to and fro. And that work oftentimes does lead to the other partner feeling completely burned out and exhausted. And just that concept I thought was so powerful to introduce into this dynamic. Because when we think about labor in the household, as a guy, it's easy to grab the Swiffer, feel like I'm pitching in, grab the heavy groceries in and feel like I'm doing the labor and have one partner still feel overwhelmed. And the research on same-sex couples is so interesting here, right? Because if you look at same-sex couples who don't have the gender roles to default to, to my definition, the same gender, they divide tours more equitably than couples who are heterosexual couples, because they actually have to discuss every single thing that they're doing and decide who does it. And so if we can take a page from same-sex couples and say, yes, let's make sure we surface and Eve Rodzky has 100 cards of all the different potential chores that are involved in running a house, the first step is to clarify, like throw away the cards that don't matter to you. So like, if you don't care if your kid writes thank you notes, don't make them write thank you notes, just like put that one to the side. And then you have ideally a smaller pool of tasks to then divide, but do divide them in a way that has invisible labor alongside the visible labor. And then, you know, you don't actually have to hold the card for the rest of your life. Like I, this is where the regular check-ins come in. And I did do the thank you notes, because it's important to me for many years. And then at one point I was like, I can't do this anymore. Like I don't want to hold this card anymore. Will you take this from me? And my husband said, sure. So now it's his turn to do the thank you cards. For everyone listening to this, it might sound like an ordeal or the system is complicated, but the frameworks and the worksheets that you put in the book were incredibly simple. And I couldn't help but looking at them going, if I was to discuss this with my significant other, not only would we reach a shared vision, a shared conclusion, but there would be buy-in from both people because you worked through these steps together. And with that buy-in, regardless of who might be leading that discussion, the buy-in is important for both sides. And that buy-in is on each step, on each seat, the clarifying, the communication, the check-ins, the consequence. Everyone knows what is at stake, what they're working towards. And because of that, you're only going to get closer to the person that you worked through that with. And it forces you to slow down, right? Part of what we wanted to do with the framework is give people a way to switch into that system to thinking. And so by going through all these steps, you don't rush into big decisions overnight, which is what often leads to regret. And you do have a process. Not that it's a silver bullet or a magic wand or magically gets you to the perfect outcome. But what it does do is give you more confidence that you made the decision in a way that was thoughtful, deliberate, intentional. And then it almost is freeing because you're like, well, life is going to happen, right? There's going to be a curveball that comes in here. There's going to be some unanticipated bump, but I couldn't have done better, right? I've really been as strategic and deliberate as I could have been. And maybe I anticipated that bump when I thought about consequences. Maybe I didn't, but I do feel more confident. And that's the feedback we've gotten from the folks who have been road testing the framework along the way. And the framework allows for you to not only forward think, but then also if, let's say an unforeseen consequence arrived or bad luck happened, or maybe it was a consequence that you did in the planning for C, you can now take the lesson out of that and actually learn from it instead of hold on to the regret and the emotional damage that comes around with that. So I think that's the power of the framework is both forward thinking, but also when you review and look back, like was that the right decision? It creates that ability for you to move on from those situations where in the past would have led to a lot of regret. And for many in our audience, I'm introverted. My wife is extroverted. She loves asking questions and these thought provoking questions lead to us discussing these things that I sort of bounce around in my head with. And the book has excellent questions and they're framed in a way to remove the defensiveness out of the conversation. So both parties feel free to share in the process in the framework. And I thought that was really helpful. I just want to touch on this last point because when I look at my own family tree and I look at divorce, money is one of the main reasons that everyone in my family got divorced. And it's often one of those really, really personal areas where we have vastly different behaviors around, sometimes shame, sometimes narratives around money that we hide from our partner, that we don't want them to see those uglier sides of ourselves, whether it's credit card debt or the way we view big purchases or being thrifty, whatever. And knowing that money then leads to divorce, it's a conversation that oftentimes comes up in the downside of things, where we're going into recession now, money's on everyone's mind, but it's important to approach these conversations early. So what does the research show us around money and behaviors in couples that are successful if they handle money differently or they maybe not have the same viewpoint on money going into the relationship? Money is a huge stand in for values. So even if you're not talking about money, you're expressing your values through the way that you approach money, the way that you spend money, the way that you save money. And so one of the concepts that we recommend is before you commit yourself to someone, whatever that looks like for you, have those conversations that you would have if you were developing a prenuptial agreement. So we know that more and more people than ever before are developing prenupts. I think they've either seen their parents go through a divorce or maybe they delayed marriage and so therefore have more assets and more debt. And so it's going to be more complex than if you got married when you're 18 and you didn't have any assets or debt. And so some people are going in and actually developing prenupts, but we think that you can get the same benefit of a prenupt, not legally, but by working through the same questions you would ask to develop them but stopping short of creating a legal document which has all sorts of costs and lawyers involved and things like that. And so the idea of how are you going to share expenses? And this is one that actually my husband and I looked at. We wrote our final paper for my risk glass about how we were going to approach living together and one of those questions was how we were going to approach finances. And you could, there's one of three approaches typically, people either pool everything, meaning you combine paychecks, everything and all, you know, just use that shared fund to fund your expenses. You partially combine, right? So you have a percentage from someone's paycheck or a specific amount that goes together and then you use that to cover rent and other expenses, or you combine nothing. What the research shows is that the couples who are most successful are couples that have combined at least something, right? So even if you don't put everything together and say this is ours, there's no, you know, one person, first member of the couple, second member of the couple and the joint, it's like everything is joint. Or, you know, what my husband and I decided to do was ultimately we were actually making very different salaries when we graduated from business school. He was working for a hedge fund and I was working for a non-profit but we had rent to pay. And so what we did is we took a percentage of our salaries, put it to the shared account and used that to pay for our expenses, but then we actually upped that percentage over time. So we said when we get engaged, it'll be, you know, we'll increase it to this amount and then when we get married, it's this amount. And that was a helpful, those were sort of tranches almost or kind of like milestones for us to be able to adjust over time as we got more comfortable with each other and as we had more trust and a sense of, okay, this other person is not going to be, you know, taking our savings and spending it recklessly. But having that intentional approach does help you build to something where now, I mean, yeah, we put everything together, like, except for a very small amount that we keep to pay for gifts or to, you know, do something that we don't want the other person to get the credit card bill for like a, you know, girls weekend, like, that's not something I would, you know, necessarily expect us to pay for this from the shared fund. But it's helpful and it's also helpful to set amounts that you need to check in with the other person before you spend. And so that's another practice that we advise to set the like, let's just check in. If it's over, you could do it for anything like $100, $1,000. And again, that will change over time. Yeah, it's pretty much exactly what the discussions I've been having with my wife and looking at that. And it's, it's sort of easier to see it in other couples than it is in your own behavior. And I just think the book again has great frameworks around this. And it's very cool to hear the way that you designed it when you were first dating, engaged, married. I think that perspective is really helpful for a lot of members in our audience. Thank you so much for joining us. We love asking every guest what their X factor is. What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary, Abby? So I am a connector and a translator, not literally because I don't, unfortunately, speak other languages besides English fluently. I wish I did. But I have always been able to see connections and patterns between two different areas. And so that helped me when I was a nonprofit consultant taking the frameworks and concepts that were used in Fortune 500 companies applying them to the nonprofit sector. It helped me when I was in my graduate program and doing a joint degree with the business school and the education school. And now it's helping me as I take this idea of money and love, which are two very different concepts, but come together holistically to help people make better, more fulfilling decisions when they're considered jointly. Well, we appreciate the work you're doing. Where can our audience find out more about the book and everything else you have going on? So we have a book website at moneylovebook.com where you can find links to purchase the book. You could take a short quiz to help you understand your money and love decision-making style, which is very helpful. So you can figure out how to improve it. And we also have places where you can follow us on social media there as well. Excellent. Thank you, Abby. We really appreciate you joining us. Thanks so much. This was a great conversation.