When the party is over

I started dating my husband in November 2014. I started building MadeComfy with him in April 2015.

Which means our relationship has never existed without the company. From almost the very beginning, we were building something together, sharing the same spaces, knowing the same people, dealing with the same problems, having the same conversations at midnight when we should have been sleeping. The architecture of the business and the architecture of our relationship were built simultaneously, on the same foundation, out of the same materials.

I always wondered what would happen when the building stopped. Whether we would know how to be with each other when the shared project was gone. Whether the thing we had built together had also been the thing holding us together, and what would be left when it was removed.

Now I know.

I want to be honest about what building a company with your life partner actually costs, because the version that gets told publicly tends to be the romantic one; the shared vision, the trust, the particular beauty of making something together. All of that is true, and so is the other part.

The friction was constant. We have very similar values and very similar ambitions, but we are very different people in how we approach problems, how we read situations, how we make decisions under pressure. Every significant challenge in the business became a debate between us. Not a polite discussion, a real debate, often heated, sometimes at midnight when we were both exhausted and had nothing left to give each other except the argument.

You cannot leave yourself at the door. The person who had a very difficult conversation in a board meeting is the same person who comes home that evening. The hurt does not disappear because you have crossed the threshold into the private part of your life. It comes with you. And your partner, who was there, who was part of the difficult conversation, who is carrying their own version of it, is the person waiting on the other side of the door.

There were many times I questioned whether this was the right relationship for me. Whether what we had was a partnership or a working arrangement that had accumulated the trappings of a marriage. We broke up once before we married. There were many moments after that when I thought seriously about calling it. Not because I did not love him. Because loving someone and building something with them at the same time is genuinely one of the hardest things a relationship can be asked to hold.

Building a business together is an extraordinary thing to do with the person you love. It is also a relentless test of everything the relationship is made of, one that extracts a cost the public version of the story almost never includes.

And now the party is over, the company has been sold. The operational noise, the endless problem-solving, the business conversations that consumed everything, all of it is gone. And what I find, standing in the quiet on the other side of it, is something I was not prepared for.

I feel like I am dating him again.

Not naively, not with the uncomplicated freshness of the beginning, before we knew what we were taking on. But with the specific warmth of two people who climbed a very difficult mountain together and came down the other side knowing something about each other that could not have been known any other way. We fought together. We did not let each other down. When it was hard (and it was genuinely hard, for both of us, in different ways at different times) we pulled each other through.

That knowledge produces a kind of trust that has no shortcut, you cannot manufacture it. You can only accumulate it through the actual experience of going through difficult things with someone and discovering that they hold. He held, and so did I.

Now, without the noise, I can feel it clearly. The operational friction is gone. What remains is the person, the one who showed up for our family, who fought alongside me, who is a rock solid foundation in a way I could not fully appreciate while the business was consuming all of our attention.

The relationship is not the same as it was before, it is better, deeper. Built on evidence rather than hope.

If you are building something with your life partner (or thinking about it) I want to offer three things that were true for us, for whatever they are worth.

First: your partner is probably the right person to build with. It will be hard, but you already have the trust, the shared vision, and the particular willingness to be honest with each other that most business relationships take years to develop. That head start is real and it matters.

Second: assume positive intent. When the friction comes, and it will come, constantly, in the middle of the night, in the car, in the office, in all the places where the business and the relationship collide; assume that the person across from you is coming from the same values, even when they are expressing them differently. That assumption saved us more times than I can count.

Third: gratitude. Not grand gestures, one deliberate moment a day. One thing your partner did that you noticed and are grateful for, said out loud. It creates a reciprocity that sustains the relationship through the periods when everything else is depleting it. We forgot to do this for long stretches. We always came back to it, and it always helped.

The party is over. The noise is gone. And what I have found on the other side of it is the person I built everything with, and the relationship we built alongside the company, which turns out to have been the most important construction all along.

I am grateful we did not give up on it. I am grateful every day.

— Sabrina

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