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  📍 Welcome back to another episode of the 200% Marriage Podcast. I'm still getting used to saying that. Yeah. You're doing a great job though. Yeah I haven't messed it up yet. So we're reading the 200% marriage book. You're Winning Playbook to Be An Unstoppable Team. Last week, Mer got in deep and read her story. Chapter two. This week is all about me. Chapter three. Ignore the Feather.

Get the hammer. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. Rita Mae Brown. My upbringing was not a lot different from Mer's. I was also blessed with a great childhood and two great parents. They made sure my younger brother and I were loved and that we knew they were proud of us.

My dad was in the Canadian military. Yes, we have a real military. They even carry guns sometimes. I have many fond memories of traveling across Europe with my family, including Germany, France, and Switzerland. I had a lot of incredible experiences that many kids don't get to have. As great as my mom and dad were as parents, they weren't always great to or for each other.

I don't remember them showing much love or affection toward one another. Maybe they did. I'm sure they had their moments, but I just don't recall seeing them. I do recall seeing them argue, criticize, and pick at each other. I remember my dad tormenting my mom to no end, and my mom getting so frustrated with him that she threatened to knuckle him in the head.

Those are her words.

I think she called it that because it sounded better than punching him in the head, which is essentially what it was. She followed through on the threat more than once too. She was simply at her wit's end and didn't know what else to do, so she'd deck him. I'm not justifying it, but I'm also not saying he didn't deserve it.

They did their best to hide the big fights from my brother and me, but we could always tell, sometimes something would be broken in the morning indicating it had gotten heated. And like Mer I never saw them apologize or make amends after a fight. It seemed to just get ignored until it came up again next time.

They weren't happy together for a while. I remember being maybe 10 or 11, and my parents told me they were separating. They ultimately decided to stay together that time, but you could tell they were only doing it for my brother and me. They hung in there for another eight years or so. Thinking back now, it couldn't have been easy for them to be in a relationship that neither of them were happy in for the better part of a decade.

That's a pretty big sacrifice to make. When you think about how short our time is on earth. They sacrificed a big chunk of their lives so that my brother and I would have both parents around. Growing up, it seemed like they were doing it out of love for us, not love for each other. They hung in there until they couldn't anymore.

Eventually, they had had enough and something had to change. When I was graduating from high school and my brother was finishing eighth grade, my parents called us into the living room to break the news that they were splitting for real. This time, even though it wasn't a huge shock, it still hurt. I was upset.

I mostly blamed my dad for whatever reason. I guess I thought it was more his fault that he was less willing to work it out. They never told me that. I just picked up on it, whether it was right or wrong, that's what I believed. They actually did an excellent job of never badmouthing or blaming each other directly.

In fact, the opposite was true. For the most part, they both spoke highly of each other when talking to me, and I'm really grateful for that. The thing is, none of this is their fault. They are two really great people who were never taught about healthy relationships. My dad's parents were together until the day they died, but to say that they had a loving, beautiful relationship would be an overstatement.

It looked more like a relationship of convenience and survival than anything else. Granted, I obviously don't know the details of their relationship, just what I saw as a teenager, to which admittedly I paid very little attention, but I would never have called it a fantastic marriage. And my mom's parents were divorced before I was even born.

I have divorced grandparents. Whose family is so dysfunctional that even their grandparents got divorced. This guy. That's who. Because of these experiences, I promised myself I would do it differently. I promised myself I would never get divorced.

I would find my person and not be like my grandparents or my parents. I would be better. I'm going to marry my best friend and we're gonna be together for 60 or 70 years till death do us part. That's cute. Brings to mind a Woody Allen quote I heard once. If you wanna make God laugh. Tell him about your plans.

Well, I had a plan and God definitely laughed. After university. I met a girl we dated, eventually got engaged and moved in together until we moved in together. Much of our relationship was long distance. We worked and went to school in different places, so moving in together was basically like taking a highlighter to all of our differences, especially our very different visions for the future.

Cracks were forming in our foundation fast, but I felt like they were more cosmetic than anything. And the big holes like dream alignment. Well, I could just plug those with my fingers. I was dumb as you're beginning to see. As much as I was committed to doing things differently than my parents and grandparents, I had done exactly 0% of the required work to execute on that commitment.

I didn't learn how to be in a healthy, happy relationship. I didn't learn healthy boundaries, how to communicate or work through disagreements productively. I didn't know how to be a supportive, emotionally available partner. I also wasn't ready to put her needs or the needs of our relationship over my own.

I damn sure wasn't prepared to look in the mirror and take full accountability for the baggage and other bullshit I was bringing into the relationship and actually do something about it. In other words, I was not ready to be married. I hadn't grown up enough yet. I was way too immature for that type of commitment.

I didn't even know who I was or what I wanted, but I wasn't gonna let those minor details stop me. I wasn't gonna let any details stop me as it turns out. As we were getting closer to the wedding day, my gut was telling me this might be the wrong move. I kept hearing this voice whispering to me.

  Are you sure about this? I think you might need to reconsider this plan. Your visions for the future aren't exactly the same, bro. Are you forgetting that she basically wants to own an ark's worth of animals that you're allergic to?

I didn't listen. I ignored my intuition. I explained it all away as cold feet and went ahead and got married anyway. Besides they make allergy pills, right? You don't really need kidneys, do you?

In the process of being so hard nosed about fulfilling my commitment to myself that I would make the marriage work come hell or high water.

I let both of us down Within a few years of getting married, the concerns I had suppressed before the wedding continued not only to persist, but get worse, and those whispers turned to screams. Bro, what the fuck are you doing? You are not happy. Neither is she. Is this really what you want for the rest of your life?

Life is too short for this bullshit. You need to do something now. That's the weird thing about problems. They don't seem to just go away no matter how hard you ignore them. The gap between what we both wanted in life widened and we began spending less and less time together until we became roommates.

Ships passing in the night. I was married to another human being and I was never lonelier in my life. I think we both were. The difficult conversation I had put off years earlier was no longer possible to ignore. So we had that incredibly difficult conversation and as advertised, it was the hardest thing I'd ever done to that point in my life.

We separated and ultimately divorced. We were just too different and ultimately incompatible as lifelong partners, and we ignored our problems for far too long. She's a really good person, just not the person for me, nor was I the person for her. I wish her nothing but the best and take full responsibility for the relationship breakdown and for allowing it to continue far longer than it ever should have.

By not acting on my initial reservations years earlier, I let the problems fester and become toxic. I mirrored a lot of the stuff I saw from my mom and dad, and this isn't me blaming them or anyone else. I own this fully. I handled conflict in unhealthy ways. I avoided difficult conversations. That's on me.

I traded short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction. This was a massive lesson for me. As uncomfortable as that conversation would've been years earlier, it was so much worse Later. We'll talk about this later as we dive into the 200% marriage. For now, the important takeaway is that if you want a healthy, successful relationship, you cannot avoid the uncomfortable conversation.

The really ironic thing about this whole situation is that I also learned the same lesson as Mer. Do not settle. However, I learned it in the exact opposite way. The universe has a way of teaching you lessons. It will usually start by tickling you with a feather, but if you don't get it, eventually it will resort to smashing you with a hammer.

Mer was smart enough to get it with a feather. I needed the hammer. The end of that relationship was a really dark time for me. I had committed to doing things differently from my parents, there I was getting divorced. I was extremely hard on myself.

I felt like a complete failure. I isolated myself and didn't open up to anybody. I struggled through it by myself. I felt ashamed. The thing about shame is that it lives in the dark, and that's where it grows and gained strength over you. And for a while I allowed that to happen, but eventually with time, I was able to bring my shame into the light.

Now I can share it with the world, even write about it in a book, and hopefully help others see that it's okay to fail. It's okay to make mistakes. They don't define you. Making mistakes and learning from them is how you grow and become the best version of yourself. I knew I needed to grow and learn from this, so I made another commitment to myself.

Rather than promising myself that I would never fail again, in other words, get divorced again. I promised I would become a better partner and someone worthy of my dream spouse. I had to divorce the outcome from the process.

See what I did there. That's a divorce joke. I can make those now. That's growth.

But in all seriousness, I learned that it's not about the outcome. I cannot control everything that would prevent a divorce. Two people play a role in any relationship, and I cannot control what someone else will or won't do.

Making a promise to myself about something that I won't have complete control over is a recipe for disaster. Instead, I focus on what was within my power, my actions, and how I show up. I focus on who I would be when I was ready to be in another relationship. I guess now's as good a time as any to talk about that next relationship.

I don't wanna spoil the surprise, but it was with Mer. I know. Crazy plot twist. Right?

That's chapter three. That's chapter three.

So reading that out loud Yeah. Putting that out into the world. Vulnerable. Yeah. What's the hardest part about that for you? You know, reading it now. It's not something that I have any real emotion attached to anymore. Early days going through this stuff, talking about it was incredibly vulnerable, and then writing it was a little bit vulnerable.

Now that it's, it's out there I'm not feeling a big impact, to be honest. You divorced the emotion from the words. Yes. Yeah. Another divorce joke. We can make those. We're in a better place now. Growth. That's what it's all about. Growth.

You said, you took a lot of lessons from your first marriage.

Yeah. How long did it take you? To turn that feeling of failure into lessons and be able to see it differently. A long time I was more interested in bury it like it didn't happen and not talking about it and like figuring out how to just move on with life without actually ever addressing it.

And to be honest with you, I don't think there was ever a moment there where it just kind of happens. I think it was more of a process. You talked about how you struggled with the trust stuff and you had moments of decisions to go one way or the other. Similar for me in that, you know, I have choices I can make. I can project old patterns and old relationships on this one, and I can do things how I've always done them and think the way I've always thought and probably just sabotage this thing, so that it fails like the other one. Or I can make a decision to lean into trust and communicating better and sharing things that are on my heart and, making sure that we're aligned on our big life goals and things that we want to see and do in this world.

That I didn't always do in the past.

One of the big things I allude to in the book is my previous marriage, we got together and the early part of our relationship was long distance, a lot of visiting. We lived in mm-hmm. Worked in two different places and we'd see each other on weekends and then go away and separate and come back and, so you're always just kind of.

Re reconnecting, getting back to homeostasis almost, and you're not growing beyond that. You're always just kind of catching up on, you know, what happened over the last week or so. Then you've got a couple days that you wanna spend together, and then you're off again. Separate. It's always like a highlight reel.

You only have two days at a time. Yeah. And you don't really get that time to the downtime, the board time, the Yeah. To connect and, and really understand where are we going? What do we wanna build, like our dream life? What do you see for your future? What do I see for mine? And do they connect and how can we make that work?

Eventually, we get together and it becomes a lot more obvious that, oh, we do have some major differences. But at the same time, I was a big dummy and didn't really do anything with that information. Like I did. It was like, huh, noted. But I think we can get past that. What I've learned since then is that it's critical to align on what you want for the future because this is the person you're gonna do life with, and if they have a completely different vision for the future than you do, it's not gonna work.

So, having those whispers. Early days, but not listening to them was a huge lesson for me. That is something that I did take relatively quick early on. That was the first lesson. That was the lesson. Lesson. That was the lesson that I, I kind of took early on some of the other stuff around, you know, the work I had to do internally.

I wasn't really willing to look at that quite yet. So we swept that under a rug until, to your point when you said talk about it in your chapter, it just, the rug became, it just became too big for any rug to cover.

But I would say that that was the main lesson I learned learning to listen to that, that voice, that intuition, that little whisper that's there saying, are you sure?

And why do you think you didn't listen to those whispers?

I think part of it was similar to what you talked about in your chapter around seeing your friends, growing, partnering up, getting married. Buying houses, having kids. I kind of felt like I had invested so much time and energy into this that it would be a huge setback, to not see this through, to not make this work and to be off schedule.

I was comparing myself to other people's journeys, which sets you up for, for failure right from the start. And so I think it was a combination of throwing good time after bad, you know, almost you sunk cost fallacy kind of, yeah, that and feeling like I was comparing myself to other people in my orbit that I didn't feel like I was ma maybe measuring up.

And looking at those.

Like the people in your orbit that you were of measuring yourself to? None. None of them are in my life anymore. If that's where you're going, that's where I was going. Yeah. Yeah. How many of them are still in your life? None. In your twenties, you don't know that, a lot of these people that you're, you're so caught up in.

Many of them you're probably not even gonna have a relationship with in 5, 10, 15 years. And if you do, they're all gonna be carrying on and taking care of themselves in, in their own life. They're not gonna give two thoughts to what you're up to. Mm-hmm. Or care in any way. Whether you are getting married or living the single life, they just don't care.

But that wasn't where I was at then.

Let's have a similar conversation to what we had with me last week around like your parents take. Haven't heard from either of them yet, on whether they read the book and if they have what they think of this particular chapter.

What do you think your dad's take and your mom's take will be?

You think they'll read it?

I don't know who made the font a good size. Yeah, my mom's biggest excuse with books is that the fonts too small. So I made it big enough so that that excuse is removed, but to answer the last question.

I don't know if they'll read it or not. If I had to put money on it, I would say My dad will, my mom, I'm not sure. So maybe she's listening to it for the first time right now. Maybe. Maybe she is. How do I think they'll take it? Part of me thinks that they might be a little bit disappointed in some of it, and that I shared some stuff that, you know, my mom knuckled my dad in the head punched, basically punched in the head. He also said he had a comment though. He for sure did. And, my mom, beautiful person, she can only take so much like any of us.

And my dad is a great person, but he can get in there, test some boundaries I think they'll be okay. I don't think it'll impact our relationship in any way, shape, or form. I really don't. Honestly, the part that I think might be the biggest,

sore spot maybe, if, if that's the best term. I'm not even sure. But my mom's parents, they divorced. There's no gray with that. They separated and haven't been together for a very long time. But my dad's side, when I talked about that,

my aunts, my dad, my family might have a different take because they have a different experience, experience with them. They grew up with them. They may believe that, or think or have experienced that those two individuals had a beautiful relationship and I'm sure they had their moments and, and I'm not taking away from that.

My grandfather was very stoic. He was a old Newfoundland man's man who just didn't say a lot. And my grandmother, sweetheart, who, loved everyone and took care of the family. They had very, traditional roles. I never saw them. Have a loving relationship behind closed doors. I mean, they had nine kids, so there was some loving going on, but I don't know, to the degree, that they had a fantastic relationship.

Mm-hmm. Or if it was a a, an emotionally intimate Yeah. Connected to me it felt like it was a, a relationship of we've been together this long, we've got a bunch of kids, we've got a life together. And we're just going through the motions kind of thing.

That's the interpretation that I had growing up. But I can see how my dad and his siblings might have a different take on that. They might disagree but my experience is my experience and I think I've done an okay job of articulating that.

But I would say my parents will be fine with it. I mean, at the end of the day, they don't really have much choice in the matter. They can either read it and be fine with it or, they can take offense to certain parts of it. And which case, I can't help that.

It does them No good. No, it doesn't serve them in any way. It might be interesting if they do have some parts they disagree with rather than take offense to that it might prompt an interesting conversation that you might learn more about. It might for sure. Yep. And I welcome. So that would be a benefit really.

I welcome it if it happens. You said something in there about how your parents sacrificed almost a decade. Of their lives staying together after they had said they were gonna separate. Mm-hmm. So that you and your brother could grow up with both parents mm-hmm. At home. What's your take on that now? So the benefit of hindsight and being in your mid forties? Yeah, it's interesting 'cause that happened when I was maybe nine, 10 years old.

And I just remember that conversation back then. Them telling us that, and then I don't remember a follow-up conversation that they were not doing that. I just remember it never, like, actually never happening. Like, it was weird. It was almost like they talked about it and then just never executed on it.

And we're just kind of like always there still. I was like, all right. I guess we're, I, I guess we're past that. I don't know. We're just gonna keep going with whatever's happening here. But that was obviously, that was the first point where I knew there was trouble. Then eight to 10 years later they announced that they're actually splitting.

I surmised that in those like eight to 10 years, things didn't get a lot better. Like they just tolerated it, and did it for us. Mm-hmm. I think they really did choose to just stay together for us. And to be honest with you, you know, the child in me is like, yeah, that's great, but

I don't think it's the right decision for anyone to do that, to stay together just for the kids. I think that life is way too short and that you owe it to yourself to live the life that you want to live and live it to the fullest. To me, when you sacrifice for the kids and you spend the better part of a decade together, just going through the motions, you're not your best self, and that bleeds over into the family life and the relationships.

And so would it have been better had they separated, then gone on to do the things that they really want to do, be with the people they really wanted to be with and be happier in their life? I would have to think that if you're happier and you're more engaged in life, then the relationships, all the things are better.

And so I would think that as much as it would be a pain to be apart and to have separate Christmases if everyone's happier, that would be the better option. But not to say that my childhood was bad post that. Happening. Mm-hmm. It wasn't in any way.

They were, they were still great parents.

I think it's a big responsibility telling your story, especially as it touches other people's stories. And we've talked about that at length a lot through this process. It's, something that we took very seriously. We felt the weight of that responsibility.

I was gonna say burden, but it's not a burden. It's a privilege. But it's got some responsibility, weight to it for sure. And we took that responsibility incredibly seriously to be respectful and kind and empathetic to all parties involved. Yeah. It was really important to me if there were gonna tell this story and it impacts other people and it, and the overlap we've talked about many, many times. I want to tell our story from our perspective, but I also wanna be really respectful and kind of the people that are also touched and impacted by these stories.

Mm-hmm. And I'm actually quite proud of how we've been able to tow that line, still get our story across and be respectful and kind and empathetic and take full responsibility.

Probably I would say, and you can, you can tell me if you agree or not, but I would say those two chapters in particular were the hardest to navigate as far as finding that line of what is too much versus being respectful of everybody.

And at the end of the day, getting to the place where. It's our story. We've been very, considerate of people. It's our experience and how they take it and how they react is largely out of our control at this point, and we've controlled the part that we can. Right. That's chapter three.

What's next week? Chapter four. What are we got? Chapter four, Toques, beer and hockey. A Canadian love story. Eh. See you then. Bye bye

If you want to turn your marriage into the engine that drives your business forward instead of the brakes keeping it stuck, book a free marriage and business strategy session with us at 200percentmarriage.com/strategycall. We'll see you next week.