I Need Somebody to Love… and to Design With
How a design process can bring couples closer together
For Valentine’s Day I interviewed couples who’ve come to my Design The Life You Love Workshops together.
Hani Hong is an out-of-the-box-thinking marketing director and Andrew Hessel is a scientist, working to advance synthetic biology, two nomads who met in 2011. In Andrew’s words, “If you can’t sit down together and design the life that you love you’re in trouble because you won’t be pulling on the same chords and levers in your life to make it happen.”
Anni Kuan is a fashion designer and Chris Reilly is a graphic designer who met six years ago online and been together ever since. Anni believes that, “It’s nice to live strictly to your own personal liking, instead of what society or your family expects you to do. What makes you the happiest is to do what you think is going to make you happy, not what other people think is going to make you happy.”
George Simons is a design consultant and Lisa Syme is VP of Commercial for a cruise line. They’ve been together for 11 years. According to them, “One session of designing your life together is worth tons of counseling that hasn’t produced a damn thing other than a few fights!”
Steve D’Amico is a designer who helps companies create cultures of innovation and Pam D’Amico is a retired stay-at-home mom who worked in the finance industry. Steve went home and taught the process to Pam and they’ve been designing their life together every Sunday morning over coffee and a cinnamon roll.
What I learned is that design’s process and tools can help bring couples closer together. Here are my five take-aways:
01. Design is working with constraints.
Understanding that you are never going to get where you want to go by becoming a different person is key to understanding yourself and your partner. Instead, it is key to learn to work with your constraints, rather than going against them. In your constraints lie opportunities.
For George and Lisa, knowing each other’s constraints helped them to create the conditions for each other’s strengths. Lisa noted that, “The two things that inspire me and get me going that I came up with were humor and singing. When I read, listen to or watch humor, it really elevates me and I realized that I should make those kinds of choices, go to funny movies, watch funny things, read Tina Fey…And my second thing is singing in the car, with or without the radio. These things really pump me up and I should use those things to move me forward instead of trying to become someone else. George was really interested in my take-aways and he remembered them and he’s really applying them. He said that every weekend he is going to make sure, that it’s going to be his goal, that I sing. It’s going to be on our checklist. Which is sweet. It’s as if someone said, I love peanuts and you bring them a bag of peanuts. He’s applying and helping me enact what we came up with.”
02. Design uses imagination, inspiration and playfulness to solve tough problems.
Design is a non-threatening way to get below the surface and see what the other person is like, in a very positive and moving way. It gives you different visual tools — from drawing mind maps to using metaphors which help us understand complex things in relation to things we know — to play with ideas without being judgmental, like children who are experimenting with things without preconception. This is the best way to explore possibilities to let new solutions percolate to the top.
Pam and Steve did just that at a time when their kids were leaving home and they were feeling somewhat disconnected from each other within their empty nest. Pam noted, “When Steve was back [from taking the workshop] we started thinking about what are some of our common grounds and realized we both liked to explore. Steve’s was more in the mind space and mine was about traveling, but we suddenly realized that we both want to explore. That was our jumping off point for the future… It’s so easy to be living your everyday life, doing the same things every day and living parallel lives. This gave us some common ground to actually have goals together. It forced us to pause and talk to each other about where we were individually and as a couple.
03. Design uses creativity to help people of different disciplines bridge their differences.
You don’t have to be a designer to think like a designer. We’re all capable of extraordinary creativity given a process and set of tools. Thinking like a designer can bring a couple together around a shared understanding of their future. They can visualize how the things that are important to each of them align and, through that exercise, create a shared vision.
Hani Hong and Andrew Hessel described the process: “It’s like when a single person is doing it, they have a general idea of what they might want in life or what they might want to change, or redesign and they can’t quite get that clarity until they go through the class and they’re drawing out their bubbles and making their priorities. It’s like saying something out loud. I think with us doing it, it was putting it down on paper and then sharing it and saying OK, these are the things that we’re both aligned on, here are the things that are a little different from each other and then recognizing what is really important to the other person and being able to get alignment on those other things.”
04. Design is holistic.
Chris and Anni, talked about designing your life this way — “You may know aspects of it very intimately, but once you see them all sketched out on paper and are able to see the connecting points you get a much more cohesive realization about all the pieces that make up your life. After you’ve taken it all apart you can put your life back together as a much more cohesive structure.”
So, designing your life together is like building a model of your future, holding it in your hand and looking at it from different perspectives. It seems easy, but having it all in front of you and being able to view it together is what makes it different. Looking at the big picture and saying, here is what I drew and here’s what you drew and look at how similar they are.
05. Design is about looking forward.
Design is about imagining the future based on what we know today. It helps move you from today to tomorrow. Hani talked about this in terms of, “Visualization in design helps you see yourselves as you move forward together.” It helps you to understand each other and create common ground as you move from here to there together.
It takes courage to design and to imagine the future in a new way. It takes even more courage to design your life. It takes tremendous courage to design your life together with your partner. But the ROI, at least according to these couples, is well worth the effort, and like all good design, can bear fruit for a very very long time.
I will share the original interviews on which this article is based on via Medium throughout the month February.
Design the Life You Love is Ayse Birsel’s new book, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Get your copy here.
Ayse thinks that her life is her biggest project and that we owe it to ourselves to create original lives that look, feel and smell like us. That is her definition of a life well lived, just like what these couples are creating together. You can follow her on Facebook or subscribe to her updates on aysebirsel.com
