Oh, the things we do for love
The story of how Human After All came to the practice of running your marriage like a business and your work like a love affair, applied to every day interactions and relationships.
This experiment loop started when the handsome-and-talented-husband and I hit a rough patch and we applied our design skills into solving our relationship problems. As designers, we were skilled in uncovering unmet needs, reframing the problem(s), exploring solution directions and carrying out the solution intentions.
Lateral thinking is a designer’s superpower.
If we were so great at solving other people’s problems, we can apply those skills to solving our own, right?
- Act: stakeholder interview in the form of a dialogue between the both of us. Outcome: understanding what was important.
- Act: gather data by tracking our travel via Daytum. Outcome: evidencing the source of the problem and mapping it. Too much travel and not enough time together → imbalance in energy → imbalance in dynamics → we were an orchestra that didn’t know how to play music together.
- Act: exploring solutions to each problem statement with “how might we?” questions. Outcomes: a series of rituals that we still practice to this day and the major decision to move to Berlin, where we still live happily a decade later.
Why not use the creative problem-solving and solution-finding skills that we honed in our professional lives as designers, to solve problems in our personal lives?
Vice versa, using the ingredients and methods that gives depth and breadth in my personal relationships, in my professional interactions. After all, they had similar dimensions and had gone through similar evolutions.
In several thousand years, marriage went on a journey from the “Your son and my daughter and our joined farms” (or “My throne and your throne means a bigger kingdom”) institution of economic security and social status and companionship and children or succession into all-of-the-above plus “My best friend, my confidanté and really great in bed until we are 90”… That’s a lot for one person.
The same with work. My parents and his can’t fathom our job changes and our freelancing. “We thought you had great salaries at XYZ corporate company.”
Modelling the great relationships in my life. I pondered loosely around three steps.
- What are the qualities of the best relationships and interactions I’ve had? Identifying what the other person did and what I did which worked so beautifully in combination.
- How do I distill these and inject them into other relationships? Identify the variables to understand what our relationship needs when, because I believe each relationship is unique, and they each transform people.
- Staying authentic by regularly checking in with my “inner”.
My own answers to these three points became my recipe in building, nurturing and navigating relationships from then on. Many of these relationships have endured over years, if not decades. I distilled my life’s great relationships and interactions no matter how brief and fleeting, as well as the deep and lasting ones. They marked me all the same.
Let’s experiment with our lives. Because we are all prototypes. Because discovery brings us joy. Because we are here to experience great things. Because my handsome-and-talented husband gives me exploration space to find my way, even when it takes me in directions other than him.
So this series of posts on Medium will be all about this practice and its learnings applied to every day interactions and relationships.
Run your marriage like a business, and your work like a love affair.
