Forty Years Later
Last weekend, Ricardo and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary.
Whenever people hear that we’ve been married for four decades and have also worked together all those years, they almost always ask the same question:
“How do you do it?”
Usually, there’s a second question hiding underneath the first one.
How do two people spend that much time together without driving each other crazy?
It’s an understandable question.
Most couples have separate careers, separate routines, separate circles of interaction. At the end of the day, they come back together and share stories about what happened while they were apart.
That’s never really been us.
For forty years, Ricardo and I have shared not only a marriage, but businesses, projects, dreams, risks, stress, family responsibilities, and more conversations about work than I could possibly count.
And no… we are not the ideal couple.
We argue.
We annoy each other.
We clash over control sometimes because we both naturally move toward problem-solving and fixing things.
We have completely different tastes in food. He’s a meat, potatoes, and rice kind of guy. I love veggies and spices.
One of us can happily listen to something the other person would probably classify as auditory torture.
And honestly, we laugh about that more than we fight about it.
Somewhere along the way, I think we stopped expecting each other to be versions of ourselves.
That matters more than most people realize.
This wasn’t either of our first marriages. We both brought history into this relationship—along with some scars, hard-earned lessons, and probably more caution than we admitted at the time.
We weren’t building from fantasy.
We were building from real life.
And maybe that shaped the way we approached this marriage from the beginning.
Not as two people trying to become the same...
but as two people learning how to build a partnership while remaining fully themselves.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that one of the greatest mistakes couples make is assuming that differences automatically mean incompatibility.
Sometimes differences are simply differences.
One person needs more quiet.
Another thinks out loud.
One finds comfort in structure.
Another finds energy in spontaneity.
One wants time to process.
The other wants to solve the issue immediately.
Those differences can easily begin to feel personal.
Threatening, even.
Especially when stress enters the picture.
But understanding Perceptual Style changed a great deal for us because it helped us recognize that many of our differences were not judgments or intentional acts of opposition.
They were differences in how we naturally experienced and processed the world.
That shift is bigger than it sounds.
When you stop interpreting every difference as criticism, rejection, or resistance, something softens.
You become more curious.
Less defensive.
More willing to ask:
“What’s really happening here?”
Instead of:
“Why are you doing this to me?”
That doesn’t mean conflict disappears.
It doesn’t.
We still disagree.
We still get frustrated sometimes.
But our disagreements rarely feel threatening.
More often, they feel clarifying.
Cathartic.
Like two people working through a problem rather than fighting to protect their ego.
Over time, we learned that not every difference needs to be fixed.
Some things require compromise.
Some require adaptation.
And some simply require respect.
There are places where we meet in the middle.
And there are places where we’ve learned to say:
“This matters to you, so I want to honor it.”
Or:
“This matters deeply to me, and I need you to understand why.”
I think that balance matters.
People often talk about needing “space” in relationships, and I understand what they mean. We all need room to breathe, to grow, to maintain our sense of self.
But I’ve also learned that closeness itself is not the problem.
The problem is what happens when individuality disappears inside the closeness.
A healthy partnership doesn’t erase uniqueness.
It makes room for it.
Looking back over forty years, I don’t think Ricardo and I succeeded because we avoided friction.
We succeeded because we gradually learned how to interpret friction differently.
We stopped seeing differences as threats to the relationship.
We started seeing them as information.
And through all of it, we built a life together.
A family.
Two successful companies.
Friendships.
Shared memories.
A thousand ordinary moments no one else will ever fully understand.
Not a perfect life.
But a deeply meaningful one.
And honestly, after forty years, I think that’s far better.
Please share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section below.
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