I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort zones lately. If you never stray from them, you’re not going to grow much and that’s no way to go through life.
But first, we must address the question from many weeks ago where I asked if financial independence could be a bad thing for your life, specifically your marriage.
Marriage On FIRE Or Fire?
Not having a job has allowed me to live truer to myself. Without having to answer to The Man for 40 hours a week, I’m a purer person. While most of this is good, some of it has caused marital strife.
I believe that one of our core tasks as humans is to continually evolve. We should be growing constantly. I’m not the same person I was 5 years ago. I’m not the same person I was 1 year ago. And, I’ve been married for 16 years!
With growth comes a risk of growing apart from others. This is why some marriages fail. No affairs and no money issues. One or both humans just aren’t who they were when they got married. If the divide is too great, the solution is to peacefully separate.
Mrs. 1500 and I are not separating. We made some adjustments, got through our rough patch. We’re now in a better place than we were at before. I’m happy and the Mrs. is too.
Here is what y’all had to say:
Revanche from A Gai Shan Life is wise:
Like any life transition, I expect that early retirement would require the same amount of effort to establish the new normal in our relationship while we adjust to our new circumstances and how we choose to spend our time. We play out this compromise in a micro sort of way with our nights and weekends but we’d have to extrapolate to that the larger scale of weeks and months.
Thanks Done by Forty for being open and sharing. I’m usually terrified to show the world these glimpses into my life, but when others share, it makes it a little better. That sounds kind of crappy though; like it’s easier for me to have pain because of your pain. I wish you didn’t have these issues in the first place, but I’m glad you recognize them and work through it. If you can do that, you’ve won most of the battle.
Mrs. Done by Forty and I spend 24/7 together now, as we both work from home. Throw in Baby AF and, yes, we too are seeing some issues with our relationship come to light.
We (okay, “I”) need to work on communicating (i.e. – fighting) better. For me, that means going to my therapist again and heading to meetings, too. :/ All good in the end but, yes, having a lot of time together seems to mean you can’t ‘fake it’ anymore.
Mr. PoP is on FIRE and happy:
FIRE also allows people to spend time on some pretty big questions…are they happy, are they fulfilled, do they still like who they are as a person.
It’s been good for us, mostly because I bring less stress home from my job, and hopefully even take a little work off of Mrs. PoP’s plate so she is more relaxed as well.
Chris from CanIRetireYet has had similar issues (see his post about it here):
Interesting post for me as this is a near parallel of issues we’re dealing with in our relationship.
One final thought I have is this; I think that Mrs. 1500 and I have the right balance. Even though we occasionally argue, a relationship without conflict has issues too. If a couple never has a disagreement, one person is probably a pushover and that’s not good.
Comfort Zones
Straying out of our comfort zones is how we get better:
- Do you want to be a really good runner or cyclist? You’re going to have to sweat.
- Do you want to go to medical school? You better spend a lot of time at the library.
- Do you want to have a successful blog? You better put your time in.
It’s all good because as it turns out, meaningful work is the key to a good and happy life.
Your Turn
Tell me what you think. Answer one or more of the questions below. I’ll call out my favorite responses next week.
- How do you get out of your comfort zone?
- Tell me about a time you left your comfort zone and got to a better place.
- How do you get out of a rut?
Join the 10s who have signed up already!
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I believe mid life crisis is a thing for nearly everyone. That crisis is usually self reflection. The stress of work and kids is real regardless of how great your job and children are, even more so if either of those are great.
I know so many couples that get divorced when the kids are almost done high school and I just think jeez you made it through the tough part you are about to get to the point where you have some of your time back for each other. In hindsight my used mini-cooper wasn’t the worst mid life crisis outlet after all !
“I know so many couples that get divorced when the kids are almost done high school…”
Wow, I wonder why that is and if it’s common? How sad to have made it that far only to fail then. I suspect children are the glue that hold some marriages together.
I remember reading somewhere that there were 7 stages of marriage, if one chooses to get married. I know there have been several books and articles written on this subject. We’re somewhere between the rebellion and reassessment phases of our own marriage due to an expected life event, which brings me to my next point.
When you asked, “How do you get out of your comfort zone?”, sometimes it just hits you in the face with it. With the arrival of the personal pan pizza, oh boy has it been a shell shock Haha! The way I’ve been getting out of my own rut, very slowly mind you, is by embracing change and taking action by helping the Pizza Gal as much as possible. At least it leads to less…hummm….criticism….each day that passes 🙂
Congratulations on the arrival of that personal pan pizza! Happy times!
Embracing change! Yeah! Much better to embrace and roll with it than to fight it.
I’m glad you guys are working it out. I’m a bit nervous about my wife retirement too. Not sure how we’d do 24/7. She tends to take on various projects so I’m pretty sure she won’t be home all the time. We’ll see how it goes.
Getting out of the comfort zone? That’s hard. I traveled solo once. That was fun, but I like traveling with my wife more. Maybe you can take a 2-week solo trip or something like that.
“I’m a bit nervous about my wife retirement too.”
I think it’s important to accept and even embrace that even in retirement, you’ll both lead separate lives. It’s OK (and important) to not feel compelled to spend 24/7 with each other.
I can totally understand how people end up drifting apart as they grow older, sometimes I think I’m lucky that I didn’t meet my partner in crime until long after I was FIRE…hell the only reason I met her was because I was FIRE’d and able to be at the gym at 11am on a Tuesday : ). We are only a couple of years in but already each of us having a life that allows us to spend the vast majority of our time together certainly vetted out our compatibility quickly. I for one appreciate your openness and honest on this blog, just because you made it to the promised land of early retirement doesn’t mean it is all puppy dogs and ice cream cones. I was sad to learn of another FIRE blogger going through a divorce recently and it does hit home how special it is to find a partner who you can spend a lifetime with, never take anything (especially your relationship) for granted.
“I for one appreciate your openness and honest on this blog, just because you made it to the promised land of early retirement doesn’t mean it is all puppy dogs and ice cream cones.”
Thanks! While I’m so grateful for my life, the struggles and issues are important and worthwhile too. You don’t find much out about yourself when you’re skipping happily along.
“I was sad to learn of another FIRE blogger going through a divorce recently and it does hit home how special it is to find a partner who you can spend a lifetime with, never take anything (especially your relationship) for granted.”
Yep, so true. If you can find someone who shares your values and grows along with you, that’s a gift. In my case, I’ve also found someone who will put up with my shit.
You guys are my heroes on multiple levels. Your ability to set goals and put yourself out there to ensure accountability is an approach I’ve used successfully the majority of my career, only you take it and apply it to all areas of your life.
Kudos to you both for taking the time to not only work through your issues together, but weighing the impact on the others in your lived who would be impacted.
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Thanks so much for the kind comment. Much appreciated.
What interesting timing. I’ve had a few conversations with close friends lately that initiated from them asking me for a favor or advice. The subject got me reflecting on my own life and while I have goals (written), tracking systems, and even an accountability partner, I realized I have just been going through the motions because they have become familiar and comfortable. To combat this, I used my journal for some from thoughtless (read: brainstorming without over analyzing) reflection. I put myself through several exercises. I thought of Jim Rohn’s quote “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” and determined who the five people I SHOULD be spending time with and why….and then I emailed each of them and told them (this was very high on my uncomfortable zone as it leaked into vulnerability, but I closed my eyes and hit send without proofreading or editing because I knew that would cause me to delete delete delete). I also went back to basics, I drew a “spider web” diagram with my name in the middle and my top 5 goals as the first layer. From there, I through threw WHY they are important to me and then HOW I was working toward them. This spurred many other random thoughts that ended up in a completely crazy page of randomness and ideas, but things I will go back to and put some sense around. I think the underlying concept of this is that no matter how set you are on your goals, if you don’t take the time to reflect back on them and do some honest self talk about whether or not your behavior and actions and moving your toward them, it’s very easy to fall into the habit of the motion without deliberate focus of improvement.
Holy cow, where do I begin?
“…and determined who the five people I SHOULD be spending time with and why….and then I emailed each of them and told them (this was very high on my uncomfortable zone as it leaked into vulnerability, but I closed my eyes and hit send…”
That is some powerful stuff right there. I hope those five people appreciated what you were doing. Being able to be vulnerable is a powerful tool. Much better than living behind an emotional shield.
“I also went back to basics, I drew a “spider web” diagram with my name in the middle and my top 5 goals as the first layer. From there, I through threw WHY they are important to me and then HOW I was working toward them. This spurred many other random thoughts that ended up in a completely crazy page of randomness and ideas, but things I will go back to and put some sense around.”
What an amazing exercise. What I’m thinking about right now is that the original top 5 goals may be much less important than the “completely crazy page of randomness and ideas.” The journey that you’re mind can take you on when you get into the groove always amazes me. Sometimes with a post, I’ll end up at a completely different place than I anticipated when I started writing it.
Interesting post given the speculation around MMM having become divorced recently. I’ve been FI for over 10 year now, but it turns out that my work has provided the friction to keep our family ‘mainstream’ although we do things that are nothing of the sort. Right now, I’m living abroad while my wife and kids manage the routine in an extremely different environment. They have more financial resources but are realizing that it does not subsidize the physical defect of me not being there.. So I’m pretty smug around not taking the ER pill just yet, although it’s probably also somewhat true that bloggers aren’t 100% ER….
Thanks for the link. Glad to hear things are going better for you all.
Likewise here, but it has taken us stepping out of our comfort zone and asking for help. I think in this community we pride ourselves on being DIYers and wear that as a badge of honor, sometimes to our detriment.
We tried couples counseling to break the cycle we were in and the results have been amazing. Embarrassed it took as long as it did to admit we needed someone to help us get back on track. I’d highly recommend it for couples that are struggling, but willing to put in the work to make things better.
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My wife and I have gone through a transition as she is working part time. It has actually been really good for us, since we save a boat load on childcare and someone can always take and get our kids off the bus. Our main problem is Fridays. She doesn’t work on Fridays and I work from home. She likes to blame me for her lack of production on those days (she doesn’t get as much cleaned as she would like) because I am around and distract her. Apparently me, sitting in front of a computer and talking on conference calls is very distracting.
As far as leaving my comfort zone… I am not exactly extroverted and just spent last week in Germany, where we went to a wedding between a German friend and his Romanian fiancé. The wedding and reception lasted at least 12 hours (we gave up after 12 hours). I don’t speak German nor Romanian, but I can usually follow a conversation based on context. It was an interesting evening and definitely outside my comfort zone, but it was a lot of fun
Interesting article and the comments from the previous one. I’ve been trying to push out of my comfort zone in many areas since the start of my divorce. I’ve taken a couple opportunities to try to learn to dance, attended events I usually would have said “No” to and have been trying to make new friends.