The Second Transition Begins

Fleeting doubts, troubling dreams, and nagging questions are all hallmarks of the start of the second transition. As couples enter their middle years, the stability of the joint path they crafted at the end of their first transition begins to crumble under a new set of challenges. Rather than wrestling with the life events that trigger their first transition, couples must now contend with existential questions and doubts about the foundation and direction of their lives. If the first transition requires owning one’s choices, the second involves questioning those choices. And the more we own our choices, the harder questioning them is.

The questions seem to emerge out of thin air, creeping up on people to disrupt a well-functioning—and at times, apparently blissful—life. In reality, they have been brewing for years, accumulating outside people’s awareness until they are substantial enough to be recognized. The questions often start small: Is this the career I want? Where does my passion lie? But they quickly expand into other aspects of life: Is this the relationship I want? Am I who I want to be? What should I do with the rest of my life?

The source of the questioning is simple: many couples I spoke to, having had the good fortune of a partnership and a career that worked for them, were on the receiving end, and put up with, a lot of demands. They had the resources and support to meet those demands in their careers and in their social lives, and to a great extent they felt that they had chosen to do so. But at some point, one of them started asking, “Why do I put up with this, and how long will I?”

I found that couples most frequently faced the questions that spark their second transition in their forties. At this stage, people have had enough professional and life experience to reflect on their success, recognize their limitations, and not want to waste their remaining potential. They also become less likely, if they have succeeded enough, to tolerate paying prices that seemed acceptable before. Whether positive or negative, their assessment sparks more questions. In a quote ascribed to Oscar Wilde, “The Gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us—the first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.” If you have achieved success and realized some dreams, you ask, “What was it all for? Is this all there is to life?” If you judge yourself to have slipped behind your peers, and failed to reach your dreams, you ask, “What will I do now?” and you face the disappointment of realizing that you may never accomplish your goals.

People’s pressing need to author their lives as they reach their middle years has been so extensively documented that some psychologists consider it universal. Whether it is an intrinsic need, or simply the result of constraints posed by social systems on young people, is an issue for the philosophers. Practically, most people who have worked hard to secure career opportunities and social standing in their twenties and thirties, like the couples in my research, will feel the desire for more freedom from the very commitments they once longed to make as they hit their forties.

From Impasse to Individuation

Prior to our forties, whether we like to admit it or not, most of us follow a career and life path molded by social forces that take the shape of parents, friends, and peers at work. On graduating from college, we may apply to medical school and follow in our mother’s or father’s footsteps to become a family doctor. We may train to become engineers because that is what smart kids do in our culture. Unsure what first job to take, we may join a management consultancy or a bank because that signals talent and status to our peers. Not only do we do what is expected of us, we also become the person we are expected to be—the hardworking striver, the caring organizer, or the diligent follower. That our life paths and personae are initially shaped by others does not mean that we are weak or lacking self-awareness. It is a common pattern that, in the early years, serves many of us well, as anyone who has benefited from a demanding mentor will know. But its usefulness only lasts so long.

The internal questioning and doubts that typically emerge in people’s forties are the first sign that their “true self” is tugging on the persona that they have developed to conform to social expectations. When the people I studied sensed, for the first time, that the life they were living might not be entirely their own, they often felt trapped. They knew that their current path could not continue. They wanted to recraft their path to reflect their own desires rather than what other people expected of them. But they were unsure what exactly their own desires were. They were stuck.

The developmental task of the second transition is to shift from adapting to social demands and expectations to identifying and pursuing what each partner wants out of their career and relationship. I call this task reciprocal individuation. The psychologist Carl Jung was the first to describe the process of individuation through which people craft a self and life rooted in their own unique interests and desires. Jung recognized that individuation was tumultuous, but he saw it as central to healthy human development. It is only through this process, Jung maintained, that we let go of our “ought to be” self, become the person we are meant to be, and follow a path that feels truly ours.¹

I call the task of the second transition reciprocal individuation because to successfully pass through this transition, couples must be able to support each other’s individuation and recraft their joint path to align with both of their interests and desires.

Many of the dual-career couples I spoke to for my research found this transition daunting and, like Matthew and James, initially avoided it. Matthew’s fear that his individuation would betray his and James’s “identity as the high-flying couple” illustrates the reason we avoid the second transition. Because, at least on the surface, the impulse to be more ourselves, the impulse to individuate, appears to threaten the very ability to be a couple.

Resisting the Second Transition

To enter the second transition and embrace the process of individuation, couples must accept that the joint path they crafted during their first transition is no longer fit for purpose. Doing so places a lot at stake. Their identity, relationship, and careers are all developed within and adapted to a life path that they must now call into question.

No wonder many couples resist: “I should count my blessings,” “Life works, why rock the boat?” “I have too many responsibilities to indulge in self-doubt.” I have heard couples tell themselves all these things and more in an attempt to quell their questioning. People’s ambivalence about the second transition leads many to hesitate.

Benjamin had been avoiding doubts about his career and life for almost a year when I first spoke to him. An IT security specialist, he had always been fascinated by computers and technology, and had sailed through a computer science degree and into a series of jobs in midsized companies. For the last year, however, he had felt increasingly restless and longed to explore other options. The thing that had attracted him to his career—solving other people’s problems and protecting them from harm—had become a turnoff. He began to resent what he referred to as the “IT illiterates” he had to support. He was becoming weighed down by the personality clashes in the team he managed. But what else could he do? He repeatedly explained—more to himself than to me, I suspected—how it would be “impossible” for him to take stock and consider a different path forward. In his mind, he could afford neither the time nor the energy to do so.

Three years earlier, he had begun a relationship with Zoe, a laboratory analyst, following the breakdown of their respective first marriages. Both had children from their previous relationships; Benjamin had two girls who were seven and nine years old, and Zoe, a five-year old boy. And like many couples in second marriages, they juggled complex lives. Benjamin was deeply in love with Zoe. He admired her professional commitment and appreciated the openness of their relationship, something he had sorely lacked in his first marriage. He struggled, however, with their life arrangement.

Benjamin and Zoe rapidly went through their first transition from independent to interdependent lives. Zoe’s son lived with them during the week and spent time with his father every other weekend. The opposite was true for Benjamin’s daughters. Zoe and Benjamin had hardly any time alone. To make matters more complicated, Benjamin’s parents, who lived nearby, were aging, and his mother had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Benjamin envisaged a period of heavy caretaking ahead. With all these responsibilities, how could he focus on himself?

Although Benjamin said that he valued the openness of his relationship with Zoe, he decided that it was best not to bother her with his self-doubts. Unsurprisingly he began to sense a growing distance between them, a worrying throwback to his first marriage. Zoe said that she felt the distance, too, when I spoke to her. Unaware of Benjamin’s inner doubts, she assumed that he was cooling on their relationship. Able to sense these shifts, Benjamin convinced himself that his growing responsibilities and complex life meant that not sharing his doubts was the best course of action.

Benjamin is not alone. Couples’ second transition begins during a time of heavy life responsibilities. In their forties, people are becoming more senior in their careers and may have a team of people depending on them; they are financially committed to mortgages, pension payments, and health care; and if they have children, they are responsible for their upbringing. The forties are also a time when some people take on the care of ailing parents. All these commitments can make the idea of investing in personal growth seem self-indulgent and the prospect of change risky. As a result, I found, many people denied their questions to themselves and their partners. However, as Benjamin and Zoe’s, and Matthew and James’s stories reveal, people may not explicitly acknowledge or share their turmoil, but their partners often sense it.

Rushing the Second Transition

While I found that some people resisted the second transition by avoiding their questioning and hanging on to their current life path, others rushed through their questions and jumped too quickly to a new path. Take Carla. At forty-three, she encountered the typical questions and doubts that trigger the second transition. She began to question whether her monotonous but time-intensive career in a design agency was really for her, and she longed to spend more time pursuing her passions. An action-oriented go-getter, Carla wasted no time in making a transition. She came home one evening and declared to her husband Francesco that she was going to resign and would be building a portfolio career involving a mix of freelancing design work that she had already begun to set up, as well as doing some voluntary work. A shocked Francesco grappled with the financial implications of Carla’s move for the family, while she went out and built her new path.

Fast-forward nine months. Carla’s restlessness had returned with a vengeance. No longer isolated to her career, Carla’s questions focused on her whole approach to life. “I’ve always been running,” she explained, “I don’t even know why. What am I running toward, or away from? What do I want from life? I just don’t know anymore.” Carla felt confused that her transition had not put these questions to rest. She realized the pressure she had put Francesco under by thrusting him into the primary breadwinner position and was ashamed to admit that her move had made little difference to her inner world. She was also afraid. Would he support her in a second round of reorientation?

The mistake Carla made, and many others like her make, was to equate external change to a completed transition, to think that switching jobs was the sole answer to her questions. At their core, transitions are about our inner world. They require a new way of being in the world—a new approach to life, a new focus, and new priorities. For some people, this new way of being will lead to a new way of doing—a new career; a new interest; for some, even a new partner—but inner change must drive the outer one, lest the latter become a dramatic way to avoid the former.

Letting Go of the Old

All transitions start with an ending. In couples’ first transition, they must let go of having independent careers and lives. In their second, they must let go of something more existential in nature. The inner questions people face signal that their self no longer identifies with the persona they have built to please others and the life path they have crafted to support it. The first step of this transition is to figure out what no longer fits. For Carla, it wasn’t her job, but her “constant running.” Your transition truly begins when you figure out and begin to let go of your way of being that no longer works—be it an approach to life, an attitude toward others, a worldview, or an assumption about how you should behave or for what you should strive.

I found that people identified what this way of being was when they dug beneath the things they were doing and looked at what was driving them. When Matthew, whose story opened this chapter, eventually dug beneath his discomfort with the “success train,” he realized that he had crafted an inner world in which he constantly needed to overreach in order to feel good about himself. The habit of stretching himself confined him to a train that seemed to never stop, let alone allow him to get off. As he explained, “I had turned my whole life into a race for progress, not just at work. I strove to become the best cook possible, the fastest runner. It seeped into every aspect of my life.” Once he realized it, Matthew described feeling a wave of sadness and loss: “I remembered the soulful little boy I once was, the boy who would sit in his parents’ garden all afternoon drawing and reading. I wanted to get him back, to give him more space to be.” Matthew’s insight was that he needed to recapture a lost self and to do it, he needed to let go of, or at least diminish, the piece of him that relentlessly overreached.

Letting go of an old persona, an old way of being, is tough. While letting go frees the self to move on, it is also a death of sorts. It’s an acknowledgment that the way of life that has got you here cannot get you there, and you probably don’t yet know where there is. At this time, the tendency to think of there only in terms of external change holds people back. Your transition may well involve an external change, but it is the inner ending and the inner change that will lead you to the external ones. This makes your ability to stay with the inner questions and change critical.

Entering Liminality

It is only when people can let go of their old way of being that they can enter liminality—the central experience of the second transition. First described by folklorist Arnold van Gennep and later elaborated by anthropologist Victor Turner, liminality is the psychological state in which our identity is in suspension.² We are betwixt and between the old and the new. When people enter liminality, an opportunity arises to connect to layers of their self that are not accessible elsewhere. They no longer identify with their old persona, but they have not yet figured out their new way of being. In liminality, people do this figuring out; the self can just be because it is not yet defined.

Traditionally, liminality occurred between set roles and was marked by rites of passage. Adolescents would leave their tribe and be taken by elders to a physical liminal space to learn about their new identity as adults. Nowadays, when people enter the liminal world, they most often do so alone, without elders to guide their passage.³ When people enter liminality, they board a boat with no charts and no idea what direction they should sail. In writing their charts and steering the course they have chosen, people become their own selves. In liminality, we become open to exploration and reflection—the fuel for individuation. The explorations we conduct, combined with deep reflections, allow us to unpick our choices and behaviors, make sense of our past, and feel our way into a new future. This shift does not occur through immediate realizations, but through a series of gradual revelations that together combine into a picture of what we really want and how we can go about getting it. It takes time.

Speed and productivity have become virtues in the modern world, but they are limitations when it comes to liminality. Just as an embryo needs its nine months in the womb to develop into a heathy baby, so do people need an extended period of time in liminality to develop a healthy individuated self. To overcome the pull of speed and productivity, you must enter liminality with acceptance—acceptance that the process will take time and acceptance that your most important tool is your ability to make sense of the experiences you have within liminality. As William Bridges, an expert on transitions, notes, “The way in [to liminality] is the way out.”⁴ When you can accept liminality and use it to build a deep understanding of who you are and who you want to become, you will naturally transition out of it and on to your individuated life path.

Reflection and Exploration

Reflection is one of the most important tasks in liminality. Reflection about the past—What led you to your impasse? Who are you? Why did you make the choices you made?—and reflection about your future—Who do you want to become? What do you desire from life? Reflection occurs in empty time. To reflect, you need to stop doing. Reflections can be purely in your own mind; they can also be made through journaling, drawing, or in conversations with others. Some people reflect alone. Long walks, time spent staring at the waves or at a roaring fire, afternoons pottering in the garden can all give us the calm and uninterrupted space in which our minds can wander and make associations. People can also reflect with others. Long conversations with friends, siblings, coaches, analysts, or our partners all give us a space in which we can share our thoughts and associations, drawings, and writings. Often the simple act of saying out loud what you think and feel helps to clarify your mind. Of course, many of us combine different ways to reflect, gradually feeling our way into what is most helpful.

I have found that couples who work well through their second transition include each other in their reflective spaces from the beginning. It does not mean that all their reflection is done together, nor does it mean that no one else is involved or they don’t take time for themselves. What it means is that their thoughts and feelings unfold together, rather than one partner presenting their new life path to the other. They might be leaving an old life, but they take each other along to find a new one.

To reflect on the past, you need time. To reflect on the future, you also need data. This is where exploration—the other major task in liminality—comes in. Exploration gives us insight into the alternative selves we might become and the alternative paths we might choose to take. It involves engaging with new and unfamiliar worlds to gather information about the practicalities of an alternative path as well as understanding the kind of people who pursue it. This gives you a picture of both what you might do and who you might be if you take it. As my mentor Herminia Ibarra explains in her thought-provoking book Working Identity, exploration can take many forms.⁵ One way is through structured networking events organized by alumni clubs or local professional networks. Such organizations hold regular gatherings that can be a great way to find out about different worlds. Other ways are more informal, such as asking friends, neighbors, and others in our community for introductions to people who have careers that interest you. Others involve less personal contact. There is a lot you can learn through reading books, articles, and blogs written by people in different walks of life. Others still involve active experimentation—job shadowing, secondments, or voluntary work to actually try out different roles. And of course, the best exploration combines all of these things to build as full a picture as possible of alternative paths.

Most career books are packed with great advice on how to explore alternative paths. What they pay less attention to is just how bewildering and anxiety-provoking liminality is. After eighteen months of running, Benjamin, the IT security expert we met earlier, finally admitted to himself and Zoe that he needed to stop being what he described as “the independent warrior always fighting my own battles and protecting everyone else in theirs.” He had no idea what he should do with this realization. He only knew that he couldn’t carry on with this way of being and that he needed to figure out who he wanted to become instead, and what he really wanted from life. Zoe was supportive of his exploration, but neither she nor Benjamin were prepared for the realities of his liminal experience. As he described it, “I was totally lost. I knew I couldn’t go back, and at the same time I had no idea what forward meant. I spent a lot of time just thinking about how I had gotten here. I also went out and gathered information about other directions. I spoke to a lot of new people, but it took a long time for anything to become clear. Strangest of all, nothing had changed on the outside, I was still going to work, looking after the kids, caring for Mom, but I was somehow detached, there was a disconnect between what I was doing and how I was feeling, what I was thinking inside.”

Benjamin’s experience is common. While disorienting, liminality is ultimately a space of potential. It is the space in which we figure out what we want, the space in which we can explore the range of selves we may become and find a new direction. It is in this space that individuation occurs, and it is only by staying in it that you will figure out what you really want and who you want to become. The problem with the term individuation is that it can appear to be all about you as an “individual.” It never is.

It’s Never Just About You

When two people become a couple, they take a major role in each other’s life story and, through the process of their first transition, they forge a joint interdependent path that connects two previously independent ones. Couples’ focus in their first transition is on deliberately accommodating to major life events by negotiating how to prioritize their careers and divide family commitments in a way that suits them. Yet at the same time, I discovered through my research that couples implicitly negotiate the roles they will take in each other’s lives. No couples I spoke to explicitly discussed these roles until they were in the midst of the second transition, but all established them early on.

If couples accommodated to their first major life event in a nondeliberate way—that is, if they fell into of one of the traps of the first transition and settled on a career prioritization and division of family commitments that didn’t allow them both to thrive—they felt caught in their roles and regretted establishing them. If couples deliberately accommodated to their major life event, the roles they settled on initially served them well as they traveled along the joint path they crafted in their first transition. Over time, however, these roles—even when they were a by-product of a very deliberate accommodation—became constraining and were one of the sparks of the restlessness and questioning that led to the second transition.

The second transition is thus triggered by a combination of two forces—the drive to individuate that is part of the life cycle and the need to tackle the division of roles within a couple that is a consequence of the first transition. This combination of forces means that although couples are most likely to face the second transition in their middle years, I also found couples at other life stages who were wrestling through it.

In the three chapters that dealt with the first transition, we examined how agreements about career prioritization and family commitments let couples thrive (or not) in love and work. In this and chapters 6 and 7, we examine couples’ deeper psychological agreements, which they need to surface and revisit to make it through the second transition.

Just as couples divide practical labor, they also divide psychological labor. Each partner takes on certain roles and relinquishes others. One partner becomes the expresser and holder of emotions, while the other becomes the rational planner. One partner becomes the energetic go-getter driving the family forward, while the other becomes the laid-back counterbalance. We gravitate toward roles that we have a personal affinity for, and as our partners relinquish those roles, we act them out for two and can therefore become exaggerated versions of ourselves. At the same time, we let go of sides of ourselves that our partner takes up on our behalf. Thus, partners in a couple can become polarized into consistently playing some roles and rarely playing others. The result is a division that makes us whole as a couple but incomplete as individuals.

When people reach the impasse that starts their second transition, the questions and doubts they face often point to a way of being that has been lost or underdeveloped, partly because during the first transition it was given to, and has since been lived out through, their partner. Carla, whom we met earlier in this chapter and who made a rushed transition from her design agency to freelancing, had always been a go-getter. But when she looked back, she realized that her “constant running” had been amplified by her relationship with Francesco. She had become the one who drove their family—not only was she the organizer-in-chief, she also kept things constantly running in her mind. She relied on Francesco to bring calm into their lives, to force her to take breaks, evenings off, or simply chill out. She admired his ability to switch off.

Carla knew that she used to be able to kick back too, though maybe not in the wholehearted way Francesco did. But when she looked back to her early twenties, she discovered a more carefree self. The polarization of roles in their relationship and her fast-paced career had let her go-getter self run wild and left her carefree self behind. Carla wanted to rebalance these two sides of herself; but to do so, she and Francesco would have to rebalance the two sides in their couple. Her individuation, in other words, required not only his cooperation and support, but also a change of his own.

Transitioning Together

Couples are like any kind of system—change in one part affects the rest. For one partner to change their way of being, the other partner has to adapt theirs. While people may say, and genuinely believe, that they support their partners’ individuation, they support them exploring and becoming a new self with a new way of being and a new way of doing, they often resist it unconsciously. We are okay with our partner changing, as long as we don’t have to give up being the one who holds all the emotions. We are OK with our partner becoming more ambitious as long as we don’t have to hold in mind more of the practicalities. I found that the discomfort people felt about their partner changing was widespread. It signaled that they needed to change the roles they played in each other’s stories. Seeing this as a negative evolution, though, is a mistake.

When your partner pushes back on the division of roles in your couple, it presents you with a chance to reclaim lost or underdeveloped pieces of your own self, and to make both of you more psychologically whole. It is a developmental opportunity that can enrich a couple. Moreover, when one partner reaches their impasse, it often triggers an impasse for the other because partners emotionally resonate with what I call each other’s developmental stuckness. Emotional resonance amplifies each partner’s experience of stuckness and creates a joint impasse and a joint opportunity for change.

Three months after Benjamin confessed to Zoe the extent of his questioning and deadlock, Zoe herself began to share a similar experience. Unlike Benjamin, her doubting didn’t concern her career, but the way she took up other roles in her life. As she explained, “I’ve always had other people looking after me. I’m still the little girl somehow. When I was a child, it was my dad who shepherded me through life. After college, I joined the lab and had a group of much older colleagues who treated me like their daughter.” She went on to describe how her first marriage had followed a similar pattern until her then husband became emotionally abusive toward her following the birth of her son. “Benjamin saved me from that marriage and rebuilt my confidence,” she explained. But she was back in the same pattern. For the first time in her life, the pattern felt constraining rather than comfortable. She longed to break out and stand on her own two feet. Soon, Benjamin and Zoe recognized a connection between their impasses—he was stuck in the role of the rescuer, and her of the victim. Rather than relieving them of these roles, their current psychological arrangements were cementing them.

As Benjamin and Zoe’s story reveals, the impasse couples face at the start of their second transition does not signal that their psychological agreements are broken or flawed, but rather that the life path that those agreements supported is coming to an end, and to reorient to a new life path, they will need to renegotiate these psychological agreements. Couples, in short, must face the question, What do we really want?

What Do We Really Want?

Whatever form your internal questions and doubts take, they reveal the task of the second transition: to shift your focus from adapting to demands and expectations to identifying and pursuing what you each want out of your careers, lives, and relationship. Because this transition is in part about tackling the division of roles established in the first transition, it is not enough to ask, “What do I really want?” Your story is so intertwined with that of your partner that you must ask, “What do we really want?”

Just like the first transition, couples that work figure out the answer to this question together. Unlike the first transition, this figuring out will involve individual exploration interspersed with joint reflection. This exploration and reflection occur in the liminal world that we must embrace to make a fruitful transition.

In chapter 6, we will explore the traps that can ensnare couples as they meander through the liminal world and the struggle that accompanies it. We will focus on the support you need to give to, and receive from, your partner to make it through and the positive feedback loops that can emerge from mutually supportive behavior. Then, in chapter 7, we will address how couples can successfully craft a new life path once they have figured out what they really want and felt their way toward a new way of being.

The second transition is psychologically demanding, and not all couples make it through. This life stage is one of the peak times for breakups and divorce.⁶ So before we move into the meat of the second transition, I’m sharing here some ideas for how you can bolster your relational resilience in preparation for the stormy ride ahead.

Relational Resilience

Resilient relationships endure, even in times of adversity. In chapter 2, we explored the importance of kindness and undivided attention in building a high-quality connection with your partner. The key to building resilience into this connection is your and your partner’s mindset.

Psychologist Carol Dweck identified two types of mindsets—fixed and growth—that profoundly shape our motivation, success, and relationships.⁷ People with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence, ability, and character are static traits that cannot be changed. In contrast, people with a growth mindset believe that those same qualities can be developed through dedication and effort. Research consistently points to the benefits of having a growth mindset, yet when it comes to relationships, people are bombarded with messages that reinforce a fixed one.

From an early age, most people are taught the narrative of relationships as destiny. The fairy tales that parents recount, the films people watch, and the magazine articles they read most often portray love as a quest to find “the one.” While it may be romantic to believe that destiny brought you and your partner together, this belief hinders you from building relational resilience. The reason is that it fosters a fixed mindset.

When we have a fixed mindset, we interpret relationship difficulties as signals that we are incompatible with our partner. If we disagree or fight, we conclude that we are not meant to be together. When troubles and conflicts arise, people with fixed mindsets are more likely to disengage from their partner and withhold support.⁸ Moreover, when bad times arrive, couples with a fixed mindset are less forgiving with each other, which, as we saw in chapter 2, can lead them to break up.⁹

In contrast, when people have a growth mindset, they believe that relationships grow when the couple works through rough times together. If partners disagree or fight with each other, they conclude that they need to invest more in their relationship. When troubles and conflicts arise, people with growth mindsets are more likely to stay positive, cope with the difficulties, and maintain a forgiving stance toward each other. In short, couples with a growth mindset are more resilient in tough times, and rather than weakening their relationship, difficulties can actually strengthen it.

So how can you and your partner foster a growth mindset, and in doing so, boost your relational resilience? Here are five ideas:

First, abandon the fairy tale image of “the one.” Couples who have good relationships have them because they invest in each other, not because Cupid struck them with his arrow. Second, show gratitude for the effort your partner puts into your relationship. No one is perfect; everyone hurts their partner at times. What matters is your intent and investment over the long term. When you display gratitude for their efforts, your partner will respond by investing more.

Third, frame challenges not as wholly negative, but also as opportunities for growth. Relationships become resilient in tough times. You’ll face plenty of these in your second transition, so embrace them as necessary and helpful. Fourth, value the process more than the result. How many times do you find yourself saying to your partner “When x happens, then we can relax/take a vacation/feel pleased with ourselves”? The problem is that one x is replaced by another, and it’s through the process that you grow, not by reaching the destination. Take time to appreciate being in the muddle together.

Finally, celebrate your growth with each other. All too often, couples wait for external achievements to celebrate—the promotion, the pay rise, or the recognition. Celebrating growth in your couple, the overcoming of difficulties, the ease at which you can have meaningful conversations are important to keep your growth mindset alive.