The Marriage as an Interested Party

1. The Situation

I was out at a local Durham watering hole with a mix of old colleagues and new ones when someone asked what I do.

“I teach people to embrace conflict.”

That usually earns me a pause, sometimes a raised eyebrow, and then, almost without fail, people start telling me about their own conflicts. I’ve come to think of it as my version of field research.

That’s when I met Kyle.

Kyle was telling me about his marriage. Four kids, a full life, a lot going on. At one point he said, with a kind of quiet confidence, “We’ve got a great marriage because we’ve learned how to compromise.” He meant it, and I believed him.

From the outside, everything worked. His wife stayed home with the kids while he worked long hours building a business that supported a very comfortable life. Nice house, private schools, stability. They had an arrangement that made sense, and like many arrangements, it sounded fair.

2. The Turn

But that word stayed with me. Compromise.

In the AGENT framework, compromise is useful because it keeps things moving, but it comes with a cost. It means something important is being set aside to move forward. What I’ve come to notice is that those costs, even when they are small, don’t disappear. They accumulate over time, not all at once or dramatically, but in moments that most of us recognize.

It shows up in everyday moments. One person is doing bedtime with the kids alone while the other is still at work. There’s a sense of guilt on one side, frustration on the other, and neither of them really says anything about it.

So I pushed a little further.

And that’s when Kyle shared something I wasn’t expecting. He told me that early in their marriage, they were given a piece of advice that stuck: don’t think of the marriage as just two people, think of it as something else entirely.

“There are three of us in every conversation,” he said. “Me, my wife, and the marriage.”

3. The Shift

I sat with that for a moment because it sounds simple, almost obvious, but it’s not easy. When you are in the middle of a conflict, your own interests feel immediate and real. They carry weight and urgency, and letting something else into that space doesn’t come naturally. If anything, it can feel like you are being asked to give something up.

And in a way, you are.

But maybe that is exactly the point.

I’ve started to think of this as a kind of “third party” in the conversation, not a person, but something both people are responsible for.

That idea stayed with me, so later that week I brought it home. I told my wife about the conversation with Kyle, and instead of trying to force it into a live conflict, we reflected on how we’ve handled things over time.

What became clear is that in many of our better moments, we had already been doing this. Not consciously and not with language around it, but in how we showed up. There were times when one of us stepped back or made a choice that didn’t fully serve our own immediate interest but still felt right for the relationship.

We just hadn’t named it.

It wasn’t the conversation with Kyle alone that created awareness. It was the conversation we had afterward. That’s when it clicked. We could see that what we had been doing wasn’t compromise in the traditional sense. It was closer to contributing to the relationship itself.

That shift from unconscious habit to intentional choice felt important, because it means we can now return to it on purpose.

What made that realization even more interesting is that we had seen this dynamic before, just in a different form.

For the past 20 years, we’ve been coming out to our lake house on weekends, almost every week. It’s about an hour from our home in the city. Early on, we started saying, half joking, that it was “the house that saved the marriage that didn’t need saving.”

At the time, it just felt true.

Now it makes more sense.

Our lake house became something we both cared about, something separate from either of us. The weekends weren’t just about getting away. They were about resetting and recharging, individually and together. It gave us space, and without ever naming it, we were orienting ourselves around something shared.

In its own way, the lake house became that same kind of third party in the relationship.

4. AGENT in Action

What Kyle introduced, and what we recognized in our own lives, is a reframing.

Conflict often feels like arm wrestling over positions, who gets what and who gives what up. Collaboration becomes possible when the focus shifts to something shared, something both people are trying to take care of.

What stood out to me is that we had already been doing this at times. We just hadn’t been aware of it.

And that may be the real shift.

Being an AGENT does not start with negotiating. It starts with noticing. Recognizing the patterns we are already living inside of and choosing whether to step into them more intentionally.

Seeing the “third party” does not solve the conflict, but it changes how you enter it.

Takeaway:
Sometimes the most important shift is not in what you do, but in what you learn to see.

5. Practice for the Reader 🛠

Try This Before Your Next Conflict

• Where might small losses already be building up here?

• What would change if this problem belonged to both of us?

• What does this relationship need right now, even if it is not the easiest answer for me?

6. Closing Reflection

It is not easy to let something else into the conversation when your own needs feel strong, but the alternative is often quieter and more costly over time.

I have seen this dynamic before, just in a different setting. When I transitioned from a founder mindset to becoming a CEO of a growing organization mindset, something similar had to shift. The company could no longer be an extension of me. It had to become something that could stand on its own, and decisions had to serve the health of the company itself.

In a way, the company became that same kind of third party, not me, not any one individual, but something we were all responsible for building, protecting, and sustaining.

The more I think about it, the more I see this pattern showing up anywhere something is meant to last. Maybe that is what we are really doing in our most important negotiations, not just getting what we want, but learning how to take care of something that is trying to outgrow us.

See you in the win-win moments this week,

Sam