Make a Better You, Make a Better Marriage with Meygan and Casey Caston

How did you end up here? How did you end up in this space? What's your origin story?

How we started marriage 365 comes from our own broken story. Because between Casey and I, both sets of our parents, there's 12 marriages.

Yeah, my mom's on our six marriage.

My dad's.

On a six.

Yeah. So we grew up in divorce affairs, chaos. Just a lot of hatred and anger and shoving things under the carpet. We don't talk about it. And so we went blindly into our relationship thinking, well, we're not going to be like our parents. We're not going to follow in their footsteps. But then by year three of our marriage, we grew to hate each other. And when I say hate, I mean hate. And I had all those questions of, did I marry the wrong person? How did I? How did I end up here with this guy that I used to madly be in love with? And so.

So that's year three. What year we on now?

Almost 23. Yeah. And married almost 20 years together for 25. And I remember just sharing with my best friend I just yeah I made the biggest mistake of my life and she said that's a really sad thing to hear. And I feel like you should go talk to somebody about that. So I had begged Casey to go to therapy with me and he didn't want to go. He said it was all my fault and I was thinking it was all his fault. We played the blame game for those three years. And so I went to a therapist and she was one of the most amazing women. And she said two things that changed my life. She said, if you want to make a better marriage, it starts by making a better you.

You said your husband's not on the couch, but you are. What do you have to work on? Megan? And really kind of encouraged and forced me in a very healthy way to really look inward at my own stuff, my own baggage that I brought into the marriage. The second thing she said to me was, if you're going to divorce your husband, you want to make sure that you have done everything and anything you can to save your marriage so you don't regret. Because, she said, I see too many people in my office that live with a lot of regret that they wish they would have done X, Y, z. So are you willing to to be all in with me? And so she really helped me create boundaries, learn how to communicate, apologize. I'd never apologize to Casey.

Geez.

I didn't know how to forgive. I didn't know how to let go of pain. I didn't know how to work through my emotional triggers. So for 13 months I worked on her marriage by myself and I did a complete 180. I'm a different person than I was back then.

I remember a very particular story that this was kind of like that pivot point where I knew that the music had changed from whatever we were doing before to something different. I was really upset with Megan, can't even remember what, and I like, come storming in. My nonverbal is very loud. I'm red faced, the whole thing, and I'm like, and I was just like, I'll let you know what's going on right now. And she saw that from across the room, and she stood up and with like zero emotion, just deadpanned it just very like, hey, I can tell you're really upset right now, and I'd love to hear what you have to say. Why don't you take a beat, go outside, take a walk. I'm going to be sitting on the couch waiting for you, and then we can talk in a healthy way.

And I was like, what? Yeah. This is like a totally different kind of engagement she had. And she had to do that a couple of times for me to get the message that Megan is no longer going to tolerate, allowing me to yell at her and scream at her and things like that. And slowly, you know, the way I would say is like, if we were doing the toxic tango, you know, all of a sudden she starts doing the chat and then I'm like.

Wait, yeah.

We're doing a different dance now. So I had to be reflective of that, right? Because now the dynamics change and it's shifted. So I think that's what's really cool is to be able to understand that, you know, when people say things like, I'm stuck in my marriage, my spouse won't participate. That's actually a very limiting belief. They don't understand that they actually can take action because our story is exactly that. Like, yeah, you're not stuck. You can change if you make it better. Marriage. Want to make a better marriage? Make a better you.

Now, obviously, Zach, you know, I had no idea how he was going to respond to all these changes that I was making. But here's what I love. And for anyone listening is that you should change for you first and foremost, right? We never want to change because someone else is asking us to change, or we're going to have resentment towards our spouse. I change because I recognized I wasn't a great communicator. I did not have boundaries. I didn't even know what boundaries were. I heard the word, but I didn't know what that looked like. I had resentment that I had to be free from, no matter if Casey responded to that or not. I'm just fortunate to where at some point he realized, well, 13 months later, shoot, I'm I'm unhealthy too.

So we say we say it took two years to fall in love. It took about 3 to 4 years to destroy our marriage. And then I always tell people I said this was not a quick turnaround. We it took us a good solid for almost five years to really repair and heal and kind of create a brand new foundation for a marriage. And so with that, we were looking at resources. Now this is 2006, 2007, 2008. Social media was not even really on the, you know, yeah, out there yet Pinterest didn't exist. The blog world was pretty still new. There were many resources out there for couples like there are now. There was no podcasts, and we were frustrated and very disappointed with the limiting resources that were out there.

And we didn't. We couldn't afford therapy. We couldn't afford therapy ongoing even though we knew we needed it. So then what do you do? What do you do if you're a hurting couple but you want to repair your marriage and there's not many resources available, we kind of started creating our own. And yeah, that's how marriage 365 kind of started.

Cool. There's a couple things like to your point about how there's sort of nothing new under the sun. At least you didn't really say it that way. But the idea that it takes a village or there's everybody's doing the same, like we're all saying basically the same thing to in terms of like what it takes to make relationships work. And, and I think, you know, I'm going to ask you what you say to people, but if I'm on a plane, this never happens because I have my earphones on and I don't make eye contact. But if somebody says, oh, you're a mere service, what's the secret? I say exactly what you just said. Number one is you got to be grown up.

Number one is you got to be a like a an adult, you know, so you, you know, Casey comes in and it's like child, I'm a child and I'm childish about my childish thing that I think. And then you're like, I'm going to be a grown up and grown ups talk on the couch. And they do that when they act like grown ups. And so when you're ready to be a grown up, come talk to me on the couch like I think that's exactly right. And then the number two thing I say is this is this always gets a laugh. Do more things that your partner likes and fewer things that your partner doesn't like.

I mean, it makes sense, right?

Be a grown up. Do more things that your partner likes, fewer things that you don't like. But you have to talk. You have to negotiate those. And as an adult, right? You have to say, I don't really like it when you did this or I really like it when you do that. And so and then the other thing I wanted to say is this idea of the dance as a couples therapist, what I think is the dance is my client. The like when you when two people come in. He's got a thing and she's got a thing, and maybe he and he have a thing, or she and she have a thing or whatever it is. They got a thing. They're a thing because my parents were divorced or I, you know, I don't like the Red Sox or I'm an introvert or whatever it is, and then the other person's got a thing.

And sometimes there's two things are problematic. Sometimes they are really great. Like, oh, look how good at dancing we are. But when when you're not, you have to look at the dance and go, how do we change the dance? And so, Casey, to your point about, oh, we're doing a different dance, that's actually the whole game, I think, is. Yeah. How do you. Nothing wrong with the way you dance. You're probably a really good cha cha dancer. Nothing wrong with the way you dance. Probably really good at waltz, you know. But we got to learn to rumba together, because that's the dance that the two of us can do.

Yeah, there's two people in this relationship, and we got to figure it out.

And I just to pile on on that analogy, I think there are some people that are married that are doing their own dances. They're like solo dancers, but they call themselves married. And I'm seeing this more and more in our coaching practice is that people like the idea and concept behind marriage, and so then they get married and then they're like, okay, cool, but I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to do. I'm, you know, my priorities are my priorities, and you're not going to be able to speak into that even when you feel deep. Prioritize. I'm still going to work more or provider be with kids.

I have a theory on that. I wonder if you agree, which is like, for me, I grew up in a very norm core scene, and I was kind of coming up through this sort of evangelical Christian pathway where you had like kind of the this is what you did, and this is when you did it, and this is how you did it. And, you know, for me, getting married was kind of the way you became an adult, like, oh, I'm going to if I'm going to be an adult, I guess I got to get married. I guess I got to get a job, I guess I got to get a house, you know? I got to get a kid. I think lately there's a lot more of this idea that I get to become an adult first.

And then maybe I'll get married. Yes. So to your point, like, now, I've got two adults and they're sort of like, I figured it out and I knew it, but Rebecca and I, we reraised each other. I mean, we were married at 22 and 23, so we, you know, we became adults together under this umbrella that we thought was a check mark that we had checked. But we we had no clue. We had no idea.

Yeah. We're exactly the same. We got married, I was 20, he was 24.

And we had nothing.

And we had nothing. So we I remember going to Ikea and buying our first coffee table that was actually ours because all of the furniture, our fridge, our vacuum was given to us because we were poor and in college. Right. And, and one of my best friends got married at 33. And she will always say, I think it's harder because I was so set in my ways. I had my own apartment, I had my everything was mine. And then I'm having a mesh in with this guy who was 35 and also did like the way he wanted to do for so many years. And it was a huge adjustment in a different way. Right?

Yeah.

Kind of a side gig that I've had for the last 15 years is I've actually officiated weddings. Yeah. And it's the funnest job. So and I've done over a thousand weddings. That's cool.

Yeah, I've done maybe a dozen. So I agree with you. It's a nice.

Yeah. So I can speak a little bit into this trend line that I've been watching and that is that people are getting married older. In fact, the average marrying age for a woman just crossed over the 30 year mark, meaning she she's getting married on average at 30 years old. So as that trend line gets older, kind of what we had talked about earlier is now you're getting married later in life, which means you have less years to reproduce and have kids. So families are getting smaller. And this dynamic of I have my own life that I'm trying to mesh and like integrate. But if there's trust bonds that are not broken or, you know, oh, I can't trust them on this or her, with that, it becomes really difficult to integrate. Really difficult.

Yeah. Yeah. So what do you offer these people like what do you how do you how do you help them shift their mindset or how do you help them integrate or do you.

Okay, well, first things first is when we thought, oh, we should do something for marriage. We started off as a Facebook page in 2013. We were like, let's just see if our ideas and our our tools and our storylines with people. Right? And then, of course it did. One follower became 100 and then 10,000 and then 100,000 what not. And we were like, we should probably write an e-book. This is kind of right. When ebooks started, right? And we did it on communication and we had a book about sex. And so, you know, I think one of the things that Casey and I are very big on is I need to be told exactly what to say or how to say it, because, again, I would be told, oh, well, you should just set a boundary with him. Okay, that sounds great. What does that actually look like?

What is that boundary?

Yeah. What is it? Boundary. What's a consequence. Is that punishment. And so we're really good at I feel like Casey and I have this unique perspective is typically our first step when we're working with a couple or an individual is get curious. That's always our best advice. Get curious. Look first inward. Why does this bother you? Why does this trigger you? Did your parents do it?

Is this a pattern?

Is this a pattern? Is this just a preference? But you got to get curious. I don't think people look inward enough. I don't think people are one with their thoughts enough. I love the show little House on the Prairie. Have you ever watched it? Okay, yeah.

You know, it's funny when we are looking for, like, just a way to stem in our house. Like, just like, how do we. We'll just turn it on and mute. So we have little house going on in our house on mute all the time.

Are you serious about that? I don't, I.

Don't I don't really know what's happening. I don't know the plot. I have no idea if.

They had a wagon again. What's going on?

But it's just like it's just something to look at and it's like. Yeah, and it's calming, pleasant enough, and you're not going to watch anybody get murdered or, you know, aliens or something. You're just looking at some nice brown and green moving pictures on your screen.

Well, Zach, if you ever unmuted at some point you're going to see it's a very much so relationship based television show. And not just marriage but family and the family dynamic and the town dynamic and the community. But one thing that I love about that show is that they are always one with their thoughts, because there was no electricity yet. There was no technology. And so when it got late at night, they would be by the fire and they would be one with their thoughts, and they'd have these conversations about really hard things in life. And I feel like I always tell people adopt that, just turn off the phone, turn off the TV, go outside, go on a walk and be one with your thoughts.

Journal something. And so that's a big thing. As we always talk about. Get curious. First look inward and then we say get spousal aware. Yeah. What are your spouse's preference dislikes and what's their personality? What was their childhood? Could this be something linked to what their dad used to do? But if you just stop and give yourself the time to think about it, you're already one step or maybe ten steps above everybody else, because most people just aren't sitting there and allowing themselves to sit in their feelings and in their environment.

Yeah, no, I think it's true. I mean, I've been one of my did I, I think I said this already about my New Year's resolution, but last year it was to read books made of paper. I love that.

Yeah.

You know, like I'm going to pick up paper, I'm going to hold paper in my hand. I'm going to be the light is going to be on. There's going to be like, I love that. Like, wait, you know what I mean? Because we don't we just we just scrolling or flipping to the next thing or stemming. I mean, you know, what? If I just turned off a little house and read a book, that'd be a be an interesting use of time, right?

Yeah. Interesting thing when you read a book is you literally cannot multitask, right? Right.

If you're. Yeah, if it's made of paper, if you're reading the Kindle and you're like, oh, ding, here comes a text from so-and-so, like, I'm going to stop reading this book now. And, you know, so even my Kindle is a Paperwhite, so it doesn't have any other. It has no other apps on it. It's just like the book.

So yeah.

I think to answer the question you had posed is like, what do you give them? You know, I think we're going back to marriage is a team sport. So we're team casting, right? If we're not a team, I feel like in in our coaching practice, when couples come to us in crisis, there's three beats that we hit. And now we kind of even more aggressively go straight after these three beats, which is one is which just trying to find where's the pain? Okay, so this could be some storytelling. Here's what's going on in our marriage. Here's the patterns and the habits that we show up. And the second step is, is heal from the pain. And I am discovering more and more that we have a framework for a proper apology, a four step apology. The apology process is probably the most underrated and yet most powerful thing that we can do in relationships.

And so Megan and I actually host in our coaching sessions, like, all right, you guys are going to apologize, and we're going to referee this process and we're going to be there, as you know, coaching you along the way or giving you ideas where you get stuck. And I have watched decades of resentment, of anger, of pain disappear. When it's validated. Acknowledge someone saying, hey, I'm taking ownership of my actions. They're asking, hey, how can I rebuild trust with you? Will you forgive me? Like all of those things that are happening within that framework of an apology that is right there, one of the most powerful things that we do as as coaches and working with couples, hands down, nothing even comes close to it. Tools are great, right? Like.

Here's the tool though of course to put would be considered a tool. But it's.

But tool. Yeah, the tools will be helpful after we remove the resentment and the hurt because we hear all the time like, hey Casey, we've got communication problems. I said, no, you don't. You have a resentment and unforgiveness problem. That's sand in the gears, that's running everything down. And we want to ruthlessly eliminate that.

And then the third thing.

We do, and then the third step is what's the new way forward.

And that's the tool. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But we want to make sure people are healing their hurt. And of course, because we're not therapists, if there's a lot of trauma, we always point them and encourage them to get any kind of support like eMDR, trauma therapy, whatever that grief counseling, whatever it is they're going through.

The Gottman, you know, they kind of got famous for being able to predict divorce. One of the one of the primary divorce predictors is what's called the failure of repair attempts. It's my favorite thing to talk about because it's tricky. One, it's not it doesn't point to the quality or frequency of an apology or even a repair attempt. It points to whether or not that can be successfully accepted. And so when you execute this four step process, are you also having to teach people how to accept that repair attempt? I mean, and how does that go?

I mean, I would say they are very hungry to hear an apology. By the time they come to us, they're ready for that. And they both have apologies prepared. So it's like a little bit of a tennis match where we watch them go back and forth. So I think they feel like there's equal ownership happening, at least the way we set it up.

Yeah. We teach the rupture and repair cycle. We have visuals, different exercises. We bring couples through so that they can see. Are either one of you perfect? No. Okay. Have you heard each other? Yes. Has most of the hurts been unintentional? Meaning you didn't wake up that day and say, how am I going to mess with my spouse today, right? We teach about intent versus impact. Your intent wasn't to hurt them. The problem is, is that you did. And so you can take that ownership. So there's a bit of a teaching there through the repair and the acceptance. And what we always say is, listen, I don't want you just to say, yes, I forgive you and I accept the apology if if you don't really mean it, better to be honest and say, you know what, I appreciate the apology. We always try to tell people you want to appreciate the fact that your spouse is apologizing, because that's a.

Big deal. I want it to be successful. Right? Yeah. To say thanks. Thanks for the effort. Thanks for the attempt.

Thank you for the attempt.

And then you may still need something else.

Go ahead. There you go. Exactly. And we say it's okay to vocalize that, because what I used to do is Casey would apologize for something. And I felt that obligation that I like had to forgive right then and there. And then I would go, oh, yeah, I forgive you. So now he's thinking she's good. We're good at the repair worked. And here I am, still stewing in the anger and resentment, and I'm not living in that forgiveness. And so a week later would go by and he'd be like, are you, are you? Did I do something else? And I'd be like, well, I'm still holding on to it. Well, that's on me at that point because I communicated something differently.

So we walk through how to do that, how to communicate that. But yeah, I agree with you. I think that the the acceptance part is probably the hardest part. And I'm going to say to women, I think women have a harder time. I see men are much more forgiving and accepting of apologies.

Okay. But I'm.

Still trying.

That I gotta go for it.

I don't know if it's gender specific, and I mean, I believe in God. Maybe God wired it that way. I think that I just feel like I think that most men tend to let things go with lots of different things. And I think that women, we stew on it. We are on social media more. We get reels that tell us your husband's at fault. We talk about our marriages, with our friends, at lunches and other moms and things like that. And I think we just think about it more. And then I believe, of course, our thoughts determine how we show up. It's the story we tell ourselves. So if we're telling ourselves, wow, I just can't believe my husband did that. And then we go to lunch with a girlfriend and she goes, wow, I can't believe your husband did that.

It's just fueling this hurt in us. Oh, and then we see a real that night or a TikTok video that just proved and validated that this is wrong, that my husband did this. And again, I think this is all happening in the subconscious. I don't think she's even thinking and putting the pieces together. But I do believe that women, again, most women, including myself, by the way, I'm putting myself in this category. I am way less forgiving and hold grudges more than Casey in our marriage. Always have been. It's something I'm aware of and I'm really trying hard to work through. Zach.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How?

I think the biggest part is that awareness piece, because he used to tell me that I feel like you hold grudges and I'd be like, no, I don't. I got very defensive.

Hold grudge about you telling me that I hold grudges for the next.

Exactly. I think being aware.

I forget that you told me that. Whole grudges. Yeah, that's the one.

Yeah. I have a really great practice that I teach women I work with that are struggling with forgiveness, where I have them right between 10 to 20 truths about their husband and about their marriage. Like, my husband is flawed, just like me. If they're if they're women that have any kind of religion or faith, God forgives me. I should forgive my husband. We are working on our marriage even if the growth is slow. I have her write down positive things like you know what? He does work hard and provides for our family and what I want her to do, right? Neuroplasticity. The beauty. We can change our thoughts towards anybody, the world, how we see it. So I have her reflect to this list as much as possible.

I say put it post-its on your office, have a notes page on your phone, whatever you need to do. But when you start thinking negatively about your husband and that pain comes up, you go to this list and you remind yourself the truth about him and your marriage. I find that it works for myself as well.

Okay, I'm into it. I don't, I never. Like I will spend time today thinking about like, do I think when or women are better at receiving it? Like I'll think about that for a little bit. And if I come back on your on your podcast, I'll find a way to articulate my conclusion if I come to one.

Okay, I could be completely wrong. I am.

I don't know, I don't think you're wrong. I just think that you you have the lens that you have. And I appreciate understanding that lens a little bit better, you know, but I have, you know, I probably harder on men. I'm like, come on, guys. Like, seriously, let it go. Like, I spend a lot more time in that neighborhood than I do with women. But that's just that just says that world needs us. All right?

Absolutely.

Can I I want to bring up something that's when we've talked about that rupture and repair cycle, going back to, you know, how you walk a couple through that, there's a little hidden ingredient that I don't think talked about enough that we've uncovered through doing, like, these two day intensives where we work with a couple in crisis. Okay. And we we do these storylines and they like, do a timeline of their life and they start sharing their stories and what is produced out of that, where some people will take two, three hours to tell the entire story of their life. It's very cathartic for them. But what it does, and I think it's the grease that keeps the wheels turning within.

Like because you were said something about acceptance of the apology, and that's compassion. I think when you're in crisis, there's no empathy, there's no perspective taking, there's no wondering like, man, what is how does Megan see this situation? We're in the pain and the pains talking. And when you can get a couple to stop, you know, maybe it's a little bit of selfishness. Like, please tell us about yourself. And, and they're able to get their story out and through coaching and just kind of reflective questions that we ask like how did you deal with that? What how did that make you feel? Do you see these trend lines? And the other spouse is listening to that story of their partner. Compassion is is at play because they realize, gosh, you know, my my husband never had an emotionally present dad.

And here I've been expecting him to show up like super husband, but that's never been given to him. And that compassion, I think, is what really does allow the acceptance of an apology to land really, really powerful in a couple.

Yeah. You know, just because we're in this neighborhood, the compassion is present. Unless it isn't, you know, and one of the the second major predictor of divorce in terms of the research is, is it's a more of a clinical thing that you guys have access to, which is how does a couple tell their story. So it's not even the story that they tell. It's how do they tell it? Did they tell it like collaborators? Did they tell it like competitors? That's not how that went down. That went down like this or but wait a second, your parents always or but hold on a second. That when when that is present and even their body language signals that they're like, I don't know, rolling their eyes or whatever.

It's a tough one to to track at the divorce prediction level strictly, but it's really about who is showing up. Are they adults or are they children kind of telling this story and stepping on each other's toes and cutting each other off and not helping it? But when they're adults and compassion is present, I suppose it's the opposite of a spiritual. It signals that there's opportunity, there's possibility here. So I agree with you. I think compassion is a critical piece of the puzzle. And when it's not there, you know, I just like to hold up a mirror and go, man, is this fun for you to tell this story sounds like you're sounds like you hate this story. And it doesn't sound like you're very like you're not very friendly toward one another in the telling. So what's your point? You know, they want to win. They want to win the storytelling sometimes. And that's harder.

Yeah. Or paint themselves of the victim right. As the victim in the marriage.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Just because again we're here, the other two primary divorce predictors, one is the one that everybody knows and hears about is the Four Horsemen, the apocalypse, which I don't feel like going into a whole shtick about that. But the other one is thinking about divorce. So couples that think about divorce get divorced more often than couples that don't think about divorce, couples that think about people who think about running marathons, run more marathons, people who don't think about any thoughts. But, you know, I'm looking back behind you. And this idea of choose love. You know, I think a lot of, a lot of the success or failure of relationship comes down to choice. And am I going to am I going to be thinking about and choosing to explore my out options, or am I going to be thinking about and choosing to explore my options on how to lean into this thing?

I mean, that's that's I think what a lot of couples need in terms of coaching and training and therapy is just helping empower them with that actual choice around how to stay into this, how to stay in this thing, or how to leave with integrity. You know.

Yes, I think a lot of people base their decisions on their marriage, on how they feel. And and while feelings are incredible, they can also lie to us. They also fluctuate constantly, especially for women. I'm not a man, so I don't know. But you know, if we based everything off of how we felt, this would be a scary world to live in. And I think that being able to take your feelings for what they are again, be one with your thoughts, one with your feelings. And we would say majority. I feel like of marriage things is making choices. I would agree I don't want to wake up and make KC coffee like I don't feel like doing that. I'm not a morning person.

I'm never gonna that's never going to probably change, but I'm going to choose to do it because I love him and he loves me, and we're married and we're a team. And so it's a choice to make. And I wish that there was more of an emphasis on like what you just said on choosing love, choosing to communicate. But we are constantly up against Hollywood, Disney movies and culture, which focuses mostly on love, sex, passion, romance, chemistry and all those the feel goods, right? And again, not saying that those things are bad, but to sustain a marriage, to sustain any healthy relationship, even if you're not married and you're just committed. Yeah, you've already probably seen, oh, love isn't always a feeling. You're going to have to make choices sometimes to show up and be a grown up.

The other challenge with Hollywood, of course, is that it doesn't have time to be clumsy about relationship conversations. So, like, you don't learn how to fumble through these things, you learn how to, oh, it looks like that, or I'm bad at it, you know, versus all these writers who have spent their careers earning their MFA, trying to figure out how to, you know, get into a writing room, have perfected the art of dialog. And we skipped the part that they struggled and wrote shitty dialog and had, you know, their own learned from their own pain. But yeah, I think even just helping couples, helping people have language and vocabulary and to practice and muddle through, that is another big piece of where Hollywood and short attention span reels and whatnot rob us of, like the path to the path to excellence or the path to repair because like, oh, we're supposed to be there already.

Yes.

I think that Hollywood has definitely set up, I must speak for men really, really poorly. And I know there's a lot of content that's going out there that I'm really appreciative of, that how we as a society are failing men and preparing them for for life, and specifically around the way that we've modeled what a how man shows up for a romantic relationship. He's usually a doofus. He needs rescuing. He doesn't know.

Yeah, yeah.

It's so so this at some point we have to look at like, what's the soup that we're swimming in? Because if we're getting it from Hollywood and movies and sitcoms that the man needs rescuing, and then the woman comes in and saves him. We're setting up relationships for for failure, because that's not the dynamic that that is a healthy dynamic where how does how does a masculine energy show up and lead? Well? And that reminds me of like 1950s. There was a show called Father Knows Best, and it was about how dad was a source of wisdom. And he and he, you know, spoke vision and decisiveness into some of the problems that people were facing. And I couldn't imagine how fast that kind of show would be rejected in today's culture.

Yeah. The problem is that you have to figure out how to get find the middle ground, right? Because you've got these doofus guys like Homer Simpson and Phil Dunphy and all these, like, kind of just like, oh, what an idiot. And then you've on the other side, you've got these narcissistic guys who don't apologize for anything and don't aren't accountable, and they're kind of running the show and I know best. So that's why we should do it. And we have to find that middle ground where it's like the right balance of energy that honors and respects that masculine energy is important, but it's made whole in a relationship by matching it with this, the partner's energy, you know, and that is that's where I think people miss the boat a lot. It's your way or my way when the dance is really about our way, you know.

And that's the tension that I think a lot of couples feel when they, they are experiencing that my partner is very different than me. And that becomes now a liability and it becomes a threat. And, and we need to change my spouse because that's, that's not the way we need to do things in my perspective. Whereas I want we would love to teach couples to appreciate and leverage their differences and hold that tension and recognize this is a tension that's never going to go away because we're two different people and opposites attract. Yeah. But in that tension, well.

There's maybe not even opposites attract, but I didn't want to be just with myself. Right. And myself that thought, everything that I thought and the way and my, you know, I chose someone to be different than me, you know.

Well, think about music. Music's is beautiful because you have four people playing for different things and it comes together beautifully. I mean, could you imagine if everyone just played the drums and that was the band? Yeah, it would, it would, it would be great for about 30s. And you're like, okay, this is boring. There's we find it in nature and in a lot of things, there is always this tension between the ying and the yang. Right. And if we can appreciate that, then we're going to start to see more harmony in our relationships. And actually, even if we can leverage Megan's so much more organized than me. So if we need to organize things that should not be on me, that needs to be on her.

Amen.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

You know, well, and it's funny, Zach, because we when we were dating, I remember Casey so spontaneous and I just thought, well, I'm not spontaneous, like you said. I love that he looks at the world a different way than me. And then whatever. For whatever reason, we get married, and I'm like, why the hell is he spontaneous? This is ridiculous. Like, why doesn't he do.

What I do? Spontaneity all the time?

Yes. But it was so endearing when we were dating. And I think that one of the biggest factors of why we almost averse was because we are very different in a lot of different ways that show up on a consistent basis. Like our core values are very similar. We're both extroverts, you know, we both have faith, things like that. But in the little day to day things like he's late and I'm on time. How many opportunities as a married couple can that produce conflict? Pretty much everything a lot. And then we work together, right? So I think it was our differences in what Casey said I love that is it was it took acceptance, just like accepting an apology.

It took accepting that he is different than me. And that doesn't mean that we're doomed. That doesn't mean that we made a mistake. It means leveraging that, finding the balance, and leaning on the person who has the bigger strength. So when we need a spontaneous day or like he's so good at, like when we're on vacation, he's like, let's do this. Let that. I just let him lead that. I'm like, this is this is his jam. That's where you thrive.

You know, in thinking about your music metaphor, I'm not a musician, so I, I don't I don't get to speak to this with expertise. But I was recently at the symphony and I was there. Ben Folds was fronting the symphony. Don't know if he had been full, but he was playing his pop songs and the symphony was behind him, and he would get up every once in a while, and he would talk about the process of making music, whatever. And he was talking about how the world needs the symphony right now, because it's this model of collaboration and harmony and bringing things in. And, and he started this sentence and I knew how he was going to finish it, but I was wrong. He started the sentence and he was like, and these musicians are up here and they're just managing it.

And I heard I heard him finish the word difference, but it wasn't that word. What he said was their managing, their resolving dissonance. So like, couples are different. People are different. Musicians are different. They're playing different melodies at different times. But the the art is really kind of coming, like resolving the dissonance, coming through, not being like, hey, you're playing that wrong. It's more like, oh, I guess I need to slow down a little bit in order to catch up with the fact that you have asthma today or that you have, you know, you missed the cue from the conductor or whatever it is. But this the art form of staying in a relationship is staying in is resolving dissonance, because you're not going to resolve difference.

You know, he's never going to become more organized and you're never going to become less organized. That difference is never going to be resolved. But you can at least bridge the gap between the fact that that difference exists, you know? So I really loved it, and I wish it was a musician, but I never I never.

Thought I'm stealing that one. Zach.

You can have it. Yeah, it's Ben Folds. Make sure you give him the credit for it, because, Hey, listen, I've loved talking to you guys, and I'm bumping up against my time and maybe yours as well, but I'd be eager to have part two. It's been really fun to kind of just talk shop and get behind the curtain a little bit and, Yeah. Is there anything that you would want to make sure that we hit or name for my listeners before we move on to the next thing?

Absolutely. So we have a new book coming out called The Marriage Habit, and we're really excited about it. It's been there's ten habits in the book. They are very positive, helpful. That forced up apology is one of them. That's one of the habits. But yeah, that comes out February 3rd, 2026.

It's a great framework for people that want to choose to be intentional in their relationship. But maybe they're like, how do we do this? What does that look like? And so to to Megan's, what she had referenced earlier, we really walk through like this is what it looks like very tactical, very practical. And what we're really that is the more intentional you are with your relationship, that's the structure that can contain your the feelings of being in love. But if we just rely on hope, we just wing it, or we hope that one day everything gets resolved, that those feelings of love will not be contained, right? Cool.

It's called the mirror tab. It would.

You say marriage habit? Yep.

Yep, it's called the mayor tab. It comes out on February 3rd. I think that's about when this episode will come out. So that'll be really good timing. Again, thanks so much for talking to me and for letting us know kind of how you think about the relationships and how you think about relationships and how they're working for you and your and your people. And yeah, check out the book Marriage Habit February 3rd, 2026. Probably everywhere books are sold, Correct?

Yes, yes. So thank you so much, Zach. It was wonderful being here.