How a 45-Year Marriage Works w/Meg Staley and Jerry Gretzinger on Rules, Resentment, and Recovery

Um, well, thanks for coming. My name's Zach and, um, we've gotten to email, Meg. It's a pleasure to meet you. I feel like I, I sort of know, I don't really feel like I know you, but I've watched the, um, People Make Games documentary twice now. I watched it with my wife again last night. We both cried. It's, it's spectacular what you're, uh, what you guys have crafted together over 44 years of marriage.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Going on 45 in December.

Yeah.

And then there's also the map. Like, the map is like secondary to the other thing that you've built together.

Yeah, it's almost a member of the marriage.

Yeah.

So you've been married almost 44 years, 44, 45, almost 45 in December.

Yep.

The map precedes the marriage.

Yeah.

I wanna talk about it, of course. I'm gonna make my readers or my listeners, I'm gonna encourage them to watch the movie before, before we talk, but I don't wanna spend a whole bunch of time on the map. I'd much rather hear about the two of you. I'd like to know who you are independent of this project. And Meg, I'd be interested to hear from you, like, who are the two of you in general? Like, how do you describe just Meg and Jerry?

Oh boy. I mean, we met in New York kind of following our passions individually in New York where almost anything can happen.

Right.

And we joined forces professionally first.

Because you ran a business together for a minute.

We were in a co-op together. Jerry actually hired me to be the press and sales representative for a co-op of designers in SoHo in 1989.

No, '79. 1979.

'79. And after knowing each other for a year or so, well, not even a year, we were attracted to each other. We were friends and business associates before we started this relationship.

Well, and you'd lived a lot of life too, right? You were in your late 30s, maybe early 40s, if I'm doing the math correctly.

Meg was 29.

I was 29. Recently sober. That's a big part of my story.

Okay. Recently sober as of being a 29-year-old, not as of—

29-year-old. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In New York, uh, for the first time and, uh, raised in Seattle. So I'm a Seattle—

That's where I am.

Yeah. Yeah. I know that. That's why I mentioned it.

So you're 29, Jerry, you're older by some point.

I must, yeah, I must have been 38. I'm roughly 9 years older than Meg.

Okay. So you guys connect in New York and what happens next?

Well, I had been married before.

Okay.

And I have 2 older kids.

Okay.

And was separated and then divorced from my wife. And so Meg walked into this scene where I have 2 kids who are how old?

15 and 11, I want to say.

I had moved to New York from North Africa. That's where I last lived. In Tunisia, had been introduced to the place by the Peace Corps. Had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. Went to New York kind of on a challenge from friends who said, "You're a creative guy. It's time you took on New York." So I said, "I know I'm gonna hate it, but I'll give it one year, one calendar year, and then it'll be bye-bye New York." Well, of course it wasn't. I loved— it was a very exciting place to be. I arrived there in 1973. We left Manhattan in 1990 and moved to a village on the Hudson River, commuter distance from New York. We moved up there because by then Meg and I had 2 young boys.

You have 4 boys together, like total of 4 boys?

We have 2 boys and then Jerry has a daughter and a son.

Yep.

Oh, and then when did the map start?

The map started in 1963.

Oh, wow.

Okay. You're just sort of plugging away at the map, uh, in your life as a thing. And then—

Yeah, yeah. It was always a pastime.

Yeah.

Just something I took up in spare time. Yeah.

Why did you do that? Why did you— why did you start? Like, what was the— what was the— what was like the beginning?

It was a doodle. It was just a doodle.

Yeah.

I had, I worked, had a summer job in Ann Arbor that summer. I monitored these machines on a, it was a ball bearing factory. And they were counting, they were clicking. I had an office and they, there were all these machines linked up to these clickers and they clicked every time they made a part. And I had to monitor the runs and page the foreman when it was time to shut the machine down. So I had a lot of spare time and I read a lot of books, but I got tired of reading. And so I got out some paper and I just started doodling because I had drawn maps as a kid years before and I just started monkeying around.

So you two have just moved up into— up to the Hudson or up up to a village on the Hudson and you're doing your thing. What is the thing that you are learning about one another early on? Like, what's the— oh boy, what are you learning about marriage as you start to build it?

By then we had a company together.

Okay.

And so it was really critical what our roles were going to be in that company because basically we're both designers.

Yep.

But the company is small and there wasn't room really for 2 designers. But I was the business end of the company, although Meg has a great business sense also. But I was the guy who dealt with the bookkeeping and—

And I, I basically did marketing.

What was the company?

Uh, it was called Staley Gretzinger, and we made art-to-wear clothing, one-of-a-kind clothing. Okay. You know, secondhand clothes that we rebuilt. We had a big, big customer base in major stores.

We sold to Nordstrom, actually.

That's awesome.

And also Bloomingdale's and Bergdorf Goodman and stuff. And then, but mostly specialty stores around the country. Baby and Company down on First Avenue in Seattle.

I love it.

But yeah, we both were designers, so we had to establish rules about who was in charge for different lines, for different products that we were doing.

Okay.

And whoever was in charge got the last say on what the product was gonna look like, how it was gonna communicate to the customer, et cetera, et cetera. And we had to learn that early on because we both wanted to be on the creative end and not worry about— not spend all of our time worrying about the business end of things.

Can we talk about rules for a second? Because, you know, there's the map, of course, but then the map has this card deck or this deck of rules that just sort of exist. And they're primarily, they're mostly arbitrary, it seems like. I mean, they, they got created for, or I think the word that comes up a lot is chaotic. How do you think about rules or how do the two of you think about rules in your relationship? You know, there it is in the business where you kind of decide, but do you create them together? Do you, did you reference some book? How did you decide what rules were going to work for the two of you?

I have an immediate response. Okay, so what? I say that marriage is like a system of agreements. Some of them are outlined, but most of them are intuitive. And when the agreements that we each think we've made with each other ends up in conflict, we then have to tackle what our interpretation of the agreements are, or what is the nature of those agreements that we haven't really brought to the surface and examined. It's just been this kind of thing that we've rolled with, and then suddenly it's not working anymore.

Do you have an example of how that plays out in real time? I'd love to hear more about that.

God, there's a million.

What do you have conflict about?

Well, let's talk about time.

Okay.

You know, in regards to our parenting, for instance.

Oh yeah, that's what comes to mind right away.

Yeah.

We decide that we have to establish a bedtime. And we agree that it's 9 o'clock and the reading stops at 9 and the boys go to bed. And at 9:05, I step in and say, hey, you're still reading. Well, I know, we just have to finish this chapter. And I'm much more regimented than Meg. So I guess it's maybe Germanic roots or something. But, you know, I take it literally and Meg has a little wiggle room always built into her sense of time.

And there were a lot of— it was a lot of conflict in terms of styles around time when we were first married. But I was actually thinking about time when we first had kids because we were so used to being able to control our own time use.

Right.

And suddenly you have a joint responsibility. You can't just go off and do your own thing without crafting an agreement with your spouse about who's going to be doing this.

Yeah.

And that seems to be kind of the pattern in at least in our 44 years. We go off, we have a different interpretation of how things are supposed to go, and then it doesn't work out, and then we have to talk about it.

That's intriguing. I think one of the— what you're reminding me of is in my house, we call them lanes. Like, we have lanes. You have your lane, you have ULearn or whatever else. Jerry, you said you had an immediate answer when I asked this question about rules. Was yours the same, different? Like, what was your—

What I was thinking of, how we operated within the company. Meg alluded to this a minute ago, but we had to make a pretty specific rules. And she was the chief designer, and she would come up with a product, and then she would show it to me. And the rule, the understanding was that I would critique it in my terms. And then because she was in charge of that product, she could either reject or accept what my criticism was. And later on, I designed a minor, kind of minor product line of my own, and then all of that process was reversed.

Flipped over.

Yeah. Yeah. That worked out really pretty well. It was tough in the early years because I did feel preempted in the in my role in the company. It was, it had been my company and Meg joined me and it was clear that her color sense and design sense and marketing sense was greater than mine. And so that should be her role. But I, I, it, I still found myself being resentful of having to give up those, those roles. And there were discussions about that because of practical reasons. I wanted one-size styling. So all of our clothing was one-size-fits-all. And Meg had to convince me that that was not going to fly in the marketplace. But that was a hard thing to accept. But I had to give in to reason here. And so we worked that one out.

What do you— I love— it's like I'm like a dog with a bone when somebody says the word resentment. What did you learn about or what did you do with that as you recognized it inside of yourself and you kind of grappled with it? How did you work that out?

Well, it was tough, but part of it was getting my own product line, even though it was much smaller, much, much smaller, probably represented 10 or 15% of our business versus Meg's bigger chunk. It was mine. And yeah, I didn't care that it was small and minor. Um, it was mine, and I got a lot of contentment out of that.

Yeah, I feel like resentment often comes from the story that people tell themselves about how they don't have control or they don't have influence or they don't have agency.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, if you then kind of create, even carve out just 15% of some control or some agency, maybe it, it alleviates that for you.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yeah.

I mean, in AA, they always say all you need is a coffee pot and a resentment to have a meeting. And that's, you know, but it is how you grapple with those resentments. You know, that's one thing. We've done a lot of therapy. We've done couples therapy. We've done individual therapy during a period of time. In the late '90s into the 2000s when our kids were teenagers and getting— one of our kids was really difficult to parent and we ended up sending him to an emotional growth boarding school actually in northern Idaho.

Hmm.

And so we had a lot of conflict around that. The business wasn't doing all that great. It had been almost 20 years at that point, and it frayed our relationship. And so that's when we ended up going into therapy and couples therapy.

How long did you do that?

I think we were in couples therapy only for about 2 or 3 years.

I was going to say a couple of years. Yeah.

Could you name key takeaways or key experiences of that? change for better or for worse, or one way or the other for the two of you?

You know, my reflection on it is that it was not so much conflict between the two of us, but it was an issue of how we were going to deal with this son, the one who was really causing problems. And we were— it's true, we were not always on the same page when it came to dealing with him.

Yeah, I mean, that was a conflict.

Yeah, you're right. But in the end, we agreed on what needed to happen.

Let me, let me ask this question in this way. A lot of times when my own clients come in and they are, you know, thinking about whatever it is that brought them in, I want to sell them a proposition. And the proposition is couples therapy ought to be a thing that you look at in your life where you go, before we did therapy, life was like this. After we did therapy, life was like this. Like it should be a pivotal thing. And I don't really, I don't really hang my hat on the word should, but like you want it to make a difference, right? And I'm wondering if you could sort of say, well, before we did therapy, we were sort of in this mindset or this space. Uh, after we did therapy, we had, we had this access or this new thing. I wonder, do you have anything like that?

I have an answer to that.

I don't.

Okay.

I'm glad you do.

I, I believe that what we learned from couples therapy and also all the other work we've done— I mean, we're both in 12-step programs, so our language has gotten more and more aligned as our marriage has gone on. What we have learned is this awareness that when we are stuck in ourselves, it usually has something to do with the relationship. And if it doesn't have something to do with your relationship, it's something that we need to share with our spouse. But certainly because we've— I felt, I think our communication and our awareness changed dramatically because we had practiced talking to each other. And at least that's from my vantage point. What changed is our communication.

What would you say, Jerry?

The changes that took place in me were much more because of the 12-step program than the therapy, I think. There's a— in the 12 steps, the 4th step is a personal inventory.

Yep.

And, and I wrote that out, and it took me over a year to do it. There's a questionnaire available online, a couple hundred questions, and I learned so much about myself from that. I, I will never forget the first question, which was, what was your mother's relationship with her family?

Okay.

And boy, I thought, oh, wow. And I started digging into that.

Yeah.

It says something about who she was and then who she was going to be as a parent to me.

Yeah. Yeah.

It was really a revelation.

Yeah. I love that. I love that. I did not see this coming, the sobriety 12-step piece, but I'm also sober about almost 6 years now. And Fantastic. Worked the program, did the steps, the whole bit, and have kind of come through a lot of different self-awareness of my own. But of course, it includes the relationship that you have with your family and kind of what trickled down for you. There's a, there's a singer-songwriter right now, he's very popular, his name's Noah Kahan, and he, um, he has this song on his first album about his own experience of therapy, and there's a line in there that kills me every time, and he says, I'm still angry at my parents for what their parents did to them.

Okay, I love that.

And you're sort of like, yep, yeah, yep. So when somehow you can let go of like, my parents weren't the bad guy, and actually neither were their parents, but we're all just trying to figure out like, how do we make this thing work, um, and buffer ourselves from the, the things that are trying to thwart us off the path of health? Like, that is, um, there's actually my favorite scene I might cry saying this right now in the documentary is kind of toward the end, Jerry, where you're in the middle of the map and the phone rings and you pull out your phone cuz you gotta answer it. Your wife is calling you and, you know, she, Meg, you're like, are you drinking enough water? Like, are you drinking water? And you're just sort of, uh, taking care of each other in these really simple, small, like normal ways that in this case is a very pristine example of buffering from dehydration, you know, but like just trying to help each other stay healthy in this moment. So, and I think that's actually what it's ultimately about is how do we take care of each other and protect each other from the things that are inclined to knock us off the path. Yeah.

The day after that documentary was released, I had watched it, and Meg wasn't here when it first aired, I watched it with my assistant and his 2 daughters, and I got through it and I thought, oh, that was really well done. They really created an accurate picture of me and my project and Meg. And then the next day, Quinns, the interviewer, emailed me and he said, have you read the comments?

Hmm.

And I hadn't started to read the comments. And I sat down, and by then there were, I don't know, 1,500 of them or something. And I started reading them. I started crying, and then I was sobbing.

Yeah.

And Meg was still asleep that morning. And I went into her and she said, you're crying. And I said, yeah, I— every time they mention our affection for each other in any way, I start to bawl again. It was really moving to me too. But that hadn't registered the first time I saw it.

Well, the other thing that comes up in that interview or in the documentary, which is almost the opposite, although not quite, is when Quinns pulls Meg aside and you guys are upstairs talking about the map and the void. And she says something like, Oh yeah, I love Jerry and all of what makes him interesting, but it also, it's the same thing that drives me crazy too. There's this thing. Jerry, Meg, what do you think about that? I agree with you. I think that's pretty universal, but I just wonder what that looks like for you in real time.

Well, specifically, I think I was referring to Jerry's modus operandi.

Okay.

Because I'm in creative— my creative process is entirely different from Jerry's. It's very metaphoric for our relationship in some ways because—

Do tell.

Jerry loves imperfection. I love perfection and always try to work on that in sobriety. Right? Because I want the gift of imperfection to be something that works in my life, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, I have a vision of what something's going to look like in its end outcome, and then I figure out how to get there. Jerry works entirely the opposite. He doesn't have that picture at the end. He just does something and waits to see what happens. And then takes whatever happened, shows him the next step.

Mm-hmm.

And that drives me crazy sometimes when I have an idea of how I want the garden to look.

Oh.

And he kind of refuses to play that game and lets all the weeds grow up because he thinks they're pretty. When I just know that they're going to multiply and multiply, and very soon we'll have only Queen Anne's lace and nothing else in the garden. That's what I was trying to say.

Well, and I think the visual representation of that is this thing called the Void that is taking over the map. And you're grieving the loss of the map because the Void itself is taking over. How How does that metaphor translate into the actual labor of being married or the creation of your relationship? Is there a version of the void or is there a version of the sort of the takeover that is also causing you to grieve?

I don't know. I think it's really hard. I don't think so. What were you gonna say?

Well, I just don't think so.

I have to say, Zach, that we are in a very sweet spot and have been for about 10 or 15 years in our marriage.

Okay. Tell us about that.

Yeah. Begun when I finally agreed. We have this place in Northern Michigan, and we had this place on the Hudson Valley, which was our home in New York after Manhattan. We had developed an amazing community there. Jerry was on the board and then president of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I was on the board and then president of the Garrison Arts Center. And our kids had gone to school there. And it was an hour 10 on the train into New York. And we had sold our company. And I didn't want to leave there.

Mm-hmm.

Jerry really wanted to move full-time to our farm here in Michigan. This is where he grew up. We had so many wonderful— we've had so many wonderful years, 40 years, almost 40 years here, coming at Christmas and for a month every summer. This was certainly our home as well as New York, but it didn't have the gravitas as—

for me—

Yeah. As our place in New York. And we finally agreed that we would sell the house in New York and we would move full-time here. That was me not kicking and screaming, but it was a very difficult transition for me. And I knew that the marriage would really suffer and Jerry would be deeply unhappy if we had a—

Mm-hmm.

sold the farm and stayed in New York. I knew because of the program, actually, because I'd already started to go to meetings out here, and I developed a foundation of friends here in the program. We both had developed a friendship with several families out here.

Mm-hmm.

That I could make that move, that I could adapt And be happy here.

It was a moment when we explored a compromise. You remember when we looked at farms in New York State that might have worked?

Yeah. But I had said at that point, I want to keep one of the places where we've made memories. And I didn't want to just throw it all up and go to a new place. So this was the move that was difficult for me, and it was a sacrifice on some, on some level, but it also drew us together in a new way.

Hmm.

You eliminated some variables and kind of committed to something specific. And that is the— is that, is that the sweet spot?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

We were very fortunate because one of Meg's prerequisites to moving here would be to have her own studio. And we were really lucky to find a place that was very— it was big and very affordable.

4 miles away.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. But it meant she could create her own little world there.

Yeah. What are you making?

I'm still making one-of-a-kind clothing.

Okay.

And I have customers. I just have a few customers left, but it's a place where I can continue to make, and I have friends who I do commissions for. And so it's a very satisfying and happy place for me. I mean, it's a big space, and I host a women's AA meeting there.

Yeah.

It's really my community base.

Can I get some clothing? How do I— how do we get clothing? Can people get some clothing? Or are you like, you're, you're like exclusive in your, in your customer base?

Well, I don't do anything online, Zach.

Okay.

Because that was a decision I made.

I love it.

Yeah. So—

So if I want some clothes, I gotta come, I gotta come to Michigan and walk around the—

Right, you gotta come to Michigan or you have to— we have to talk. Okay.

Well, I got a couple of birthdays coming up, so I'm gonna— not my own, but, uh, people in my life.

Here's something I will sell to you, say to you. If you have a, a shirt or a t-shirt that you love that fits you, but it might have a tear in it or some, some stain or something, or your wife does too, or your daughter, yep, send them to me with a statement that says, Meg Staley, you have total artistic license to do with whatever you want.

To this loving piece of clothing, yeah.

Yeah, to this loving piece of clothing. We'll start there.

Okay, that's a deal. I'm excited about it. I'm gonna run outta time here for a second. I could talk to you, I think, for hours and hours, but what do you, what's the secret? What's the secret to making making your marriage work and thrive? Do you have one?

Well, I was talking to someone who was— he was considering splitting up with his girlfriend, and he wasn't quite sure which way to go. And it dawned on me that if there was one thing that worked between us, it was the fact that we treasured our relationship and we were willing to sacrifice something of ourselves to maintain the relationship. It became more important than either of us individually. And of course, a lot of that had to do with us having kids, but also having been married this many years, neither of us wants for any reason to give it up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have the tension in your actual marriage between this thing, Meg, that you're describing as, I want perfection, so I see the thing and I work toward that, and Jerry, you're like, I'm just gonna do the next thing and see what happens? Like, does that tension bubble up for the two of you in actual relationships terms? No.

No.

It's okay.

We don't have a lot of tension in our relationship now.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like.

You know, we really want— we really respect each other and want each other to be happy.

Well, and it sounds too like you've been able to— I mean, part of growing older, and then by virtue of that, your kids growing older, is you're no longer— you no longer have a reason to argue about bedtime. And you haven't— and you've made practical decisions that have eliminated the tension between, like, New York versus Michigan.

And we no longer have a professional platform to have to argue within too.

Yeah, yeah. You each have your own thing.

My answer just to what you asked both of us and Jerry answered, which I really agree with your answer, is the AA thing of the how of AA. Honesty, willingness, and open-mindedness. Honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness.

Mm-hmm.

Those 3 things are really my mantra now. That's a spiritual language that we share now. It's not religious. It's— but it is a value platform that I think we both adhere to.

Yeah.

I love that. I'm really, really grateful to talk to you both. I love your story. I can't wait to share it with people. I'm just glad to know you both.

Thank you.

Take care.