Chris Duffy

They realized that they had different ideas about what it meant to be monogamous and that because of that, they actually broke up because they both thought they were like doing the thing that was just a regular old romantic relationship.

But the quote unquote regular old romantic relationship was different for each of them.

And you talk in the book about how not having that kind of plug and play template for friendship is a is a strength, right?

It allows us to define it for each other, but it also can make it hard to know exactly what we want or how to how to handle those tougher conversations in that heart, those hard times.

It makes me think we are supposed to get everything from our romantic partner, that they're supposed to be our best friend and we're supposed to be extremely attracted to them physically.

And they're supposed to be a cheerleader for our professional life.

And we're supposed to be inspired by their professional life.

And they're also supposed to be great with the kids.

It's all of these things which are really not the same role over and over.

And we somehow think that like the perfect partner would have all of those at the same time.

For me, I feel really good about my marriage.

I feel like it's a strong one.

But I think that so much of what makes it strong is also that we both get pieces of what we need emotional fulfillment from outside of the marriage that we have friends.

Right.

Like.

I am a comedian.

I need like silliness and goofiness and total like someone who could just do bits.

And I also don't want to be married to that person.

It's really helpful for me to have friends who I can go and be like, we're going to spend an hour and a half just talking in accents and it's going to be totally hilarious and bonkers.

But then I like that I go home and it's like.