485. The Rise of Feminism in the LDS Church Part 3: Family Dynamics

We’re talking about the rise of feminism in the LDS Church, and today’s episode is going to be filled with my own thoughts, insight, and observation. I’ve tried to preface this with two other episodes that demonstrate the way I coach around it, as well as bringing in a guest expert last week, Kara Loewentheil. But today’s podcast is a little bit more in my own head, again based on the literally tens of thousands of people I’ve coached who have mostly been women, the roadblocks I see that we need to work on, and specifically we’re going to focus on your home situation. Welcome to The Rise of Feminism in the LDS Church, Part 3, The Dynamics in Your Home.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

Sometimes, listening to a podcast is enough. But sometimes, you’ll feel inspired to go deeper. If you hear things that speak to you in today’s episode, consider it your invitation to a complimentary coaching workshop.

On this live, interactive Zoom call with me, you’ll get a taste of the power of this work when applied in real life. You can participate, or be a silent observer. But you have to take a step if you want to truly see change in your life… two steps, actually. Head to jodymoore.com/freecoaching and register. Then you just have to show up. Your best life is waiting for you. Will you show up for it? Jodymoore.com/freecoaching. I’ll see you there.

Okay, everybody buckle up. It’s truth telling time. One of the things that I view as my responsibility as a coach is to tell people what I see as the reality, the truths that I see that they may not see in themselves. And from that place, I hope to empower you. All progress starts from the truth.

However, it is not my place to say what you should do with that truth. I know for myself, sometimes when I am either handed the truth, shown the truth, or I discover the truth, I still choose what are not always the most ideal patterns or behaviors. I don’t want you to expect perfection of yourself. But if we’re afraid to look at the truth because we think we have to change it, that doesn’t serve us either.

All right? So I’m going to point out what I see as some of the common problems in the home that are contributing to the dynamic of inequality amongst the genders. We all want to point to institutions and policies and society and socialization as the cause of these problems. And even if that’s true, in many cases, they are where we picked up our ideas about the roles of men and women and whether or not we should have equal power, decision-making authority, et cetera, in our lives. 

In the end, if we don’t start with our own view of ourselves and others as well as in our homes where we have a lot of influence, then this changes that we hope to see happening I should say will not be long-lasting and impactful to us in our lifetime. We must be doing the work on a personal level as well, starting with ourselves and also translating into our relationships and the dynamics in our home. All right? So that’s what I’m gonna be talking about today, especially specifically the dynamic between a husband and wife or male and female partner.

So there are four areas I want to address. We’re going to talk about money. We’re going to talk about sex. We’re going to talk about household duties or responsibilities, and we’re going to talk about raising children. These are the four areas I probably coach on the most frequently and the four areas where I see that we have a lot of opportunity to evolve ourselves and the way we view both genders, frankly, in the relationship.

Okay, so for starters, I want you to think about your marriage, and I want you to think about this question, which is, why did you get married? And why are you still married? What is the purpose of marriage?

Now, if I’m taking a guess about what answers would come up if I had you here in front of me and you could raise your hand and answer it, my guess is some of you would say things like, well, we’ve been commanded to get married. If you’re a member of the LDS church anyway, part of the doctrine of our faith says that God wants us to be married. Okay, so maybe you were doing it to be obedient.

Okay, others of you would say that maybe you just were raised in a society where that was kind of expected and you always imagined that it would happen, so you just kind of went along with what seemed like the right path. All right, cool.

Maybe some of you would say that you fell in love with someone and you wanted to be with them forever and you couldn’t imagine not being with that person. And so it seemed like the logical next step to get married.

You also might say that you wanted to start a family and build a life with someone and have a partner that would be with you forever so that you weren’t lonely and that you had somebody to build a life with and maybe this is why you got married and maybe it’s a combination of all these reasons or maybe there are even reasons I didn’t consider but okay, I’m good with all of that.

What I want to recommend is that you think about this if you haven’t recently and it’s possible even that the reason you got married and the reason you stay married are different, right?

Because again, depending on how long you’ve been married, you’ve probably grown and evolved a little bit as a person, your relationship has changed, your partner has changed, and you may have some or completely different reasons for being married today than you did when you first got married. 

That’s all good and fine, but what I want to offer is that many of us grew up watching movies and TV, and we still see this, right? Where romantic relationships are always highlighted when they are in the courtship phase or the new phase. And everything is exciting and dramatic and challenging, but also wonderful. And in fact, the pursuit of the relationship and whether or not that relationship is going to last, in and of itself, makes for a great story. 

That often is the whole movie or the whole TV series, is what’s going on in this relationship and is it going to work out. It’s very exciting to our brains. It’s a really fun time, although it can also be a really challenging time, right? And that tends to be what’s highlighted. And once the relationship moves beyond that and the drama settles a little bit, there’s not the mystery or uncertainty or novelty anymore of this new situation, things get a little more boring and regular, then that part usually isn’t the main story in a movie or TV show because it’s not exciting. It’s not interesting. And at the same time, that’s the natural course of healthy relationships. They’re going to end up in that point. 

And so my question is, once it gets to that point and knowing that it’s going to get to that point at some point or another, what is the purpose of getting married? Now, again, like I said in the beginning, if part of it to you is like a religious kind of following of counsel or guidance, okay, I’m okay with that, but I would like you to have another reason as well. Like, why do you think you’ve been commanded to do that then? Why does God want you to be married? And what purpose does it serve for you in this life? 

And I will tell you that I found to be the most powerful reason for people to decide they’re gonna stay married is because it’s like a partnership in a business, right? Because we’re trying to run a life, we’re trying to figure out money and how to best leverage our time and how to maybe experience the world.

And maybe we want to raise a family. And there’s a lot of decisions and a lot of work to be done and a lot of figuring out. And it’s nice to have a partner in all that. As we grow our life, grow our family, grow ourselves, having a partner is kind of a cool thing and challenging, right?

Like if I’m gonna start a business and I’m gonna have to figure out marketing, I’m gonna have to figure out sales, and I’m gonna have to figure out distribution or whatever else is involved in that business, it might be useful and helpful to have a partner so that we can divide the responsibilities. 

Each of us hopefully bring some different skills and experience and strengths so we can divide up work according to our strengths. And it’s somebody else to go through this experience with. It’s a sounding board to bounce ideas off of. Somebody to experience the highs and lows with you so that you feel less lonely, right? That is often why we go into a business partnership, not to mention we’re combining resources, both financial and like I said, skills and education.

And to me, that is also why we get married, right? Outside of any other existential reasons you might believe in, I think that it makes our life easier and better. Now, when I first suggest that to people, sometimes they have some resistance to that because it’s not very romantic. It’s not very exciting and dramatic like what we see in the movies. It sounds kind of robotic. It sounds kind of cold.

Okay, so I want to be clear that I’m not saying you wouldn’t want to maintain a really close friendship and love and connection with this person. That is ideal that you have that as well as much of the time as possible. But it is also because each of you are equal partners, you’ve equally invested in your lives, really, to this commitment.

So when people don’t approach their marriage from this sort of foundational level, we are equal partners trying to build a life together, then instead what happens is a lot of assumptions about the roles that one or the other should be playing and a lot of resentment when the person doesn’t fall into their role as planned. Okay?

So the tricky part about all this is most of us get married when we’re very young. We haven’t thought through any of this stuff at all, really. It’s kind of subconscious, right?

It’s been indoctrinated, socialized within us. And it’s not until we get older that we realize like, maybe I should have thought through this and maybe we should have communicated about this earlier. And that’s okay. It’s never too late to. But I do wish that in the LDS Church, we had a premarital preparation class, especially because of how young so many of our people get married. I think it would be really helpful.

I know my sister Natalie Clay does do a marriage prep class, and I just highly recommend that everybody go through something where you think through, what do I view as the responsibility of a spouse, of a husband or a wife? And what am I not sure about yet? And what do we need to discuss and make sure we’re on the same page about? 

Go check out Natalie Clay if you want to learn about that marriage prep class, but even if you don’t do that, or you’ve been married many years and you didn’t do that, it’s never too late to stop and have some of these conversations, but you want to get clear first in your head that this is like a partnership.

And so if, again, if I were starting a business with someone, it doesn’t mean that we would both do everything. My partner might be really good at sales and maybe I’m really good at operations. And so we might divide the work up that way. I might do more of the operations, my partner does the sales, but in the end we are equal partners.

So there are times when we have discussions about what the sales strategy is going to look like, and we might disagree on it, and ultimately the sales department will execute it, but we both have a say and both of our opinions are valid and relevant because this is our business and whether or not sales works affects all of us. And same is true for operations, right? Ultimately, I’m responsible for it and I execute it, but my partner has a vested interest in the operations and equal say and both opinions are equally relevant and valued because we’re both invested in the success of this business. You see what I’m saying?

Okay, so let’s talk about money first of all. Listen, everybody shares the money. Okay? This is the most common scenario I see is that there’s a husband who works, sometimes it’s the wife who works, but mostly in the coaching I do, it’s the husband who works full time and the wife who either doesn’t work as much, doesn’t make as much money or isn’t working at all and is at home with the kids. And then the husband thinks that that’s his money, or the wife thinks that’s his money, I can tell because they talk about it that way, right?

The wife says stuff like, well, I’m going to need to ask him if I can have extra money for this thing that I want to do. Or he said, no, I can’t have money for that. Or sometimes the husband is not treating it that way, but the wife still has that assumption in her head. She’ll say things like, no, he’s, he’s totally generous, he views this as our money. He says that all the time, this is our money, but I just feel bad because he’s the one going to work earning the money.

Okay, so listen, if we run a business together, and again, let’s say my husband is the sales department, so he’s the one literally taking credit card numbers and selling whatever it is that we do. And I’m operations, so I execute, I create the product or deliver the product, let’s just say. I’m fulfillment maybe, we would call it. Then that doesn’t mean that I don’t get a paycheck and my spouse gets a paycheck and then a certain amount of money goes back into the business to build the business.

We both get paid for our duties and our responsibilities and then the business gets money or whatever else we do with the money. And it requires both of us to make this business succeed. If I don’t create and ship out the product, then the sales department has nothing to sell. 

So we both have different responsibilities, but the money, just because it comes in through one department, is the business’s money, and then gets allocated according to the values that the business has assigned different roles, right? So whatever you’re doing in your marriage, whoever’s making money and somebody else is doing other things, that’s a common thing, right?

Somebody’s going to work making money, somebody else is taking the kids all over, driving the kids all over, maintaining the house, maybe grocery shopping, doing laundry, whatever other kind of work. It’s everybody’s money. So I don’t know how you want to set up your money situation, but if you have a spouse that doesn’t see it that way, or you don’t see it that way, you need to come to a free coaching call and let me coach you on this and or have some discussions with your spouse because this is the reality. I didn’t even make this up, right? 

If you decided to get a divorce, then the state would say half the money is yours and half the money is your spouse’s. That’s the reality in the end, unless you have a prenup and you decided something different in advance.

So if you start viewing yourself as an equal partner, it doesn’t mean that you have to have separate bank accounts. It doesn’t mean that you can’t decide together again how you’re gonna manage the money together. It just means that you have equal decision-making power about what happens to that money.

I’m gonna tell you the way that works really well for my husband and I, especially if you’re engaged or, you know, more newly married and you haven’t quite figured it out yet. I don’t mean to say this is the only way or even the right way. It just took my husband and I a minute to figure out how to navigate money together because we hadn’t done that before until we got married and I was 30 years old when we got married, so was my husband.

So what we discovered worked really well was to have three bank accounts, okay? So we had our primary bank account where our paychecks got deposited. We were both working at the time when we got married and we’ve either both worked or just one or the other worked at different times. And either way, whoever’s working, the paycheck gets deposited into that main account. Now, both of us have oversight as to what’s happening in the account. We both log in and see the account. There’s nothing secretive going on here.

From there, each of us has an individual account that we just happen to label with our names. There’s Jake’s account and there’s Jody’s account, which we again both have oversight and access to. We just label them so that when we get online to our bank accounts, we can see what’s happening. 

And from that main account, a certain amount gets put into Jake’s account and a certain amount gets put into my account. Now, what those amounts are comes from conversations that we’ve had. And this changes from time to time. Okay? So it depends on what the needs are of the family and who needs the funds, right?

Just like if I’m the marketing department in my business and maybe marketing is our biggest spend, maybe we spend a lot of money in marketing, then I need a bigger budget than a different department that’s not buying marketing, right? So we’re not just like, I get this much and you get this much. We’re like, what are you responsible for?

What are you, like, for example, I buy the groceries and my husband will pick up some groceries if I ask him to, but for the most part, I like to go and buy the groceries. It helps me with my meal planning and everything, because I like to do that part. That’s one of my responsibilities. So I get the grocery money in my account, right?

My husband, on the other hand, takes care of maintenance on the cars. If they need an oil change or they need whatever cars need, he takes care of that. So any budget that goes towards car maintenance would go into his account.

We also both have an amount in our accounts that is our own personal spending that we have jurisdiction over to do with as we please. My husband likes to buy things that I would never spend money on. I just don’t find them to be valuable or I’m not interested in them. And I buy many things that he would never spend money on.

Namely, he likes to buy surfboards and guitars. I like to buy clothes. He doesn’t understand why I need so many clothes. I don’t understand why he needs so many surfboards or so many guitars. As long as we stay within what we’ve agreed upon, this is your amount to spend as you please. This is my amount to spend what I please. Then it doesn’t matter. We can both have different spending habits within our own individual accounts.

There’s also differences in terms of your comfort level of how low that account gets, right? Some people are really comfortable with running the account down really low and knowing that a paycheck is gonna come the next week. Others like a cushion and what that cushion looks like varies from person to person. And so again, having those individual accounts where we understand, we’re both clear, we’ve communicated and agreed upon what comes out of those accounts.

Anything like my gas money, eating lunches out, going shopping, whatever, all comes out of my account and he has similar things that come out of his account, right, then neither of us touches that main account because that’s where all of our bills get paid from. That is where our mortgage gets paid. That’s where all of our other, you know, predictable, ongoing, reoccurring bills happen. And then we also have like savings accounts and investment accounts and things like that.

But when we first got married, we didn’t have much of those other accounts. We had just enough in our main account to pay our bills. And then we had allocated in our individual accounts what we needed and would have left over. And the extra spending, et cetera, wasn’t much. We were just getting by and that’s okay.

Still, having my own account and knowing I’m responsible for this money and so I need to manage it. If I really want to buy a new pair of shoes, I might buy some cheaper groceries. I might skimp a little on the groceries this month. We might eat macaroni and cheese a couple times for dinner, but I’m taking accountability for that money and that’s very empowering, right, and appropriate.

And likewise, my husband has money that he’s responsible for and accountable for and that is what I recommend. Now, as your money situation changes, maybe you start making more money, then you might need to reassess how much money goes in each person’s account or are we putting more into savings now? Are we going to invest some money? What’s going to happen to this extra money? But we discuss it together like equal partners, regardless of who’s making the money. This is what happens in the healthiest of marriages.

Now, again, if you have a partner that doesn’t see it this way, you need to be having a lot of conversations about why or why not. And most importantly, it has to begin with you understanding this in your own head, that your marriage is much like a business partnership when it comes to your money. I promise you this will set you free. It will allow you to stop trying to control your spouse and it will give you the ability to focus on the only thing you can control, which is yourself. Ultimately, you are responsible for your own finances. 

So even if I decide, yeah, I like this arrangement where my husband’s gonna go to work and I’m gonna be at home with the kids, know that that’s a decision that you’ve made. It is not an obligation that you owe anybody and you can remake that decision anytime. 

So if you don’t like the amount of money your spouse is making, sometimes I coach on this where women say, I want to be home with the kids, but I want him to make more money and he’s not ambitious or driven or he doesn’t know how to, or he hasn’t figured it out. If you want more money and your spouse isn’t on board with that, you need to figure out how to make more money. Okay? Your money situation is yours to own. Always stay empowered with it. 

All right, let’s talk about sex. If you got little ones, you might want to turn this one off until or skip ahead a little bit. Okay. Not going to get graphic here, but I want to be clear again that everybody’s bodies are their own to own. Nobody owes anybody anything. Okay? One of the things I talk about a lot when we talk about marriage is that you are responsible for your own needs. Your spouse is not there to meet your needs. 

This is where again, Hollywood and things have sort of sabotaged us because we’ve created this illusion that somebody else is going to complete me and take care of all my needs and then I’m going to feel whole and complete. And sometimes during the dating and courtship process, it kind of feels like that, but that doesn’t last. That’s not reality in the end, right? Each of us is responsible for our own needs. And whenever I teach that, the number one question I get is, what about sex?

If I want a monogamous marriage, I’m not going to go outside of my marriage, and my spouse and I have both agreed to that and have committed to that, then doesn’t that mean that my spouse needs to cooperate in a certain way in order for me to have that need met? Unfortunately, my friends, for those of you that are struggling in this situation, that is just not the way it works. That is not reality, okay?

So if you have a spouse that is not interested in sex or not as frequently as you would like it or whatever the situation may be, it’s still your responsibility to manage your own sexual desire. It is yours to own. What are you gonna do with that? I don’t know. Maybe you’re gonna have to live with the discomfort of it not being met. I don’t know. It’s up to you. But ultimately your spouse is not responsible for fulfilling you sexually.

Now, for those of you that are the lower desire partner, it is not wrong for your spouse to desire sex either. Okay? This is probably an area where I see a lot of resentment build up and it’s a really vicious loop that people get stuck in. So I just want to say, wherever you are, whichever partner you are in this loop, I know how challenging it is, okay? I have so much empathy for you because, again, I’ve coached on it a lot.

I know if you’re the higher desire partner, you feel rejected, right? When your spouse is not interested in sex. You make it mean that they don’t like you, that you’re not lovable, that you’re not good enough or something like that. Or at the very least you have this unmet need. And I know that’s challenging. I know it is.

At the same time, becoming resentful or grumpy or passive aggressive or manipulative, even though I know you’re not doing it consciously and intentionally, we do this subconsciously, unintentionally, but we become this version of us when we’re not getting what we want sometimes, right? And we think our spouse should be giving it to us. That is not hot. It’s not a turn on. It doesn’t make your spouse want to have sex with you more. It does the exact opposite. 

It’s a total turn off because now it feels like even more of an obligation, even more of something that the person is supposed to do or has to do, which is the opposite of what is arousing to us sexually. And so you’re actually making the problem worse from this point. 

And if you are the lower desire partner and you feel bad that you don’t want it more and you think that you should or you know that it’s part of a healthy marriage and you don’t want to deal with a grumpy spouse and you don’t want them to, you know, be passive aggressive with you and so maybe you just do it anyway and then it’s even more miserable. I have so much empathy for you. But the truth is people pleasing and placating and pretending doesn’t work either. It’s not going to help you reconnect with your own sexuality and your own desire. It’s just not. Okay? 

So what is the solution? Gosh, this is like really go to Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife and take some of her classes. She’s the expert in this. I’ll just tell you from the coaching that I’ve done with higher desire partners, when they can get to a place in their heads of it’s okay. It really is. 

Like there’s lots of ways for us to connect and this part doesn’t have to change or even get better for me to appreciate my spouse and myself and recognize that I am worthy and lovable and their lack of sexual desire has nothing to do with me. It has to do with them. And it’s okay. Maybe it’s uncomfortable. Maybe it’s not ideal, but it’s okay. It’s not terrible. 

Like honestly, sometimes I’ll help people see this by saying, what if heaven forbid your spouse got in a terrible accident and they were physically injured and unable to have sexual intercourse with you, then would this be as painful? And the answer is always no. Like it would be uncomfortable, it’d be unfortunate, but because they wouldn’t be carrying around this resentment and this expectation that the person should be different, it would be much less painful, and they would suffer a lot less because of that. 

So that’s where you ultimately wanna get your head as the higher desire partner. As the lower desire partner, your job is to work on being vulnerable and being vulnerable just means telling the truth and allowing your truth to be known.

And so what’s true for you right now is that you have very low sexual desire or that you don’t enjoy it at all, that it feels like an obligation, and you’re doing it out of resentment and guilt, or because you don’t want to deal with an unhappy spouse. And maybe what’s true for you is that you don’t want that. You want to reconnect with your own sexuality and desire, and you know that’s available somehow, but you don’t know how to get there and in the meanwhile you really just want to tell the truth.

That’s true vulnerability in the beginning, right? That’s what sex is actually. Like really good sex is vulnerability and that only comes from being real and authentic. So just start by speaking in a true, authentic way. Okay? 

And then maybe the two of you, I’ve seen many couples decide to come to some kind of a compromise. And again, I’m going to go back to what I said in the beginning, which is stop trying to make this like a fairytale movie that isn’t even real. And let’s just be real about what we have right now and what we can work with. More like a “business partnership,” except in a business partnership, you’re not supposed to sleep with one another, I guess, if you’re not married, right? But let’s stay with me on my metaphor. You’re like married business partners, okay?

And so maybe it becomes something a lot less romantic like, I guess, Wednesday night. Let’s make Wednesday night the night that we have sex. And that way the higher desire partner knows not to ask any other night, it’s just going to be Wednesday nights or whatever frequency you decide. Okay. I just picked once a week because that’s what I’ve worked with a lot of couples on.

And the lower desire partner knows, okay, Wednesday’s going to be the day. So I’m going to try really hard to get my head in the right space, to think loving thoughts, to work on my own connection with my own body, with embodiment and being present and allowing pleasure and allowing myself to be vulnerable. And I’m going to work on that.

And it doesn’t mean that you’ll right away start enjoying it, but you’ll know Wednesday’s the day I need to try to get my head in the right space, or not overeat dinner, or whatever helps you to enjoy that experience more with your spouse. Okay, and just start from there, make it more transactional. That’s okay, there’s no shame in that. But we gotta start from the truth, and we gotta start from not trying to manipulate one another to get our needs met. Are you with me?

All right, that’s what I have to say about that topic. Let’s talk about household chores and duties and responsibilities. So there’s a lot of work that needs to happen to run a household, especially if there are lots of people, lots of kids living there. There’s cleaning and shopping and cooking and laundry and all the things that need to happen. And just like with the money, this is equal responsibility of both people, regardless of your gender.

It sounds ridiculous to me to have to say that out loud about any of these topics, but it’s the truth. Even if you know this logically, maybe your subconscious, like below the conscious level is subconscious, right? Maybe your subconscious still doesn’t see it this way. I think my subconscious still doesn’t really get it because I notice myself feel guilty if my husband has to make dinner two nights in a row, even though he’s perfectly willing to, he volunteers to all the time.

It’s not even necessarily a control thing. I mean, I do make dinner mostly because I like to make what I like and I have opinions about the right way to make dinner. Okay. So there’s some of that that comes into play, but I do think I also still have this socialization or conditioning in my head that says that’s my job because I’m the woman. And that if my husband does it a couple of days, then I feel bad.

That’s how I know I still have it because I feel bad that he had to do that, even though he doesn’t feel bad. Interesting to notice, right? So we’re just noticing and we’re just bringing up these stories and working on them in our own heads. But ultimately, again, we need to be having healthy conversations. Okay?

So the work that you’re doing at home, any of you who are doing the housework, maintaining the house or the home, the family dynamics, is valuable work. We pay people to do if we don’t have a spouse there to do it, right? If I’m not gonna clean my house and my husband or kids aren’t gonna clean the house, if no one’s gonna clean the house, I’m gonna pay somebody to clean my house. 

If I’m not going to do the grocery shopping or the laundry, I’m gonna need to pay somebody, if no one in my family is, right? I’m gonna need to pay somebody and it’s worth it. Many people pay people to do these responsibilities because we value them enough to pay money for them. They are valuable. We all want these things done in our lives and it’s great to do it yourself. I’m not saying not to, I’m saying it’s valuable.

This is why the money is not just the person going to work earning it. The money is also, needs to be paid to you, you could say, for the work you’re doing at home. It’s valuable work. You have to understand that. Now, it’s also both people’s responsibility, even though you might choose to divide up the work differently, right? 

You might agree, hey, I’m gonna be responsible for grocery shopping and making dinner, and maybe your spouse is gonna be responsible for something different, or maybe you’re gonna own all of it as your spouse goes to work. I’m okay with that, I just want you to make the choice consciously as though you have a business and you’re dividing up responsibilities, not just default to what you think is true based on gender or based on what your parents did or based on what you think your spouse wants.

Their opinion is of course very relevant and valid. They’re an equal partner as well, but we need to be having conversations both ways. We need to understand each other and we need to decide together like equal partners how this is going to go. 

And once again, nobody is anybody else’s boss either. I see this happen a lot where instead of an equal partnership, somebody thinks that this is like a hierarchy. And so someone will say, hey, the house isn’t clean. What’s going on? As though the person at home cleaning house is the employee of the other person. That is not the case.

You are not anyone’s employee and you are also not anyone’s boss. If you are married and you are running a life together and you are running a family together, you are equal partners. Okay? You got to keep working on understanding this and having discussions with your spouse about this if necessary.

And then finally, when it comes to raising children, the same thing is true. You have shared responsibilities in raising your shared children. Okay, now this is one where I tend to see, in most cases, the woman tries to be the dominate one, and maybe the man likes that, or maybe he doesn’t, but often I’m coaching women who believe they know the right way to raise these kids and the spouse is not complying. And I say the same thing. You guys are equal partners in how you’re going to raise these kids.

So yes, your opinion is relevant and valid, but so is your spouse’s. And even though he or she may not be there with the kids all day, just like you’re not there making the money, doesn’t mean you don’t have equal say over the money. And they’re not there raising the kids during the day while they’re at work, doesn’t mean they don’t have equal say in how we’re gonna raise the kids. So either way, both parties have equally weighted opinions.

All right, now, what do we do when we disagree? Because this happens, right? All the time, especially with things like raising kids. Well, what if I disagree with my spouse and we can’t come to a compromise? Well that’s where again, some coaching is going to come in really handy. I highly recommend you have a coach or a therapist or somebody to help you work through it. But as long as you’re approaching it as equal partners, that’s what I really wanna emphasize here, okay?

So, it just so happens that my husband and I do run an actual business together too. So I’ll tell you what this looks like in our business and then how we translate that into our personal life. Is we pretty clearly defined what Jake’s responsibilities were in the business and what mine were. Okay, so I oversee all the coaching and the marketing. Those are my two departments that I’m responsible for. So any staff or outside help that we hire to help us in those areas reports up through me, and that’s my responsibility in my departments.

He oversees all of the web development, all the customer support, and the bookkeeping and financial part. Okay? So This doesn’t mean that we don’t have discussions with each other. I discuss with him marketing strategy and program creation and things like that. And he discusses with me customer support or maybe new technology we might wanna try out for the website or things like that. We discuss things and we both equally have valid opinions to bring to the table. But if we really can’t agree on it, then we defer to the person whose department it is to own.

Okay, so for example, if I really feel strongly about a marketing strategy and my husband doesn’t agree with it, I want to hear him out, I take his opinion into consideration, but ultimately I have the final say. And if he feels really strongly about something in customer support, He asks my opinion, but if we disagree, he has the final say. That is his department, right?

So maybe I really want my husband to take a promotion at work and he doesn’t want to, then I hope that he’ll be respectful enough to hear me out, and I know my opinion is valid, but ultimately, if he’s gonna be the one taking the new job or not, it’s his decision, right?

And let’s say with the kids, if I’m home with the kids all day, and he thinks that we should homeschool the kids, and I think they should go to public school, and if we homeschool them, I’m gonna be the one doing the homeschooling, then I get the final say, really. It’s my department that I’m “owning,” even though we both have a highly vested interest and opinion that’s relevant. You hear what I’m saying? 

So this gets tricky and complicated with individual situations. I realize I don’t mean to say that this podcast is going to answer all those questions. I know it’s not. I know you have a million questions of scenarios that don’t fit so neatly into what I just told you. That is why I offer on occasion a free coaching call, free coaching workshop. 

So I would invite you to come and join me and bring me your questions. You can also shoot questions into me on Instagram. Sometimes I take long breaks from Instagram for my own mental health and time management, but I try to get on there and answer questions. We also have the podcast hotline that you could call a question into, 1-888-HI-JODI-M. So there’s ways for you to get specific help on your individual questions, but I hope that this gives us a starting point of conversations that we can be having.

If in your marriage relationship, you are operating from a lot of resentment or power plays or manipulation or martyrdom, or maybe there’s passive aggression happening or just outright aggression or self-pity, or there’s lots of shame and blame cycles happening, then this is a topic worth exploring.

I recommend that you take a look at it first and foremost on your own, and then if your spouse is open, maybe you start having conversations together. Because when we understand the equality of our roles and the possibilities that can exist in a healthy marriage and in the dynamics in a home, we are going to create a better situation for ourselves today and for future generations. And that is work worth doing.

Thanks for joining me today, everyone. I’ll see you next time on another episode. Take care.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: jodymoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s jodymoore.com/freecoaching.