Dating for a Corporate Family
Dating a person as dictated by the predominant pop culture essentially involves testing out a partner for sexual and romantic compatibility. While for some long-term relationship structures this might be a sane strategy, if you are building a corporate family, it makes about as much sense as choosing which carton of milk you are going to buy by tapping on all the jugs and listening for the sound they make. Sure, carton sound may have some slight correlation with internal milk quality, but it is largely irrelevant.
The concept of a corporate family is one we explore in depth within The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships. Broadly speaking, the most unusual characteristic of the corporate family vis-a-vis the way marriage is construed in pop culture is that the couple works together and combines their public identity. More broadly, when you marry someone in a corporate marriage you combine with them into a single, synergistic unit—you aren’t just two friends living together and having sex. When you start a business, you do it together. When you build something, you build it together. When you raise kids, you raise them together. The corporate family model holds that you should not be marrying someone if they cannot make you more efficacious in every domain of your life, not just a few. While men and women have different strengths and weaknesses on average, they both have a role to play in every aspect of life.
This is not some new idea but the way Calvinists traditionally structured their relationships. As David Hackett Fischer put it in Albion’s Seed:
“They were expected to work together for the common welfare of the family. There was no clear idea of “separate spheres” in this culture. Depositions filed [in the courts of a heavily Calvinist area] describe women routinely doing heavy field labor, carrying sacks of grain to the mill, cutting firewood, tending swine, and castrating steers.”[[93]](#_ftn93)
We will strongly recommend this model to our kids, as everyone we know who lives by it enjoys both a stronger relationship and more professional success than most of those who don’t. Moreover, the corporate family model aligns with our culture’s values of efficacy over emotional indulgence and may help to reduce the odds that our kids select partners who are good looking and nice but wanting in diligence and intelligence (because they will have to deal with the consequences of an incompetent person more viscerally in their daily lives). In an ideal world, our family will maintain this practice and it will become one of the weird things we are “known for,” like polygyny in the older LDS Church.
This corporate model of relationships is part of why we see things like gender and sexuality as tools rather than particularly important guides when choosing a partner. The number or gender of partners our kids select doesn’t really matter to us—so long as through their partnerships, they have lots of kids and work efficiently as a unit. You are not a full thing as a person; you must build the thing you become and that thing is your family: Your partner(s) and your kids.
More generally, our marriage has always been structured around our shared goals and identity rather than things like romance or sex. This is outlined pretty well in our wedding vows:
Malcolm:
- Today, I pledge to dedicate the rest of my life to strive together with Simone for our shared goals. I dedicate myself to a shared identity—to fight for the legacy we will leave as a unit rather than that either of us would have had as individuals.
- It would be disingenuous for me to promise that I will love Simone for the rest of my life. Feelings are transient, not something we control, and I cannot promise our future path together will be without hardship or our relationship without trials. What I can promise is that she will never have to face any hardship alone as long as I live.
- But I pledge more than a conditionless perpetual contract of mutual companionship. I promise to treat Simone with the respect she has earned and that I will never stop striving to improve myself as the only means available to me to adequately honor her.
Simone
- Today I vow to take on life with Malcolm as a team and make his dreams, struggles, defeats, and triumphs my own. No matter how difficult or glorious life becomes, I will stand by Malcolm’s side.
- I will let neither distance nor hardship prevent me from helping Malcolm achieve his greatest ambitions. I promise to amplify his strengths, fill in his weaknesses, and focus his attention on reaching for each next goal.
- Rather than promise a comfortable life, I pledge to make Malcolm’s existence as epic as possible, filling it with daring adventure, satisfying character development, splendid romance, and a legacy that lasts long after he is gone.
- I am privileged to share a life with Malcolm, and I promise to make it meaningful.
The larger philosophy here is that sex and romance are charming garnishes on top of married life—not the main dish. Historically, cultures have elevated romance to ensure that couples reproduce at a high rate and that couples’ kids are likely to be genetically related to a married mother and father. Without DNA evidence, a wife’s dalliance could be a major issue and a child born out of wedlock would likely increase the number of orphans under community supervision, which historically speaking could impose quite a high cost on small towns. While there were good reasons why historical cultures so strongly emphasized sexual and romantic compatibility, those reasons are not as compelling in the modern context— especially not in a cultivar like ours, which frames the creation of kids anywhere other than a lab as a moral and ethical shortcoming (unless financial constraints drove those children to be conceived naturally).
Because our House holds that spouses should always work as a single unit when possible, we recommend partners “test each other out” not by probing romantic and sexual compatibility, as pop culture dictates, but rather by testing their dynamism as business partners first and foremost. Rather than passively watching them date, we will encourage our kids to start side hustles with potential partners and see how well they work together as a method for determining whether they are a strong match. If a couple has not yet built a company together, we will encourage them to undertake some form of ritualized group trial in which they have to work together to overcome a difficult challenge, like raising a nontrivial (and challenging) amount of funds for a cause they care about, or living in a foreign country for a month, on very little funds, where they don’t know the language.
Professional compatibility is also a better predictor of parenting compatibility. Building a business or tackling work challenges with someone will do profoundly more to help you understand how you’ll both tackle challenges in child rearing than sex ever could. What’s more, should you ultimately have kids together, you’ll find raising them much easier if you both run a business together (as that way, you call the shots: You can set your own schedule, bring infants to the office, and integrate parenting with work as you please).
How much of your adult life do you really spend going on romantic outings or having sex? Around 0.5%,[[94]](#_ftn94) right? And how much time do you spend working? Roughly 30%,[[95]](#_ftn95) right? If you can find someone who makes every moment you are working remarkably more enjoyable and impactful, they will improve your quality of life dramatically more than someone who dishes out sex and scintillating candle-lit dinners.
This is not to say we won’t encourage our kids to learn to flirt, date, and—if pre-marital sex is a worthwhile trade-off for them—hone their sexual skills. We will encourage our kids to improve these skills while contextualizing their relative importance in the larger scheme of relationships: We will teach our kids that romantic and sexual skills can be used to achieve an important goal, be it greater psychological connection, greater partner satisfaction, or something else entirely. However, we want to make sure our kids never forget the place of such trivialities in life: They are hobbies with little reproductive necessity and our kids honestly might be better off if they were not distracted by them. Perhaps future generations will develop the technology to free us from our emotional tethers.
We pity these “alpha” men who proudly show off what are essentially servile obsequients in “hot” outfits as wives. There is an old truism: “Weak women raise weak sons.” While we disagree with the gendered nature of this assertion (weakness is not a feminine trait), it highlights something soft cultures will allow you to forget: If you marry your lesser, you fail at your most important duty as a human, which is to create a new generation that surpasses you.
Marriage Contracts
One benign (to us) aspect of our marriage that regularly shocks others is our marriage contract. We are not the only culture to put heavy emphasis on the concept of a marriage contract—the Jewish Ketubah (a marriage contract often hung on the walls of Jewish households) comes to mind—but we are the only culture to actively negotiate one so detailed or to have it be a living document.
Before we got married, we pored over relationship advice forums and interviewed dozens of older individuals, who had had both successful and unsuccessful relationships, to make detailed lists of every point of conflict they had experienced. We used our findings to create a detailed list of all potential points of conflict and talked through how we would handle each. This means we do not encounter conflict over things like home temperature, finances, or how we relate to each other’s parents, as it was all pre-negotiated. It also means there is very little opportunity for anger in our relationship, as anger is triggered when the manner in which a person is treated does not align with how they expect to be treated and thorough relationship contract negotiation explicitly delineates the sort of treatment each partner desires.
We then separated out elements of our combined life and granted ultimate responsibility over specific domains to a specific partner. This means that a designated partner always has the last call on decisions not pre-negotiated in the relationship contract. As an example, one partner may have ultimate control over all financial decisions or child rearing decisions. Sometimes these domains are “mirrored,” meaning each partner might have ultimate say over what the other partner does with their body (e.g., each partner is able to veto tattoos or elective surgery) or each partner might have final say over how the couple relates to the other’s family (e.g., if the family of Partner A wants to see Partner B, they need to stay on good terms with Partner B).
Why do we use this system instead of relying on compromise? Our culture holds that compromise ruins marriages. Compromise demonstrates that partners do not trust each other to take each other’s needs into account and, worse, it subconsciously motivates each party to exaggerate their position, deepening the conflict in the long run. For example, if one partner wants four and another wants five, the one who wants four is incentivized to pretend they want two and the one who wants five is incentivized to pretend they want eight, meaning most people will subconsciously drift toward these more extreme positions.
This dynamic encourages partners to lean away from each other, toward opposing positions, when a well-designed marriage incentivizes people to lean into each other and toward a greater purpose. Compromise furthermore encourages partners to see themselves as distinct individuals with distinct (and often conflicting) needs, which makes it nearly impossible for partners to operate as a truly integrated unit.
The most unique aspect of our marriage contract when contrasted with a Ketubah (the Jewish relationship contract) is that it is a living Google Doc that is regularly edited. About once a year—or as some new, unanticipated point of potential conflict comes to our attention—we return, discuss what should be changed, and formalize mutually-agreed-upon alterations. One thing that’s notable is that, in negotiating the points of our marriage contract, virtually all suggested terms have been mutually supported. By discussing terms in a non-emotional context with a focus on creating a successful, productive, and long-lived marriage, it is astoundingly easy to develop creative solutions to address even stark differences in taste, lifestyle, and personal comfort.
When people embark on a relationship agreeing that the goal of the partnership is to maximize collective efficacy in pursuit of a shared mission (rather than prioritize personal comfort), there is very little room for genuine disagreement. The vast majority of disagreements in such relationships result from trivial and easy-to-resolve information asymmetries and differing hypotheses.
If you want to read more about this practice to design something similar for your own House, check out The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships.