There is an old saying “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes”. (I must admit I had to Google “walk a mile in his shoes” to even get something close, and not all the online sources agree on the real original or its origin.) While the original wording of this saying may have been lost in the many paraphrasings and translations, the sentiment is still true.
The value of anything – a service, an object, a meal in a restaurant – depends heavily on the perspective of the individual experiencing it. This perspective is usually the result of the person’s life experiences and how the particular object or service measures up to or compares against other experiences he or she has had in his or her life.
My perspective on things sometimes varies greatly from that of my husband, who has a very no-nonsense straightforward approach to most issues and problems. I, on the other hand, tend to circle the issue and view it from many angles before reaching a final conclusion. Sometimes I do my verbal circling aloud in his presence, which nearly makes him crazy. Maybe this is a guy thing versus a girl thing, but it’s definitely a difference between this guy and girl. He said to me “Nothing is simple for you, is it?” and I would have to agree the answer is No. I am reminded of the diagram of Man versus Woman where the Woman has dials, rheostats, and switches of many types, and the Man has just one switch labeled “On” and “Off”.
Adding to our differences in perspective is the fact that, unlike other people we know in our age group, we have only been married eleven and a half years. We each had entire lifetimes before getting together, which included many heartbreaks and at least one prior marriage for each of us. (We sometimes refer to this as our “baggage”.) I can’t speak for him, but I tend to envy those of our friends who have been married since very young adulthood and therefore have a rich and lengthy shared history. There is also a difference of ten years in our ages, which normally goes totally unnoticed until one of us watches a movie or listens to music that we remember fondly from our youth. The 50s, 60s and 70s are very different decades.
My husband and I own and operate a business together which is all about customer service. To serve each customer in the best way, you have to have a basic understanding of each customer. Some of that understanding comes from observation, some from direct questions and the resulting answers, and some from just a “gut feel”. We have had customers use our business who primarily wanted to be left alone. We have had other customers who desired a high degree of human interaction with us. And we have had every variation in between these two. The trick is understanding approximately what any given customer desires in order to give them a positive service experience. Sometimes it seems a delicate balance between providing the best service possible and “hovering” too much.
We are often asked to recommend local restaurants and attractions to our customers. Having only lived here seven months ourselves, that sometimes presents a challenge. We have made a serious effort to learn about and experience as many of these as possible, but on at least one occasion, the customer’s experience of a local restaurant was quite different than ours. Where we experienced a delightfully casual dining experience with delicious home cooked food, they came back to describe a terrible meal of chicken soup that was greasy and heavy. Sounds like comfort food to me – but then, unlike this couple, we are not millionnaires with our own small airplane accustomed to fine dining. A very different perspective indeed.
A few months ago, in frustration, my husband commented that he found me difficult to work with and wished we hadn’t gone into business together. At the time, I was a little hurt by the comment, but I have come to understand his perspective better in the past few days through my own frustration. One day this week, I was deeply concentrating on something at the computer that was related to our work. He walked into the room and started watching TV, and I was less than courteous to him (I think the specific term for my behavior starts with “B” and ends with “itch”). When we were discussing this later, I told him that it is hard for me to switch between being the coworker and being the wife, since these have such very different requirements. When we were both working for other people in different locations, the time we shared together, while limited in quantity, could be devoted more fully to each other and to non-work issues. We did share with each other our successes, failures, and funny stories from our respective jobs, but when we were home with each other, neither of us was actually AT work.
Owning a business together can be a real challenge for a husband and wife, and I think that’s an understatement. In speaking with other people with similar businesses, it is interesting to note that many, many of these businesses started out being run by a husband and wife, and wound up being run by the now-divorced wife all alone. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Such issues as scope of responsibilities (who does what) and what happens when one person has to be away, and even differences of opinion on how (or when) problems should be solved, can ignite some spirited and occasionally explosive “discussions”. A marital relationship between a man and woman who have good chemistry and shared values between them can also include an intimate knowledge of the others’ inherent strengths and weaknesses. In times of stress caused by business downturns and financial problems in this unstable economy, it can be all too tempting to use this knowledge (mostly of those weaknesses) as fuel for venting or fingerpointing.
In a better economy, both of us would probably still be working for other people, earning nice regular paychecks and having that “Holy Grail” known as employer provided health insurance. Those two things alone would relieve a tremendous amount of stress from our collective shoulders. But that’s not our reality at the moment. Our best options right now are to continue to work to make our business profitable, to seek other income streams, to pray a lot, and to communicate openly, and hopefully kindly, with each other about our very different perspectives. Otherwise, marriage and business are like oil and water.
