Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Kim and I love talking about relationships, the good, the challenging and everything in between. And just like you, we've had our share of ups and downs over the years. Today, we're doing something a bit different. We're answering five questions about our own journey together. You'll get to hear how we first met, how we work through disagreements, and we've got some advice for couples in 2024.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Hey, we're Kim and Roger and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should, we think about the future as a field of possibilities and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage. And it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house flipping business, we've achieved some big dreams and most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Hear conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts, and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: These are relationship conversations for real people, by real people. So sit back, get comfort in whatever tickles you pickle, and enjoy living the team life.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: You so today we're going to throw it back a little bit. We're actually going to ask each other five questions and each answer the same questions to give you guys that might have joined us recently as our audience is growing quite quickly.
Some more information about our background. We have had a few dms just asking us for a little bit extra, finding out more about who we were and how we got to where we are. And so we thought, let's just take an episode. It's been a year of us doing the podcast. Let's just take an episode to give our new listeners a little more info and a little more insight into who we are.
Roger and I as a couple, and how we got to running our own relationship podcast. So with that, let's kick off. And first question, Roger, how did we meet and what were your first impressions?
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, we met at Curtin University in 2002. During the first week, we were introduced by a mutual friend. Funnily enough, we had a lot of friends who were friends, but we never actually met each other. I wasn't looking for a partner at all. I just come out of. I was 18, but I just come out of a two year relationship and I was really just looking at uni and parting with my mates.
And then I met you and I think we bonded pretty quickly.
You were always a bit of a dichotomy where you were so down to earth and so chill, and yet at the same time, you were so fiery and you wore these tiny little denim and scottish pleat skirts, which left not much of the imagination. You were very sexy and very beautiful. And, yeah, I think you were such a full person and I think that just really attracted me to you as firstly a friend, but I think even at the very start, as maybe a friend, but could be a little bit more than just a friend.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: I think that is one of the sweetest things you've ever said to me, calling me a full person at 17, I definitely don't think I was whole, but to think that you saw me as a full person, that really lights my heart up. Thank you.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
I also talked about your sexy little skirts as well.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Right past those, it was the early 2000s, although pretty much everything that we wore back then is back in fashion now, which is hilarious to watch.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: So, again, how did we meet and what were your first impressions?
[00:04:24] Speaker A: So, as you say, we met at uni, but I would say, how did we meet? We met getting specific, at one lunchtime on the grassy knoll, hanging out with a group of collective friends. And we had a little bit of.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: An argument and we haven't stopped since.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: We had a little bit of an argument over skiing. We both thought we knew better and there was a little bit of a tussle between us that you could tell there was something there.
There wasn't an arrogance in the argument. There was a little bit of prodding, I would guess you'd call it.
It was cute. It was cute. And the very first time I met you, honestly, I know this sounds so wooey, but I knew in my bones you were going to be part of my life. I don't know how. I don't know whether I thought you were going to be a friend or what it was, but I was sure this person called Roger was going to be in my life, which is such a wacky thing to think.
And then I didn't really think much about it. We became friends pretty quickly at uni. We had a lot of subjects together.
But what were my first impressions?
I thought you were very cute, definitely, but I thought you had great personality. I really enjoyed your robustness, the fact that you were willing to put your ideas forward, that you were willing to speak confidently. I had been away for a year beforehand, living in Switzerland, doing a youth exchange, and had spent a lot of time hanging out with some really confident, interesting kids from all over the world. And I really had loved that. I had absorbed that a lot. These people with such confidence and such curiosity and all those sorts of things. And you seemed to have that same sort of thing going on. You were interested in conversations, you wanted to engage in them, and I really enjoyed that, that you seemed to really care about what I had to say and what we were talking about. And I thought, over the next couple of months, I thought, this person's really enjoyable to be around. And then I realized I liked you when one of my girlfriends said she thought you were cute, because I said, you can't date him. I'm going to date.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Hands off, bitch. He's mine. He's mine.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Did not speak to my friend like that. No, I realized then that I liked you. I was quite sure because I was really worried when she said she liked you or thought you were cute. I don't know if she'd got to the liking stage. And yes, the next thing you know, we were kissing at a party, and we have been together for 22 years since.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it was one of those ones where I think you told a couple of my best mates, you were like, I really like Roger. I really like him. And then they told me, and I was like, I'm going to get with Kim at the party tonight.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Just like, context here. I was 17, you were 18, which.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Is legal in Australia, just for everyone listening.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: Absolute babies. Absolute babies. When we met.
Okay. All right, next question.
What has been the most challenging aspect of our relationship and how did we overcome it?
[00:07:56] Speaker B: So Kim and I literally just put these questions together. We haven't done any research or prep for this, but just thinking about it, there are obviously a heap of difficult moments. We've been together 22 years in our relationship from times at the start, middle and end. Then, of course, you become a parent and your world revolves around your little one. And then, of course, her many challenges, moving home from moving back to Perth, from our home in Japan, which was our know, we split off and did different degrees, and Kim went to work after we finished our degree at Curtin, our accounting degrees, and I went and did a law degree.
But I think maybe that's it. Do you know what the most challenging of our relationship is when you're together for 22 years? And you're really just kids when you first meet is how much you grow, and then how do you align that growth and grow together? So couples after 20 years of marriage will say, oh, we grew in different directions. We grew apart, or they're not the person that I fell in love with. And even though Kim is the person I fell in love with, she's chalk and cheese to the person she is.
You know, we grew at very different rates.
We grew at very different speeds. That happens just because we're two different people. It happens in men and women generally. But, yeah, I think that that was probably the most challenging thing and the thing that sort of almost tore us apart a few times, but now is actually one of probably that understanding that growth is natural and you want your partner to grow, you want to grow. And so how do you align that? And I think for us, how did we overcome it? Well, we became a team, and I think probably answered, that's going to be the response to a few of our questions. But we started talking more. We got on the same page. We became aligned. We became a team. And so we started growing in the right direction. We started talking more. So we started understanding how the other person was growing more. So we could keep up or we could slow down, or we could bring them along with us.
We got curious about each other.
We got self aware. I got really self aware. So we recently did an episode on Bids of Connection. I sort of started that episode talking about how I didn't used to turn towards Kim when talking about when she made a bit of connection. I used to turn away, and I didn't realize I was doing that. And over time, I sort of used to look at myself without knowing this terminology.
And I just said, God, Kim's always talking, always wanting to engage God, she's always at me. And then I just had to stop and take accountability and go, well, actually, is she always at me, or is she always wanting to try connect with me? How can I take accountability of this situation? I could either one tell her to stop always being interesting, having great ideas, or being too full on, or I can actually start to try and match that level. And I started to try and match that level and just found that I became a better person. My connection with Kim grew, and that was maybe ten something years ago. And I think since then, that's how we overcame it. So I actually took an interest in my partner. I started to put her before my own interests, and as a result, I grew a heap, and we grew together. So what about you? Sweetie, what was the most challenging aspect of our relationship and how did we overcome?
[00:11:39] Speaker A: It is an interesting question because I think for me, and I am a detailed person, so it's no surprise I focus in on the fact that it's the most challenging aspect of our relationship, because the most challenging part of our life is definitely not what has been the most challenging part of our relationship.
And talking just about the relationship in isolation and looking at that, because, in fact, the most challenging part of our life has been. Our relationship has been incredible, which is really a testament to how far we've come in the last decade compared to our first ten years or the last twelve years compared to our first ten years.
The most challenging aspect for me is definitely what you were talking about. It was the time. It was actually the feeling. That's what came to me, as we have said this question. It was a feeling of, we are no longer on the same page.
I no longer seem a teammate in my partner. I no longer feel connected to my partner deeply. In fact, I feel like every day we're growing further apart.
And I can just remember sitting on the edge of the bed having this feeling and wondering what to do. And we had a lot of animosity between us at the time. Obviously, we've talked a lot about how when we don't work as a team, we start vying for resources and we start becoming adversaries rather than teammates and partners. And we certainly were much more in that space. And I just remember the heartbreak. It broke my heart. And I didn't know how to get out of it. I didn't know how to get back. I didn't know that we could just learn skills. I didn't know that relationships needed work the way that everything in life needs work, that that was normal, to have problems, to have really big problems. I didn't know any of those things. And so for me, that was the most challenging aspect by a mile because I felt heartbroken and I felt really, really lost. And how did we overcome it? We overcame it by staying in the relationship. Firstly, that was the first thing we did. And I'm not saying everyone should stay in there. This is by no means edict to everyone else. This is just what we did. We stayed in it.
And we started with 1ft in front of the other, and we did reading and we sought help, and we started to talk about the higher level stuff of what a relationship is and what's important. And we started to build our skills. We saw that we needed. We had deficits in certain areas and we needed more information of how to be in a relationship in a way that was going to support one another. And the more skills we learned, the more we wanted to learn, which was super cool. And there's so many resources, there's so many ways to learn in life. Our podcast is one tiny teeny drop in the ocean of ways to learn. And so, yeah, we started to learn. And when we learned together and made that commitment together to grow, it just flourished from there.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that, sweetie. I think one of the things with us is how did we make it after 22 years is we always wanted to put the effort in to stay together. And I think that was something really special about us is we always just wanted to put the effort in and we just didn't know how to, we didn't have the skills to be in a good relationship and we slowly, bit by bit, learnt those skills.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: Do you know what I think as well, though, as you say that it's not that we just wanted to stay, we wanted things to be better. I think that's a crucial difference. Some people stay and say, well, I just am not leaving, but that's not going to help you. We said we want things to be different. We were very clear about that. We didn't want the life we had. We wanted a better life and a better relationship for ourselves.
That was motivating.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: What are your favorite shared memories or experiences in our relationship?
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Well, after 22 years, there's quite a few, I think, back from when we were young. It was when we'd go down on study breaks before our uni exams and we'd go down to my parents holiday house and we'd sit there and study all day. And then at night we'd watch movies, drink $9 bottles of wine and make like big cheesy pasta bakes in our tracky dax and put face masks on and just dick around and we'd go for runs together on the beach in the morning and we were just young and free.
Since then, some of our holidays, it's funny, like Kim and I do have a passion for skiing and we moved to one of our favorite holiday destinations, Naseko, to live full time and work. And so we've got lots of great memories from there. But funnily enough, one of the best memories was on this. We went to Cambodia, which was just one of the most beautiful places in the world, and it was one of the cheapest holidays we've ever been on as well. That was the funny thing. And we got a tuktuk driver who would drive us to anchor Watt and all the anchor watt and all the temples at like, 05:00 a.m. In the morning. And we just chose him, right. We didn't realize that he had the slowest tuktuk. So all the other tuktuks would take people into the temples, and it would take him about 20 minutes. I think it took us about 45. And all the other drivers would actually each morning because we did this, like, four or five mornings in a row to see all the temples. It was such an amazing experience. They'd really start taking the piss out of this bloke and asking us if we would, like, ditch him and go with them. We were like, no, he's our slow tuktuk driver. And to me, we'd sit there and then we'd go to, there's a place called Pub street where you can get $1 beers afterwards. And we were sitting in a foreign country, Cambodia. It's got a very dark history, but recently, it's just one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The food's amazing. But as we're on that tuk tuk, we were doing things our own way. We didn't care that we were the slowest. We were just sitting know you crouched in the back. Kim's got her head on my shoulders. I've got my arm around her. And I think maybe that's a bit of how we go about life sometimes, is we do it our own way. We take it a bit slower than sometimes, even though we feel like sometimes we're going a million miles an hour. But we do it our own way and we do it together.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: I love that. I think for me, I have so many memories, and I think that's the core of my favorite memories are all our memories. They're everything we've done.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: You can't say that. There's a massive cop out.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: There's so many things.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: I like all of my children.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: I do like all of my children. All one of them.
It's one of those things where we look back and I do love what you say about having done it our way. We always do things our way. Okay. If I had to pick one specific memory, it would be the.
Oh, God. See? Like, make me emotional. It would be our first day in Botswana on safari, on our honeymoon. We were late, so our classic air Botswana had delays, unknown reasons, and we overnighted in this really crappy hotel. And all the other couples that were on heading to safari who were also delayed by this airline got sent to the same crappy hotel, and there was people screaming at the receptionist, furious. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I've booked? I'm missing my safari, blah, blah, blah. And we just looked at each other and said, can we please have the key? Went to the room and went, well, this is great. Let's go have some.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Expensive. The first night, a very expensive safari.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: But we weren't going to let it take us down. We weren't going to lose the night entirely. And we went to the boma, and we had a great dinner. And that next morning, we flew out first thing in the morning. Gives me shivers. Got off the little.
It's like a bus in the air over there.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Taxi.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Really? Taxi? Yeah. Got off the tiny little two person, three person plane. Obviously three persons, because we weren't flying. And we had. Our driver met us. What was his name? He was so lovely. Started with P Park.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: Park.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: I wrote to them about him. He was so great.
And he had prepared breakfast for us so we could go straight on a game drive. And we took off into safari, into the wilderness to safari. And I had grown up. I'd been to Africa multiple times with my family. My family were very big on Africa and educating us kids on the animals over there and watching Nat geo videos and stuff. And I had never done the Okavango delta. And so for me, going to Botswana was huge. And we drove out to this dreamland that I had had in my head. And I was sharing it with my new husband, with this amazing, thoughtful driver who had and host who had brought us breakfast. And we ate breakfast in the wilderness of Africa, looking at animals. And it was utterly surreal. Utterly surreal. An absolute dream come true.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: And that night, we had a romantic honeymoon dinner, and they sang us fertility songs to us. And then we got walked out to little hut on the water, where you weren't allowed to leave at night because you'd get eaten by lions, and you could hear the hippopotamuses chilling around you just a few meters away, which is pretty magic. But again, we did it our own way. We did it our own way. We didn't let the setbacks ruffle us too much. And we really made the best out of it. And it was an adventure, and we love adventure. So that's very much us.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Next question. How do we handle disagreements and conflicts, and what have we learned from them?
[00:22:08] Speaker B: So we have disagreements and conflicts all the time. It's just part of our personalities. Kim's very stubborn, and we're about to have another one. Look, we knock heads a lot.
We knock heads a lot, and we have very strong opinions and we care a lot about stuff and we like to do things our own way. Even though we are a team, we're a very strong team. But really overarching is the big thing, is that we know we're on the same team and we are so aligned in where we're going in our lives and who we are and what we want to achieve is that we literally will be halfway through an argument. Both of us, or at least one of us will realize we've gone too far, we've said something too much, or we're like, why are we so angry about something that doesn't even matter?
And we just say, hey, let's stop fighting. So we've had quite a few fights even in the last week, just because it's school holidays. Our daughter's very dysregulated. We're very dysregulated.
There's just a lot going on and we've been able to, again and again and again, just stop ourselves and go, hey, we're not really fighting because we dislike each other. We're not fighting because we totally agree on a really disagree on a really important issue, and it's a game breaker. We're fighting because we're two people who are highly stressed, who are maybe struggling a bit right now, and we're on the same team. We're aligned. We know where we want to go. So let's move on. Now, that doesn't mean we don't come in and apologize to each other. It doesn't mean that we don't need sometimes to ask for a bit of space from each other to cool down. In fact, that's generally really what we do do. But I think the main way we handle them is understanding that they will happen, and understanding is that we're on the same team or aligned, so when they do happen that we can recover very quickly from them and move on.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I would completely agree with what you've said. I don't really have a lot to add in terms of how we disagree and how quickly we move on.
I guess little bit I would add on would be the more you practice good conflict resolution, the easier it becomes. At the beginning, trying to let go in the middle of an argument ten years ago was really hard. I felt like I had to prove myself. You didn't like letting go either? It was very hard. These days, letting go is very easy compared to how it used to feel. It's smooth and it's fast because, as you say, we are so aligned. We know it doesn't matter in the scheme of things. We know we're just heated. We know we love each other. We know we're on the same page, and we know what our dreams are and what goals we're working towards and that we run a household and a business together. We know all those things in our soul. And so because we're practiced, and the more you practice, the easier it gets. Conflict resolution can actually be quite simple. Once you're practiced at it.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: Well, you get into it. Just like you can get into a rhythm of getting into arguments, you can get into a rhythm of getting out of arguments and resolving conflicts. And when you're on the same team, you realize that a positive for you isn't a negative for me. Positive for me isn't a negative for you. You start to realize that a negative for you is a negative for me, a positive for you is a positive for me. And that really gets your mind focused on moving forward.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: That's the premise of Ubuntu. I am because you are.
And I don't know if anyone's heard about this.
It was a very famous NBA team who adopted Ubuntu, which obviously comes from Africa, and they adopted it into their philosophy and the team, and they became this incredibly successful team and unit because every player understood that what happened to them or what happened to their teammate was also happening to them. What happened to them was also happening to their teammate. Everybody was a part of one another, and that's that unit that you describe. I am, because you are. If you suffer, I suffer. If I succeed, you succeed. We are a unit.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And especially when you've got kids or what I think people don't realize is you are a team, you're a household, you're a unit, you're an organization. And you don't think that how you treat your partner or trying to look after yourself isn't going to impact the team as a whole, because that 100% will. Because it happens in the sports team, in organizations, it happens in businesses, and of course it's going to happen in the organization. If you're in your group of friends, you try to put yourself above the group of friends, you'll get brought down a peg or you'll get moved out of the group. We know that. So it's the same in the family.
Don't just go solo. Look to the team.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: I love it. So, obviously, we are all about teaching relationship skills. That's what we do here. But as our last question, what's one thing you would say to couples as they begin 2024? One piece of advice that you would give them moving into this new year. Roger.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Well, yeah, we say this all the time. The team's the way to the dream, but it's doubling down on your relationship when times get tough.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Oh, I love that.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: So I think we've talked to a couple of couples recently in our interviews and just in general, where they're saying, how did you get through what you got through and preserve the relationship? It's like, well, we went harder at the relationship because it's your safe area. Like, man, life's tough. Life's really hard. There's a lot of stuff that happens. If it doesn't happen to you, what happened to your partner or your kids, if it doesn't happen, your party kids, what happened to your friends or your parents.
People are getting made redundant. People are getting cancer and getting sick. People are passing away. Even smaller things can build up in your life. But if you know you've got someone who's got your back no matter what, if you've got a safe zone to go to at the end of the day, after a tough day of work, or you've got family struggles outside, like greater family struggles, or even within your family, there's issues, but you're really strong and concrete with your partner. That's a safe space. It's a safe space to let your feelings out. It's a safe space to not have to pretend to be someone else or be someone else. So anytime that you think, oh, this is too much, I can't deal with this, go harder at your relationship, get your partner involved and say, I love you, I believe in us. Not only that, as I want to start putting us first, because, trust me, with everything else the world's got to throw at you, having somewhere safe to be, having a partner that's got your back and you've got their back, it's a real game changer. All right, sweetie, what's the one piece of advice you would give other couples for 2024?
[00:29:13] Speaker A: I'm going to sound like we're not on the same team at all at the moment because I'm going to go counter you.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: What?
[00:29:19] Speaker A: Well, let me nuance it.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: So I'm going to say, I completely agree with you, always lean into the team. But I am going to take the word hard out of it. Rather than saying, yes, double down, yes, lean into the team. But I just have really noticed in 2023, a lot of people in our community are talking about burnout. They feel absolutely knackered. We felt it. A lot of people were commenting on it. And I feel like our world is so push, push, push in so many elements. The idea of pushing on the relationship as well is really stressful. Progress is progress. Do not make goals that are going to make your life really hard. Just start 1ft in front of the other. And that's the beautiful thing about relationships. If you start just 1ft and you don't go too hard and you don't pressure yourself, but you have a focus and a commitment to it, it will start to pick momentum up, which means it starts to do some of the work for you. You got to do that little bit at the beginning, but then things start working for you. You start to get that reciprocal relationship. And I really feel like for this year, it's super important for people to be a little bit gentle with themselves and gentle with their relationship. Yes, absolutely. Lean into it. Without a doubt, it is the key, in my opinion, your opinion, to a contented life. If you are in a relationship, leaning into it is the way to find that contentment and to chase down your dreams. But I'm just aware that people have been feeling really burnt out and I would say progress is progress. We do not have to have a certain amount of progress, any progress is progress. So be gentle on what your expectations are, be gentle on what change goals you have. Keep them really manageable. Make it kind to yourself and your partner and just allow the progress to pick up as you go. Allow the momentum to build naturally. Be organic about it. That would be my 2024 perspective.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: Yeah, have some self compassion.
You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:31:30] Speaker A: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more living the team life relationship insights and conversations, head over to Kim androj.com where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: And if you like today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy and it'll make us really happy.
[00:31:49] Speaker A: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
