The Marriage
Offsite

We started the first version of The Marriage Offsite in France, on a much needed break after a burnout time at work. After two days of vacation... Thish decided to make a PowerPoint presentation She'd seen a partner at Bain NYC talk about a session he runs every year with his wife, reflecting on their life, setting goals, and accepting the trade offs and thinking through how they might help each other.

We decided we could do with a life plan refresh and a forcing function to do this well — so Thish took a few ideas vaguely remembered from that talk, created a few more exercises, and we went through the deck together that evening with a lot of big glasses of wine.

We've done it around 8 times in 10 years, and it's been the catalyst for some of our biggest chats on the life we want to build together. We usually do it on holiday, with lots of wine. Giving structure to these conversations hasn't felt constraining, but weirdly freeing.

Over the years we've changed it, and made an anonymised template we've shared with dozens of friends after they've heard about it and wanted to do it as well. We're sharing it now because (a) Claude and (b) we think it might help you too. But: use it however works for you — veer off-script, go slow, skip anything that doesn't fit. The only goal is that you both come away with something.

This is an early version and we're still learning. If something could be better, please tell us.

— Thishani & Steven