The annual partnership retreat
a weekend that makes the heart grow fonder
More Myself exists to imagine a more psychologically resilient world and redefine modern day human flourishing. A core pillar of human flourishing is cultivating meaningful community whether that be in the form of friendships or partnerships. This essay explores a ritual for building depth in a partnership. In a future essay, I plan to share my approach to Think Weeks, a solo week-long practice where I dedicate the week to zooming out of the day to day. If you’re interested in reading more essays on these topics, let me know in the comments!
Paid supporters: I’m publishing my first Ask Me Anything (AMA) next week! Have a question for me on my writing process, my journey inwards, my partnership with Ryan, or anything in between? Reply via email or drop your question in the comments. I’ll select 2-3 questions to answer :)
For the last 5 years, my partner, Ryan, and I have retreated to the woods around our anniversary to spend the weekend dreaming up the next season of our life, getting strategic and tactical about what’s to come in the next year. These weekends have become anchor points in our partnership, preceding many of the most meaningful decisions we’ve made in our relationship.
As a society, we’re conditioned to always be moving, always in motion, forgetting what allows us to speed up is making space to slow down. By bringing intentionality to where we’re trying to move towards before optimizing for speed, we can assess whether the trajectory we’re charting towards continues to serve us in our pursuit of becoming the person we strive to be.
For us, our annual partnership retreat represents a moment of pause to observe and acknowledge how we’ve changed in the last year: who have we become and how have our belief systems evolved? For a weekend, we step away from our daily routine and dedicate time to seeing each other, our aspirations, and our fears more clearly. We find the words to articulate exactly what we’re seeking in our partnership in the next season of life and set the intention for how we hope our lives will unfold over the next year.
Our relationship today feels like a once-in-a-lifetime partnership. I’m often in awe that the universe brought us into each other’s lives, but it hasn’t always felt that way. There was friction and strife early in our relationship. The misalignment caused stress and uncertainty, but we anchored into our commitment from the start to have the hard conversations and do the work to get to alignment.
We’ve always found ourselves skeptical of the notion of soul mates. Are there really people in this world who are made for one another? Perhaps. But while we felt an intense draw to one another when we first met, we’ve worked at bringing our partnership to new depths and meeting each other at the “soul” level. We’ve become the one for each other.
Despite attraction, chemistry, and compatibility playing a meaningful role in our relationship, our shared responsibility in nurturing and intensifying our partnership all these years is ultimately what has led us to finding home in each other.
the origin story
When we first met, I was in my early 20s and he was in his mid-20s. I was a wide-eyed and bushy-tailed recent college graduate. He was a teacher turned consultant with a few years of the real world under his belt, ready to build a new life for himself after making the move to Boston. When I think back to the people we were 8 years ago, it feels lifetimes away. Since then, we’ve shed and grown into so many versions of ourselves.
The art of an enduring relationship is aligning with the other person’s pace of and path towards growth. Like two plants growing alongside one another, how do you share the same soil and reach towards the sun together without crowding each other out or overshadowing one another? How do you balance nourishing yourself while pouring your resources into feeding the relationship?
In the first few years of our relationship, I was anchored to the idea that my energy was best spent working my way through a large corporation and striving towards traditional life milestones. Our visions for the future were largely in sync: work hard, get promoted, move in together, get a dog, get married, buy a house, and have kids. The trouble was: after a few years of walking towards the first two milestones, I was met by my first existential crisis.
We had just moved into our dream neighborhood together, yet I increasingly felt a call to leave Boston. I had been promoted into the role I’d been working towards for my “entire” (aka 4 year) career, yet I could no longer envision myself committing my life to the industry. We were hitting all the milestones as intended, but I felt an overwhelming apprehension that we were building towards a life that was not meant for us.
After several months of ruminating, I finally admitted to myself and to Ryan that something needed to change. With the rumination came revelations. The first being that I felt a call to live in a city, San Francisco in particular, that would teach me how to slow down in ways not conducive to northeast culture. The second being that I felt a pull towards finding my way into the startup ecosystem.
Having lived all across the country and studied abroad in college, Ryan was in full support of my desire to leave the northeast for a few years in search of a new city to call home.
Around this time, we were celebrating our 3 year anniversary and decided that given all the uncertainty looming in our future, what was more romantic than getting away for the weekend to dream up what our lives could become? It would be the first time we set aside a weekend to focus solely on us and nothing else for 48 hours, creating space to talk openly about our future together.
the evolution of a partnership
Back then, I viewed our relationship as a dance between me versus him. When there was something that needed to be figured out, the solution was working towards a compromise with one of us acquiescing and getting the shorter end of the stick. Still being early in our relationship, I viewed this adversarial undercurrent as the cost of protecting myself in case he decided to get up and leave.
In hindsight, it was during this weekend that the notion of me versus him began to shift. On our way to our first annual retreat, we stopped by a local Walmart to grab ingredients and supplies we needed for the weekend. I distinctly remember us in the household aisle grabbing aluminum foil when Ryan turned to me and said, “By the end of this roll of aluminum foil, we’ll have our path to San Francisco figured out.”
We left that weekend clear about our intentions for the next year: find our way to San Francisco together. I had walked into the retreat feeling rudderless and defeated, confining my half-hearted search to roles in the northeast with little success. I walked away with Ryan’s wholehearted support and clarity that it was time to set our move in motion.
Over the course of an intense job search season, his commitment and confidence in me slowly shifted my perspective from a relationship of compromise to an aligned, intertwined partnership. It was no longer about navigating our relationship as if it were a zero sum game. It became working towards building a life that both of us could feel fully seen as true equals. As new challenges emerged on our path to San Francisco, we began looking for solutions from the same angle rather than from opposing sides. With time, trust, and commitment, we moved from convincing one another to get on our page to operating from the same page — in large part due to continuing our tradition of annual partnership retreats.
getting tactical
The more we’ve become entwined in each other’s lives, the more time we’ve invested in nourishing the soil we share and being intentional about the direction we grow towards, never leaving our fate to chance.
Each year, our annual partnership retreat sets the foundation for the life we work towards building the next 365 days. As I’ve become more focused on human flourishing and Ryan on building a strong foundation for our family, our retreats have evolved into a multi-threaded conversation with intention setting exercises interspersed — a departure from our once sticky note filled, design thinking inspired weekends.
I’ll share our approach to designing on our annual retreat including our day-by-day itinerary and the set of topics & questions we cover.
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pre-retreat prep
1-2 weeks before
retreat schedule
Our typical schedule and itinerary for a 3-day (Friday - Sunday) retreat is: