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My roommate and his finance are starting a company together. While I think it could be a wonderful experience to work with your partner, I also believe it takes an incredible stroke of luck to have it work out.

I assume we’ve all read at some point in our lives about the couple that lives and works together, traveling the world writing tour books or running a greenhouse and nursery together. Invariable they’re featured in a blurb in your favorite hobby magazine, generally as a thin veneer for promoting whatever the periodical is covering, elevating cycling or hiking or quilting to the level of lifestyle choice.

All this is perfectly fine by me.

But I think these people are the exceptions, or perhaps, the exceptional. I believe that these are people that already had an established love of the similar activities and have already achieved some degree of independence from each other within their relationship that allows them to work together. And, they have usually been together for a significant period of time. In short, they have an experienced, mature relationship, and somehow garnered the incredible fortune to end up together.

My roommate and his finance are two very different people – complementary, you might say. But they spend a voracious amount of time together, have extremely different work styles (she was his manager when they first met, and she hated working with him), and she doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life.

Again, this is all perfectly fine by me.

Taken independently, that is. Combined together, I can see the extraordinary about of time together, even more than now, instilling a cramped congestion. Their styles may conflict too much to be productive in a two-person company. And who knows, she may end up despising this new occupation. I’ve already witnessed a prolonged fight regarding the company, in which my roommate was entirely correct, but in which he presented his critiques in a very “engineering” demeanor, where some more delicate phrasings may have mitigated the disagreement. Coupling this with fact that he is very financially organized and she is not, but not necessarily in a complementary manner, this could be the thin edge of the wedge.

It’s may seem like a bit of a stretch, but I’ll swing this back around to martial arts. When you’re performing a dance (kata, in other schools) with full intent, the idea is not to slam through it as hard and fast as possible. You should be visualizing the enemies, and acting appropriately – some may come hard and fast, some slower and more methodically. Some may come all at once, some may wait and try to throw you off your rhythm. Through this exhibition, you can see the mind of the practitioner manifesting through movements, and you see that the pauses are just as important as the movements. What cacophony would music be without the silence?

Relationships are like this; they have fits and spurts, sometimes full of motion and sometimes slower. Sometimes you’re together, and sometimes apart. In order to survive silence and separation, you have to be personally and individually strong. You have to be able to hold yourself up and stand when no one else is there in order to be there to hold someone else up. Moreover, this time apart is not optional, but requisite for that personal development. If you spend your whole time moving together, you’ll just tire yourself out. You’ll be neglecting yourself. Once you’ve done that, it’s difficult to sustain a relationship. Pulling this to the Taoist side, we have too much motion and not enough rest, to much together and not enough apart, too much yang and not enough yin, too much conflict and not enough change.

In Western terms, I think it might just be called an Extremely Bad Idea.