Marriage is hard under the best of circumstances, but it can be even harder when you're juggling the pressures of running a business and keeping your relationship strong. 

Which might be why author and entrepreneur Mark Manson felt he needed all the expert advice he could get when he got married recently. 

An inbox explosion's worth of marriage advice 

The author of the NSFW bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Manson also runs a wide-reaching personal growth website. 

Keen to help his new marriage thrive, he embarked on a fascinating – if completely unscientific – research project, using his site to solicit advice from couples that have been together for more than 10 years. Almost 1,500 replies flooded his inbox. 

In a long Quartz article, Manson breaks down the lessons he learned. If you're hoping to armor your own marriage against the slings and arrows of the entrepreneurial life, it's well worth a read in full. 

But what struck me as most useful was one particular theme Manson noticed after wading through this mountain of marital wisdom. 

"As we scanned through the hundreds of responses we received, my assistant and I began to notice an interesting trend. People who had been through divorces and/or had only been with their partners for 10-15 years almost always talked about communication being the most important part of making things work," he writes. 

"But we noticed that the thing people with marriages going on 20, 30, or even 40 years talked about most was respect."

The secret to keeping a relationship strong  

Much of the rest of the article discusses communication from various angles. And talking openly and frequently with your partner is valuable according to just about everyone. 

But by the end of his experiment – and his article – Manson concludes that one word trumps even the best communication skills when it comes to keeping a partnership going over decades. As Aretha Franklin could have told you, that word is respect. 

Why? 

"Communication, no matter how open, transparent and disciplined, will always break down at some point. Conflicts are ultimately unavoidable, and feelings will always be hurt," Manson explains. 

And when that inevitably happens, the thing that will save your relationship "is an unerring respect for one another, the fact that you hold each other in high esteem, believe in one another – often more than you each believe in yourselves – and trust that your partner is doing his/her best with what they've got."

In practice, Manson explains, respecting your partner, your relationship, and yourself means things like never talking trash about your better half to others, not keeping secrets, and understanding that both partners' preferences and happiness carry equal weight. 

Maybe this struck me because it fits what I've observed over the course of my own 15-year marriage. I can't tell you we've avoided the ugly fights couples therapists warn against, and we've certainly failed to follow the classic "never go to bed angry" advice. 

(Seriously, why is screaming all night when you're overwrought and exhausted better than sleeping on the couch and coming back to the conversation when you're saner in the morning?) 

But we've gotten through them because, at the base of it, I think my husband is a good guy who respects me and tries his best and, hopefully, he thinks the same of me.

Maybe it struck me because of its simplicity. 

Remembering to always hold on to respect is a lot easier to remember when you're in your fifth sleepless month of caring for a newborn (or a newborn business) together than therapist-approved advice to frame complaints in certain ways or hold household administrative meetings. 

But whatever the reason, Manson's conclusion that respect is the bedrock of basically all the other marriage advice he received was built on struck me as worth passing along to entrepreneurs keen to help their partnerships thrive despite the inevitable strain of their lifestyles. I'll give Manson the final word: 

"Respect goes hand-in-hand with trust. And trust is the lifeblood of any relationship (romantic or otherwise). 

Without trust, there can be no sense of intimacy or comfort. Without trust, your partner will become a liability in your mind, something to be avoided and analyzed, not a protective homebase for your heart and your mind."

 

Inc