Kelly talks to former Gap executive Abby Davison, who has co-written a book with legendary Stanford University Professor Myra Strober called, “Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decision” 

I had an emotional response to the title of the book, “Money & Love,” probably because it was the title of an article about Second City that pitted those two things against each other, and they shouldn’t have been. 

“And I think you recognize what it took me a long time to recognize, which is why the course was such a light bulb moment for me is that our conventional wisdom tells us you should separate money and love, right? When you have a career question, a financial question, you should think about it with your head and analyze it. When you have a relationship question, you should use your heart to make that decision. And if you use your head when you think about the money implications of a relationship, that’s really materialistic. And the truth is that all relationship decisions have financial implications, just like career decisions have relationship implications. And so, you need to think about both holistically or you’re more likely to make decisions that you might regret. So those things are absolutely intertwined and, and yet our culture continues to act as if we should separate them.” 

Can you tell us about the 5 C’s – which is the framework you built around decision making in matters of money and love. 

“We wanted to develop a framework to help people slow down their thought process but not tip into analysis paralysis. And so, we wanted to help people think about what are the right rocks to turn over? What are those evidence-based steps that are likely to lead to a more thoughtful decision that you can use as your guide? Because we certainly didn’t want to purport to tell people what to do. We wanted to give them a way to think about their big life decision. Ours is called the five C’s as you mentioned, and it starts by clarifying what is most important to you. Then you communicate with the person or sometimes people most directly affected by the decision. You consider a broad range of choices. You check in with a broad range of trusted resources and then you explore likely consequences of your decision across different time horizons.” 

You talk about some of the keys to long term success in a relationship, what is key there? 

“I would say that the ability to talk about the hard things is key. It’s not that conscientiousness and self-control aren’t important, it’s to be able to have the conversations when things aren’t going well, right? When you have a hard thing that you’re facing, or when you have a place where the both of you disagree about something, because that is the stuff that really matters. It’s not like, are you never going to have a problem with this person? Are you never going to have a disagreement? It’s when you do have inevitably a disagreement, can you figure out a way forward that you can both live with?” 

Photo Credit: Allison Busch