Guest Post: Admitting I need help is the hardest thing about being in a relationship with an entrepreneur..
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I consider myself an entrepreneur. The hardest thing in my relationship with another one? Admitting I need help sometimes.
Guest Post by Valentina Kasper Rosputinská
A 6 minute read: pause, hit the mute button and for a moment, walk in someone else’s shoes.
It’s 1 am, a couple of days into the new year that’s brimming with promise.
My partner Tomas and I are in bed, the lights are turned on. A sexy intro, but the reality is far from it. We’ve been sitting here for over 4 hours now, both incapable of ending a confusing spontaneous debate. My teary eyes are burning, my bones are aching. We both should know better and be sleeping by now, especially given the fact that I’m 6 months pregnant and we have an 18-month-old daughter in the next room who is bound to wake up at any moment.
Yet moments where two people choose to authentically show up as themselves and dig into each other’s vulnerabilities usually don’t subscribe to a convenient schedule.
It all started off innocently enough. I had spent the day doing my annual financial review – combing through my expenses and income, categorising, stacking it all away in a neat Excel spreadsheet. I do this every year to get a more high-level sense of my spending and to review my financial choices and strategy for the upcoming new year.
2020 was different though. For the first time since 2008, I had not truly worked a single day in 2020. I participated in the odd activity here and there, but if it hadn’t been for the financial support of the state and my extended family, I most likely would have had an income of 0.
Why? A complicated question – I entered 2020 with a nearly 6-month-old daughter, officially on maternity leave, but with active plans to start working at some point. Not for the money primarily, but for my mental well-being – being raised by two entrepreneurs, I grew up in an environment where work was as much an expression of one’s purpose and self as the means to a financial end. I am the oldest of 4 siblings and my mother was never on maternity leave, always working, so my base line was “‘of course this is doable”.
I was fully supported in this theoretical endeavour by my wonderful partner – he too is an entrepreneur, actively splitting his time between 3 companies that he co-founded. It was one of the things that attracted me to him – the hard-working nature of most entrepreneurs and their willingness to take responsibility for one’s actions was something that I grew up in and always admired. Going into our relationship, I knew what this ‘package’ often entailed – irregular hours, intense mental and physical dedication to one’s work and purpose, although perhaps perceivably less time for family and other relationships. The benefits of having a partner that had the courage to pursue their dreams and supported me in doing the same was worth these potential downsides though.
Yet despite the strong support framework that I had, returning to work in a more full-time capacity – as opposed to being a full-time caretaker - was much more difficult than I had anticipated. Enter guilt. Enter maternal self-doubt. Enter Tomas’s work responsibilities and my surprising struggle to imagine us functioning as a family with both of us working. Enter the pandemic. Enter a second pregnancy. It would take a whole other piece to unpack the impact of fresh motherhood on my mental landscape and working prospects.
For now, back to our bed.
I was upset with what I saw staring back at me from the Excel spreadsheet. Ours is a whirlwind romance which means that we make lot of relationship decisions on the fly, relying on our capacity to constantly review, adapt, and weigh potential costs/benefits. Very entrepreneurial of us. In the middle of my first pregnancy, we made a mutual and conscious agreement that we would set up a bank account to cover our household costs – mortgage, food etc. – to which we would contribute to equally. At the time, despite Tomas offering to contribute more in light of my pregnancy, I saw this as a fair and motivational arrangement. A mechanism for me to return to work in a timely fashion, covering the time in between from my savings. I was happy and completely comfortable with the arrangement.
What I hadn’t realised then was that I created a huge pressure trap for myself. Instead of looking forward to exploring new work opportunities, I struggled in motherhood and ended up making work decisions I thought necessary to cover my half. I thought I was doing what was best given the situation, despite Tomas raising his caring concern and offering to contribute more on multiple occasions. My problem was that I had envisioned a different reality and struggled with feeling dependent on other people to provide for me. I felt I had failed only because I didn’t fulfil my own unrealistic expectations.
I showed Tomas the table, anxious and scared. After a quick look, he once again suggested that also given the imminent arrival of our second child, he would happily cover my share of our family budget, giving me more space to figure things out. Maybe the pressure I was placing on myself was too much and the space he would give me would help. I completely snapped. It was a mixture of feeling attacked, of losing my autonomy, of being envious that he was in a position to offer such help in the first place, of feeling useless for not being able to ‘provide’ for myself, of feeling like an idiot for not being able to figure things out. I was a hard-working woman who grew up with the entrepreneurial mindset of ‘where there is will, there is a way’. Yet my will seemed to be failing me.
Rationally I realised that all these feelings were ridiculous and that I was, in fact, creating value. Inside of my body, in the daily activities with our daughter, in educating myself in my spare time, in volunteering my time to help non-profit activities, in being there for my partner and my close ones. I had no reason to feel useless and had a partner that was truly supportive of me. Yet I did feel useless.
With no clear resolution to our debate, we merely hugged, said we loved each other and turned the lights off. Like clockwork, our daughter woke up 30 minutes after we’d finally fallen asleep.
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This was not a unique situation. Over the course of our relationship, we have had and continue to have many conversations where we talk in depth about a range of things. Discussions about our individual ambitions, our professional aspirations, our wishes for how to build our family together. What values we want to aspire to, how we want to live.
These are often difficult talks and our individual conditioning of so-called ‘self-made people’ makes them even more challenging. On one hand, it’s that relentless drive and ambition that was one of the things that drew us together. On the other, it can often complicate matters as we don’t really have a playbook on how to allow and let others take care of us when we need it. Often, our ambitions collide, and we need to figure out how to compromise, how to balance. I used to think that a compromise meant that neither side leaves the table satisfied, but that has changed since we started a family together. A compromise for me now is finding a way to meet your needs in tandem with someone else.
There are many things that help us build resilience in our relationship. For one, it is the constant willingness to engage in these conversations in the first place. We have a rule that whenever anything bugs the other, we bring it up regardless of how small and insignificant it may seem. Talking about it is always better. We also make it a near daily practice to tell each other about the things we are grateful for – whether in general or in each other, in our daughter, our environment. A practice started by Tomas, I find that it really helps to keep things in perspective when shit hits the fan.
The last thing I would single out is that we are both willing to admit that we have things far from figured out. It’s okay not to know and it’s okay to forgive yourself for now knowing. There will always be things we don’t know. Our relationship and our lives will constantly change and it’s important to recognise that. To delve into how we can move forward given the unknown, both individually and together. In this respect, I think the entrepreneurial mindset of pivoting and not taking underlying assumptions for granted can be very beneficial in a relationship as well.
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The love and respect we have for each other is the foundation we are building our life together on and taking those things for granted is dangerous. Just like in trying to run a sustainable business, the way you go about building on top of your foundation influences the foundation itself, an interconnected ecosystem.
I know the experience of letting myself be vulnerable in our relationship, admitting that I don’t have everything figured out and that I do need help sometimes (however painful for me) is making me a better person and partner. And will one day make me a better entrepreneur, colleague, and leader.
Speaking of practicing gratitude, an experience I am utterly grateful for.
About the Author
Valentina is Chairman of the Board of Directors @ZAKA Startups, a hybrid PE/VC investment company focused on the CEE region. She is also a Co-founder @Humbuk Bratislava, a pop-up natural wine events platform.
Valentina was formerly Head of @FutureNow, Slovakia's biggest tech & startup events platform, and sales director at MAGNA ENERGIA, leading alternative energy supplier in Slovakia.
She is passionate about topics of impactful business development, service design, inequality across sectors, vulnerable leadership and meaningful non-profit & private sector cooperation.
Proud feminist, mother and lover.
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