When You’re The One Holding Back Your Partner’s Dreams
When I met my wife she told me about her dream to start her own business, six years later, it’s happening. Here’s why it took so long to get started, what it’s like to realise you’re the one holding your Partner back, and how we re-built our life to build a better future.
The smile across my girlfriend’s face, the look of pure excitement in her eyes meant there was only one response. I was going to do everything and anything I could to help make that happen for her. Nearly six years later and after much life in between, I realised the main reason my wife’s dreams weren’t happening was because of me and my career. The realisation that I was holding my wife back, and contributing to the slow starvation of her dreams was a feeling I vowed I’d never feel again.
Like any couple, a lot has happened in our little life together, we’ve had challenges, changes and regular reminders that life wasn’t going to make it easy to achieve our dreams. That said, we feel that now is our time, and over the last year I’ve not only seen the beauty of creativity and raw entrepreneurialism at work, but I’ve seen the re-emergence of the person that marriage, motherhood and moving into your thirties can so easily repress.
My wife and I met in Cornwall in the relaxed, sunny south of the UK. I was in the Navy, she was a student. We moved in together, lived on a beach and spent evenings discussing our dreams for the future. She dreamed of screen printing, designing patterns and finding a way to build a sustainable, ethical clothing brand. I dreamed of writing, flying, and helping her along the way.
Not long after we were engaged we moved to Scotland for my last posting before leaving the Navy. I was either working twenty four hour shifts at work, or studying at home during off days in preperation for life after the Navy. We started our married lives as ships in the night living in a place where we knew no-one, had no friends and with our families across the country in two opposite directions.
Slowly but surely, the dreams that we promised each other became more and more distant. Two more years later, we bought our first home and started a family. With me spending weeks away from home, my wife was left to look after our daughter on her own. Still without her tribe, deprived of sleep and slowly buckling under the pressures of keeping our lives together on track, she cast her dreams of owning a business away into the distractions of life. We were just into our thirties, but somehow, the clear dreams of the life we were pursuing had faded to mere memories of youth.
Over time my wife stopped talking about the business she was so desperate to start, it would come up every now and then when we would watch YouTube videos together, but with me being the breadwinner in the family and the effect that had on where and how we could live, the conversation was often dominated by where my career was going. I started to notice my wife saying things like:
and
But the spark in her eye that I remembered so fondly was gone. I realised that over time, and the natural direction of family life, our commitment to working towards the dreams we wanted to build had given way to hopeful conversation over a glass of wine every few weeks. So much of our time was taken up with the generalities of life, being parents and maintaining a house, that we’d forgotten the fact that we bought our house precicely because it offered potential to start my wife’s business, and work towards realising our dreams. We had become comfortably lost.
Before we knew it, we were being suckered down the path of normality like everyone else, accruing consumer debt, buckling to the pressure of keeping up with where we should be at our stage of life, and generally losing sight of the very clear vision we had for our life together when we met.
We aren’t alone, millions of couples get married with the promise they will help each other live their dreams, but life has a habit of roadblocking those dreams, responsibilities have a way of making the seem selfish, and social conditioning a way of making them feel unattainable. For some reason, once we become parents we somehow feel that if we push for the things we dreamed of when we were young, it’s an admission that the things we have now aren’t enough, This is why a lot of people end up never starting the very thing that might make bring them fufillment.
Just over a year ago, I was hit by the realisation that for the five years we’d been married, most of the reasons why my wife hadn’t been able to pursue her dreams, were because I was pursuing mine. We moved across the country for my work, she supported me through a change of career, helped me find a house and gave up work to mother our daughter. Somehow, a series of good decisions that we took for the benefit of our family, was costing us the thing that brought us together. When you realise you’re the reason the person you love the most can’t live their dream, it’s a very hard thing to take.
Arnold Schwarzenegger famously said:
What I realised over the period of a few months, was that the previous five years had flown by, and if we weren’t careful so would the next thirty. We sat down one evening to have a big talk, we needed to go for it now, because if we didn’t, when would we ever?
That meant big changes. First of all we needed to make sure we were in a position to weather the costs of a startup. We’d recently taken the decision to get out of debt, and so the weighty costs of equipment, workshop space and materials all needed to be factored in. If we were going to cashflow a business, we needed to sort out our financial ship. We double down on eroding debt, cut every bill we could, and made ourselves promise to keep our dreams in sight.
It sounds cliche to say that there is no time like the present, and for years we felt like it was just a throwaway statement that everyone understands, but no one values. Time really is short, I’m reminded of that every day. A big part of me feeling like I’ve done my part for my family is to keep in sight the brevity of our lives, and to impress on our daughter the importance of deliberate living. I felt that if we didn’t make every effort to start my wife’s business, I would be betraying the dearest principle I was trying to teach our girl.
At this point you’re probably expecting me to say that now a year after we started we have a burgeoning business who’s success has exceeded our expectations. It isn’t that simple. Cashflowing a business isn’t easy, it’s slow, but slow is safe and I wanted to make sure we did everything we could to safeguard the birth of my wife’s business.
Most of our energy for the last year has been focused on clearing debt, budgeting for the things we would need and trying to make a long lasting plan for the future. Wherever we can, we’ve alocated money to doing the things we needed, firstly that went into gutting our workshop, weatherproofing, insulated and painting it in order for it to become the hub of screen printing operations.
We sold everything we didn’t need, and used the proceeds to buy materials to build a 3.5 metre screen printing table, comissioning my dad’s engineering skills to build it for us. My wife managed to secure a grant, which managed to cover pretty much the exact cost of the main piece of equipment, the exposure unit. We were on our way.
Everyone goes into their starup knowing it isn’t all going to go to plan, that things will be hard, and challenges will present themselves. That said it’s hard to prepare for the way you feel when something happens that threatens the viability of the business before you’ve even got started.
We’ve had our fair share of set backs. When the exposure unit arrived it did so smashed to pieces, dismantled, glass smashed and wires broken. It would take the best part of nine months to source, buy and take delivery of a new one. Our workshop took months to finish, work stopping frequently due to lack of spare cash. When things did progress, the requirement for plumbing and wash booth meant it might not even be possible to build what we needed.
Without a doubt we will face many more hurdles, but with each one that we clear, we get a deeper sense that we are really doing it. With each one that we, there is more road travelled, more skin in the game, and more belief that we will win.
At every turn it’s easy to slip back into the stability of giving up, going back to just being those people who had dreams but didn’t act on them. For us, that isn’t an option. Growing up the one thing I always remember my Dad saying was:
Anything I’ve achieved in life I owe to that one statement, and whenever we’ve thought that it all might just be too much, that we should just focus on being a family, it’s what rings in our ears and kept us going.
A year after we made the first moves towards starting a family business, things are coming together. The workshop space is complete, we’ve lost a bedroom in the house to make an office, and have partnered with an amazing designer to produce some branding that is exactly what my wife was hoping for. A year on from deciding to go for it, we’re still grafting, as we will be today, tomorrow and for the life of the business.
Things have moved slower than we’ve hoped, but at 3am when we’re figuring out how to source materials, build a website, or fix leaks in the workshop, I’m warmed by the feeling that we are really trying, we’re on the road, on our road.
Every day of starting a business is a challenge. For us, it’s a challenge about balancing time with our family, with what needs to be done to get the business off the ground. It’s a challenge deciding if we should invest in a new storage rack to increase the efficiency of the print process, or if we should spend it on visiting family.
When you start a business, a long time can pass without much changing. Looking back, so much has changed. Most of those changes nobody can see, but they are the best kind, they are the changes in how we think, how we feel, and how we work together as a family. Starting our business has brought us together more than anything, it’s given clarity to our vision for the future we want, and given us the satisfaction that no matter what happens, we will have given it our all, and been true to the promises we made.
When You’re The One Holding Back Your Partner’s Dreams
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