In a good relationship, two plus two should equal six, eight, or ten. If you’re not better together, what are you doing? That is the rule I start with, and it applies whether you’re married, living together, dating, or in business with a friend.

We open with a video that set social media on fire: a husband at a birthday dinner who offered to pay for his wife and the birthday girl, and the guests who expected him to cover the whole table because he was the only man there. I have opinions on this one. Come with a spirit of appreciation, not a spirit of expectation.

From there we get serious. Money sits underneath more marital conflict than almost anything else, so I lay out the four places on the financial playing field for two people sharing resources, including the one position that almost guarantees a relationship won’t last. I also go back to where marriage came from, and it was not a candlelit dinner. For most of history marriage was about building something together: family, security, and wealth. We talk about prenups, and why the paper matters less than the character of the people signing it.

I also tell the story of a friend who lent me her credit card so I could ship a load of African art across the country, then refused to take a dime of the profit. I knew right then she was cut from a different cloth. A giver and a taker is neurotic. A giver and a giver is exotic. Build with a giver.

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Prefer to watch? The full episode is on YouTube.