The Other Great Love Story

On the intimacy, complexity, and stakes of co-founding and creative partnerships

Quick note: I’m co-producing a large-scale immersive experience that will go live in April. From now until then, Metaformative will be published biweekly.

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There’s a lot of emphasis on how much finding the right life partner can shape the quality of our lives and what we’re able to experience, build, and become alongside them. While this belief isn’t universally held across all cultures, there’s a general understanding that the person you share your life with can have a profound impact on your well-being and trajectory.

When your paths converge, you have to find a way to coexist and co-create. To align on a vision and build a future together. You’re bound to one another—absorbing each other’s energy, becoming a part of each other’s ecosystems, navigating problems and making small to life-altering decisions together every day.

A partner shapes our world, limiting or expanding our potential and influencing everything from our beliefs to where we live to what we do with our time.

It takes just as much effort and intention to build and sustain a work or creative partnership as it does a romantic one—yet we rarely treat it with the same care or reverence. Still, one could argue that these relationships are just as intimate and impactful. Co-founders and collaborators often become extensions of who we are and what we create in the world. The separation—or “divorce”—rate among co-founders is as high (if not higher) than long-term romantic partnerships, but it’s not something we talk about. We don’t have the language, frameworks, or tools to support people through the complexity of these beginnings and endings—despite how much they impact our work and sense of self.

Finding and choosing co-founders and collaborators you align and vibe with takes trial and error—a lot of dating and low-stakes experiments. If you’re lucky enough to find someone you want to build with longer term, maintaining that dynamic gets harder over time. It requires sustained effort, emotional maturity, and compromise. You really only get to know someone after the initial honeymoon phase, when the excitement of building and launching into the world has worn off, and you’re in the day-to-day grind. When the formalities and politeness become unsustainable, that’s when the relationship gets put to the test.

People are inherently complex and ever-evolving. You can peel back their layers and understand the essence of someone, but you’ll never get to a core truth because there isn’t one. Our values and priorities change as we learn and grow. Wisdom is gained through experience. To know someone is to know a version of them in any given moment. This is built into our DNA and is necessary for our collective evolution.

My theory is that we opt into long-term relationships of all kinds in part because we want to evolve with others, but sometimes we’re just afraid to do something on our own. Knowing our why is mission critical because, otherwise, it will subconsciously drive our motives and actions. Why do I want to partner up with this person? Why do I not want to? Why now?

What I’ve learned—from the most generative co-founderships to the ones that slowly implode—is that every potential partnership requires curiosity and in-depth consideration.

The first questions I ask now when I’m flirting with the idea of jumping into the deep end with someone is: What world does this person exist in? And what world do they want to create?

To understand someone, you have to step into the reality they exist within and operate from. To learn their hopes, fears, and values. How their unique lived experience has shaped their perspectives and ideologies. What their needs, goals, and attachments are. You have to understand what motivates them, what troubles them, and what they’re fighting for.

What are they like when they’re stressed or frustrated? How do they handle conflict? What’s their relationship to money? What’s their communication style? Are they consistent? Reliable? What’s their level of foresight—can they see a train wreck coming? How delulu are they? How fragile are they? What’s their relationship to failure? Can they handle feedback? Do they take personal responsibility? Are they effective leaders? Do they have tenacity? Integrity? Are they thoughtful, considerate, and intentional? Are they more rational or emotional? Can they make tough decisions? Speak up? Slow down? Speed up? Can they move things forward?

There are a million and one questions that can only be answered through time, conversations, and experience, but they can be wrapped up into one revelatory question: What does this person have the capacity for?

Capacity is an important one, not just from a time/bandwidth perspective but also the capacity to navigate crises, complexity, and uncertainty. The capacity to compartmentalize facts and feelings. The capacity to lead people, act on ideas, build systems, and achieve goals. The capacity to sit in ambiguity, synthesize information and emotion, and derive clear insights. The capacity to hold a vision and lead a mission. The capacity to push forward or pull back when required. The capacity to have and hold tensions. The capacity to say yes, to say no, and to let things go.

As partners, you’re constantly negotiating needs and resources. That kind of dynamic demands authenticity and vulnerability. Talking about the hard things takes courage and emotional maturity—which is exactly why so many people avoid it. But avoidance doesn’t neutralize tension—it amplifies it. What we avoid expands, just like what we focus on does—because it takes just as much energy to avoid something as it does to face it.

Without real talk, we get stuck in unproductive dynamics and patterns. Eventually, we get impatient and resentful.

Groups have an uncanny ability to uphold shared fantasies. From the startup burning through cash to the grassroots initiative trapped in a cycle of unsustainable effort, we romanticize what we’re building more than interrogate it. Knowing when to pivot or walk away takes just as much courage—and clarity—as the decision to build something from scratch. We have to be willing to ask the tough questions: Is this viable? Are we at least moving toward something that makes sense long-term? If the answer is no, it might be time to pivot or move on.

A little bit of delusion is necessary, it helps us take risks and inspires creativity. But too much delusion becomes an attachment to an unrealistic ideal that may never materialize. And that kind of attachment can cost us more than we’re willing to admit—and more than we can afford.

Co-founder compatibility is both an art and a science. Some partnerships make perfect sense on paper but turn out to be a disaster in practice. Others seem mismatched at first but somehow find their way to functional synergy. The fastest way to know if you can actually work with someone is to work with them—ideally on something small and exploratory. If there’s alignment and momentum, keep going and raise the stakes. If not, pause and reevaluate.

You can have all the upfront conversations—share boundaries and non-negotiables, outline strengths and interests, make clear agreements—but you can’t really know how you or others will respond until you’re in the trenches together. Conversations reveal our aspirations, the parts of ourselves we’ve already met. But the version of ourselves we imagine doesn’t always match the one that shows up—especially in challenging circumstances.

We know ourselves only to the extent that we’ve experienced ourselves.

How we respond in one situation with one person might be completely different from how we show up in another. Every individual brings a unique energy to the table—and in doing so, they awaken different parts of us. As much as we want or try to be consistent, who we are and how we express ourselves is often shaped by context. The scenario, the stakes, the people involved—they all influence what version of us emerges.

There’s a quote everyone loves to reference about collaboration: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” And while there’s truth to it, taking it at face value strips away all the nuance. Together can mean many things—it might mean working toward a shared vision in separate containers, or it could mean co-creating every inch of the thing, side by side. Slow can be strategic in some contexts, but it can also kill momentum and progress. Fast is often essential—the faster you fail, the faster you learn and pivot. But fast can also mean taking the wrong thing to market or doing a sloppy job just to meet a deadline. Alone can be deeply generative but can also lack fulfillment and accountability.

Teamwork makes the dream work, but the wrong team can sink the dream. And so can the wrong approach to building, leading, and scaling.

Together exists on a spectrum, and it isn’t always better; it makes sense in some contexts but not all. Some things require collaboration, especially in specific stages (e.g. building a community), but others can be achieved more independently, at least in the beginning. There are trade-offs on both sides. When we work as partners and collaborators, we benefit from a diversity of ideas and perspectives, but the cost is speed, efficiency, clarity, focus, creative compromise, and managing personalities, preferences, and feelings. People make things beautiful, but they also make things more complex. When we work alone (or more independently), we get to shape things our way but have to put in extra effort to ensure it is informed by a variety of worldviews. Otherwise, it might be one-dimensional or filled with personal bias (ok for artists, not great for entrepreneurs).

If we pay close attention, the vision, the idea, and the path will reveal what needs to unfold and when. When we’re in relationship with what we’re building—when we allow it to show us what it is and what it wants to become—it begins to attract the right people at the right time, through us. I talked about this in the Creative Process series: visions are living, breathing organisms. They carry an intelligence of their own. If we trust that intelligence—and trust ourselves to notice and respond—partners and collaborators will appear when the foundation is ready and the direction is clear. Intention and timing don’t just shape the process—they can make or break it.

Almost everything is shaped by the imprint of many—directly or indirectly. Part of our work, as conduits, as builders and creators, is to see the big picture and choreograph its manifestation in such a way that people flow in and out as seamlessly as ideas and as effectively as decisions. Ultimately, it’s up to the person who carries the seed of the vision to decide how, when, and with whom they want to collaborate—if at all.

As I prepare to build my next venture, these are the questions I’m asking myself more broadly about partnership and collaboration:

• What is the vision/mission, and who or what is required to contribute to its realization?

• What role am I best suited to play?

• Are co-founders or collaborators needed? If so, why—and when is the best time to engage them?

• Who is best positioned to contribute to what? Where are leadership and expertise most needed?

• What resources are required—or what value, incentives, or infrastructure can be provided—to engage and sustain partners and collaborators?

The answers are emerging—and with them, the invitation to build with greater clarity, integrity, and intention.

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