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Running a Blog Business With Your Ex

It’s finally time for us to tell the other side of our story. 

Many of you know from following us — or from creeping on old photos of us on Instagram (you know who you are) — that Alex and I used to date.

We started our first blog about a year into our relationship, and we dated for 4 years while running our business together.

It was amazing, because blogging can feel pretty isolating at times.

Your family and friends probably don’t understand what you’re doing, or what you’re going through, and they might be skeptical or downright unsupportive of your new business venture. 

Having a business partner, whether it’s your significant other or a friend or acquaintance, can make this journey more fun and oftentimes more successful. 

The highs are higher but the lows don’t seem as low when you have someone to share it with.

We were so passionate in the beginning, and so pumped to learn all this new stuff, and really focused and hopeful about our future, and what this business could do for us. 

And more than that, we both understood each other, and what we were going through with starting our blog, our online business, and it was a level of understanding that no one else in our lives could provide. 

But at some point, there was a shift…

We got to a point where, while our business was flourishing, our relationship had just quietly…stopped developing.

Our personal, romantic relationship was dying a slow death in the background of our lives. 

We didn’t want to admit it at first, because we didn’t know what this would mean for our business — what kind of an impact it would have.  

But we got to a point where we simply couldn’t deny that we were going down two different paths in our personal lives. 

Now what do we do? How do we disentangle our personal lives without making any changes to our really successful business?

It wasn’t always easy and the road has been a bit bumpy.

We kept these details private for a long time because we didn’t want to damage the persona that we had created as this “power couple.”

And while we did update our About Us page to reflect the true events, we didn’t go into detail.

Until now…

We finally feel like we have the right platform to express our feelings about how we managed our breakup and continue to run our business together successfully today.

So this episode is going to be a little different, and a lot more personal.

And since mixing personal relationships and business can be really hard more often than not, we hope our story will help some of you who also might be navigating these rough waters. 

We’re sharing: 

  • Our experiences with starting an online business as a couple
  • What our work life balance was like in the beginning 
  • The ups and downs of starting a business together, and how we made it work  
  • How we navigated our breakup while still running our business together
  • Rebuilding our working relationship, and redefining our roles in the business 
  • Why we’ll never just be business partners
  • What our relationship is like now

Listen to the full episode:

Episode Highlights:

  • [3:13] The beginning of the relationship, before the breakup
  • [4:13] Having a partner to go through the highs and lows with
  • [7:10] Navigating our business and personal relationship in the beginning
  • [7:50] Captain and First Mate: establishing roles with two dominant personalities
  • [9:00] Clash of the Titans (when we didn’t stick to our established roles)
  • [11:26] The beginning of the end 
  • [12:06] The first big sign that there was trouble in paradise
  • [14:02] How the good in our lives was covering up the bad
  • [14:50] How hiking Maccu Piccu showed we were no longer on the same path
  • [16:17] Trying to fill the void with new things, new experiences, and more change
  • [17:29] Everything in our lives was tangled up together
  • [18:40] Taking time and a lot of space apart
  • [19:28] The breakup
  • [20:38] How having a passive business model gave us time and space to heal
  • [21:59] The troubles we faced reentering the dating world while running a business together
  • [25:00] The ghost of Lauren McManus 
  • [26:46] Lessons we’ve learned, and having the right mindset
  • [28:54] Rebuilding our relationship, and how we feel like family in a way
  • [33:43] What our relationship is like now, and how we keep our business a happy place for us
  • [35:14] How trusting each other helped our working relationship survive

Resources and Mentions:

Full Episode Transcript:

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