Relationships are messy.
My wife, Becca, and I were on the same page when we got married: we wanted to be intentional about building a healthy marriage together so that we could navigate through the inevitable messiness that all relationships undergo.
We had both already seen the effects of divorce on people we loved and wanted nothing to do with it in our own marriage. This was especially true of Becca, whose parents had gotten divorced years earlier.
But, we didn't just want to "beat the odds." We wanted to thrive together. We wondered what it would look like to live every day as best friends for 50, 60, 70 years.
That's what we wanted: to stay best friends forever.
Truthfully, I had no idea how to go about doing this, but I knew we would need help.
And so, at its core, this company all started with a simple question: "What resources are available to couples who want to build a strong relationship foundation and maintain that foundation for an entire lifetime?"
Well, we found out, and the answer to that question was deeply dissatisfying.
After scouring all the available resources, I really only found three categories of resources available:
- Books & Articles
- Counseling
- Classes, Retreats, & Seminars
This was a very dissatisfying realization to us, because that meant that the only ways to build and maintain one's marriage were:
- Non-digital and non-evolving: Books are great (I love books), but books don't evolve based on how my marriage, family life, and I are evolving. I needed something to be with me in year 1, year 20, and again year 50. I may succeed in building a strong marriage foundation as a newlywed, but what's going to be with me when we have a newborn? I'd need 50 books to cover all 50 years of my marriage and 100 more books to cover 100 more scenario-specific aspects of my marriage. So, books won't cut it.
- Expensive: Counseling is a great option, but it's very expensive ($179/hour on average), and it would be very difficult to stay at it for decades.
- Opinions: The Internet has no shortage of articles, OpEds, and Q&A sites that discuss what it takes to build a great marriage (especially with regard to sex). But, I don't want to rely on opinions for the most important relationship in my life. I need hard, cold, objective facts. I need to see what the research says.
- Time-intensive: Classes, Retreats, & Seminars are great, but who has the time to spend multiple hours per week or an entire weekend away in the midst of a busy work, marriage, and family life? And, how do you sustain that over time? The same is true of counseling.
As Becca and I talked more and more, we realized that the resources we needed to build and maintain our marriage didn't exist.
We needed something that was digital, personalized, affordable, research-based, and convenient, so that we could make this a daily habit.
Since it didn't exist, we got a heavy burden on our hearts to create it. We realized that, if we were having a difficult time finding something for ourselves, surely other people were having a difficult time, too.
In early 2016, we started dreaming big about a "marriage health company." What would it look like to create a "health company" that used technology to help people build and maintain their marriage health, just like Fitbit used technology to help people build and maintain their physical health?
That's what we wanted. That's what we felt the world needed, too.
And so, that's where we're going with this company. We come to work every day to build an easy, accessible, and affordable product that will allow everyone to build and maintain their marriage health.
To wrap up, just think about this. There are 120M married people in the U.S., and 4M more married people are added every year.
What if all those married people were living with their best friend every single day? What would the world look like? What would change?
Wouldn't that be something.
Sincerely,
Steven Dziedzic
Founder of Lasting
p.s. Reach out to me anytime at steve@getlasting.com. I'd simply love to hear from you.