Dear Audience, about a decade into Brad Feld’s relationship with his wife Amy Batchelor, she’d had enough. She was fed up with his 18-hour work days and of- ten when he was with her, he was distracted by his phone – and even more work. “You’re not even a good roommate anymore,” Batchelor told Feld, who invests in software and internet companies, while on a vacation weekend in Rhode Island in 2000. “We were ten years into our relationship and still had deep love for each other,” Feld recently explained in an interview. “It wasn’t this final explosion of anger between us, it was much more exhaustion with an arch that had been so unsatisfying.” Feld was determined to fix the relationship. He suggested creating some relationship “rules” (some are listed in the box at the end of this article) that would help him better meet the ex- pectations Batchelor had of a husband. At first, Batchelor resisted the idea of creating relationship rules. How romantic is it to set reminders to write your wife love notes? And the idea of using an egg timer to make sure they spent four minutes together every morning to connect wasn’t going to make it into the plotline of any Hollywood romantic comedies.
But the fact he was willing to commit to a set of rules to save his marriage and prioritize his wife?
