By the time you read this, I'm somewhere in the Florida Keys. Kristie is probably in her chair with a book. Our new puppy Marcus is either underfoot or asleep on something he's not supposed to be on. I've got a cup of coffee and a cigar, and today is our 31st wedding anniversary. I wrote this before we left – because that's what Exit Without Exiting™ actually looks like in practice. The newsletter goes out on Wednesday whether I'm at my desk or floating in the Caribbean. But the topic has been on my mind for weeks, because 31 years gives you a lot of material to audit. I've been thinking about how many of these anniversaries I almost missed.
Not the dates. I was physically present for all of them. But I’m ashamed to admit that for more than a few of them I was mentally somewhere else – running numbers, solving a problem, planning a conversation I'd have to have on Monday. I was there and not there at the same time. That's a particular kind of absence that doesn't show up on a calendar.
This post isn't a love letter. It's an audit. And if you're an entrepreneur who believes that paying the bills is the same thing as showing up for your marriage, I need you to read this carefully.
The Myth Most Entrepreneurial Men Were Handed
Nobody sat me down and told me that being a good provider was the same as being a good husband. It was more subtle than that. It was in the way my culture talked about men who worked hard. It was in the language around "taking care of your family." It was in the unspoken math that said: revenue equals love, security equals presence, a nice house equals a good life.
I absorbed all of it. And because I was building something real – a business that was actually growing, actually generating the kind of income that let us do things most people couldn't do – I kept pointing to it as evidence. Look at what I built. Look at what we have. That's what love looks like.
Except it isn't. That's what provision looks like. And provision, while important, is not the same thing as presence. I confused the two for longer than I want to admit.
The Good Provider myth is one of the most invisible golden cages in an entrepreneurial man's life because it's built entirely out of things that look admirable. Hard work. Sacrifice. Building something. Providing for your family. Every one of those things has real value. The cage isn't in the things themselves. It's in using them as a substitute for something you're not giving.
The Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card
At some point I started using financial provision as a transaction. Not consciously. Not deliberately. But looking back, the pattern is obvious. I'd miss something – a dinner, a weekend, a conversation Kristie needed to have – and the unstated logic was that the business justified it. We're building something here. This is temporary. It'll be worth it.
That's the deal most entrepreneurial marriages are running on quietly. You provide the income. You earn the freedom to be absent. The bills get paid, the vacations get booked, and somewhere in that arrangement the relationship gets starved of the thing it actually runs on.
Kristie never signed that contract. I wrote it myself and assumed she'd agreed to the terms.
The research on this is consistent and uncomfortable. A Harvard study on relationships and happiness spanning more than 80 years found that the quality of close relationships – not wealth, not achievement, not status – is the single strongest predictor of wellbeing and longevity. The men who fared worst weren't the ones who failed financially. They were the ones who let their closest relationships deteriorate while they chased other things. The money doesn't offset that. It never did.
Your Wife Doesn't Want Your EBITDA
I know that line sounds funny. It's not meant to be.
EBITDA – earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – is how we measure the financial health of a business. It's a real number that matters. But I've sat with enough entrepreneurial couples to know that the husband often treats his EBITDA the way a student treats a report card. It's the proof. It's the answer to any question about whether he's doing enough.
She doesn't see it that way. She never did.
What Kristie has wanted for 31 years is not complicated. She wants my eyes. She wants to be in a conversation where I'm actually listening and not composing a response to something that happened at work three days ago. She wants me to remember what she said last Tuesday. She wants to take a trip where I'm actually on the trip.
That's not a high bar. It just requires being present. And presence is the one thing entrepreneurship trains you to be bad at, because entrepreneurship rewards you for always thinking about what's next. The business pulls your attention forward constantly. Your marriage needs it now.
Words of Wisdom
"A man who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord." – Proverb 18:22
Most entrepreneurial men know this verse. Few have sat with what it actually demands. Finding a wife isn't a transaction that ends at the altar. It's an ongoing act of recognition – seeing her, choosing her, showing up for her. The favor isn't in the finding. It's in the tending. Thirty-one years in, that's still the lesson.
The Only Currency That Doesn't Devalue
I teach the Five Freedoms as the real definition of wealth: energy, money, time, choice, and purpose. Most entrepreneurs I work with have made progress on money. A few have made progress on time. Almost none have fully reckoned with what it costs a marriage when those freedoms are chronically out of balance.
Time is the one the spouse feels. Not money. When Kristie looks back at the years of building the business, she doesn't remember the revenue milestones. She remembers the dinners I was distracted at. The Saturday mornings I worked through. The vacations where the laptop came along.
Money is a renewable resource. You can lose it and make it back. Time isn't renewable. The years your kids are young happen once. The season of your marriage when you're both still healthy and mobile and have the capacity to build something together – that's not infinite. Every hour I traded for revenue was an hour I spent from an account that doesn't refill.
Presence compounds the same way money does. The couple that is genuinely present with each other over 30 years has built something that no amount of financial provision can replicate or replace. And the couple that deferred that presence – always planning to be more available after the next deal, the next quarter, the next milestone – ends up at the 30-year mark with money and distance and not a lot else.
Later never comes. That's not a metaphor. It's a pattern I've watched play out in the lives of people I care about.
What the Audit Actually Looks Like
An anniversary audit isn't a conversation you have once. It's a discipline you build into the way you live. Here are the questions I've started asking myself annually – and increasingly, more often than that.
Am I present when I'm home, or just physically located there? There's a difference between being in the room and being in the room. If your family has learned to expect your distraction, you've already answered this question.
What has she asked for that I've consistently not delivered? Not material things. Time. Attention. Conversation. The things that don't cost money but do cost presence.
If she audited the last 12 months, what would the report say? This is the one that stings. Try it.
What am I telling myself justifies the absence? Whatever the answer is – revenue, growth, responsibility, providing – ask whether she'd agree that it's worth the trade. Not whether you think she'd agree. Whether she actually would.
The golden cage of the Good Provider isn't built out of bad intentions. Most entrepreneurial men I know love their families deeply. The cage is built out of a script they inherited, a culture that rewarded them for work, and a business that trained their attention to stay perpetually focused on what's next.
Awareness is the key to recovery. And the first awareness is this: being a good provider is the floor, not the ceiling. It's the minimum, not the measure. Your wife doesn't want your EBITDA. She wants your eyes.
Thirty-one years in, I'm still learning what that means. But today I'm actually here. No laptop open. No Slack notifications. Just the Keys, a cigar, and the woman who has put up with me for 31 years. That's not nothing. That's everything.
– The Real Jason Duncan