Linda Gets Everything She Wants
And so does Matt. The slightly ridiculous secret to
staying married for 34 years.
People ask us how we do it.
Not the travel. Not the boat. Not the selling-almost-everything-and-driving-off-into-the-sunset part. That part they usually think we are a little nuts for, which is fair.
No, the thing people actually lower their voice and ask about is the other thing. The part where we have been married more than 34 years and we spend an almost unreasonable amount of time together. We wake up together. We have worked together in our businesses. We drive together. We eat together. We go to sleep together. For long stretches of our life, including a year and a half on a boat, we have been within arm’s reach of each other more or less constantly.
And people hear that and their eyes go a little wide and they ask, very carefully, like they are defusing a bomb:
“How?”
And I always give the same answer.
“Linda gets everything she wants.”
And then Linda smiles and says, “And he gets everything he wants.”
And everybody laughs, because it sounds like a bit. A cute little married-couple routine we trot out at parties.
Except it is not a bit. It is the actual secret. And it is the most misunderstood sentence we know.
How to Stay Married Without Keeping Score
It only sounds like a joke until you think about it for four seconds
Here is what people assume it means. They assume one of us is a doormat. They assume somebody is keeping score, biting their tongue, quietly losing, and calling it peace.
That is the opposite of what is happening.
What it actually means is this. I am genuinely, actively paying attention to what would make Linda’s life lighter, better, happier. And she is doing the exact same thing for me. We are both, at the same time, trying to win the game of make the other person’s day better.
When both people are doing that, a strange thing happens. Nobody has to fight for their half. Because somebody else already has their back covering it.
Why 50/50 Marriage Doesn’t Work
The math that ruins most marriages
Here is the problem with 50/50, and it starts before anybody slacks off. It starts the moment you set it up. Because 50/50 is a competition. Who is going to do their part, and who is going to weasel out of their chores?
Think about how it actually works. A 50/50 marriage has to split up the chores. You get these, I get those. We draw the territory lines. And the second the garbage starts stacking up in the kitchen, somebody is going to pay for not doing their part.
And you already know how the territory usually gets drawn. The man gets the garbage. Keeping the car clean. Putting the dishes away. You know, the stuff that takes no real intelligence at all. Even a caveman can do it.
We do not run our home that way. We never have.
And quick aside on the word home, because for us it is not a building. Until recently, we hadn’t had a house in a long time. Wherever we are is home, because home is where the heart is. I know how that sounds. But for us it is not a needlepoint pillow. It is the literal truth. We are each other’s home. And the car, of course.
So in our home, wherever that happens to be parked, we do not have chores. We have things that need to get done. And whoever notices it and has a free moment, does it. That is the whole system. As a matter of fact, when it is time to leave a house sit, we almost always know how the place is going to get back to better than when we received it without even talking about it. We know each other’s strengths and we just go for it. And, yes, I will be the one to take the baggage out to the car. Even a caveman can do it.
Does the garbage stack up sometimes? Yep. Usually because we are both heads-down on something that actually matters more than the garbage. And when the stink gets unbearable, one of us makes the time. Nobody yells across the room, “Why haven’t you done this yet, it’s YOUR job!” Because nothing is anybody’s job. Everything still gets done anyway.
Now, full honesty, because that is the only way we know how to do this. I am actually the cleaner of the two of us. I have a little streak of OCD in me, so I like things in their place. Linda is not quite wired that way. But Linda has her own quirks, and those quirks quietly take care of a whole list of things. We are not balanced. We are covered. There is a difference.
That is 100/100. Not both of us doing identical tasks. Not perfect balance on a spreadsheet. Just both of us pointed in the same direction, toward each other, with nobody guarding their half of the pie.
What a 100/100 Marriage Actually Looks Like
What if she wants a Lamborghini?
This is where somebody always stops us. “Hold on. You just hand each other whatever you say you want? What if Linda wants a Lamborghini?”
That is the trick. We do not just run out and get whatever the other one says they want. We test each other. Especially on the big stuff.
The little things are easy. If one of us is craving Mexican for dinner, congratulations, we are having Mexican. Nobody convenes a committee over tacos.
But “I think we should leave Las Vegas, drive across the entire country again, buy a boat, and go live in the Florida Keys” is a different animal. That one does not get a rubber stamp. That one gets the gauntlet.
Here is what the gauntlet looks like. We have conversations. We poke holes. We actively try to talk each other out of it. We throw every reasonable objection at it we can find. And if the idea survives all of that, if it just keeps sticking in your craw and will not leave you alone, then we know it is real. Then we treat it seriously.
That is the part people miss about “Linda gets everything she wants.” It does not mean indulgence. It means the things we actually go after have already been stress-tested by the one person on earth who is allowed to tell us we are being ridiculous.
Right now, the current question in the Lutz house is, “What’s next?” Do we get an RV? Do we buy another boat for cruising vacations? And we are doing the exact same thing we always do. Carefully weighing each other’s input. Poking the holes. Letting it sit. And we will almost certainly land somewhere that, when the dust settles, is what both of us wanted all along.
That is how two people give each other everything they want without ending up broke and confused in a Lamborghini neither of them can get in or out of with dignity.
“But You Don’t Know My Spouse”
Fair. But here is the part you can control.
Somebody is reading this thinking, “Sure, that works when both people play. My person does not play.”
We hear you. And we are not going to hand you a tidy little fix for that in 900 words, because it would be a lie and you deserve better than a lie.
But here is the one true thing we can offer. The only side of this you control is your own. And in our experience, when one person genuinely, consistently starts paying attention to the other, without a scoreboard and without a hidden agenda, it tends to be contagious. Not always. Not instantly. But more often than the cynics will tell you.
Somebody has to go first. It might as well be the person reading a marriage post on a Tuesday.
Life Design Takeaway: Point Toward Each Other
A marriage is a life you design too
We talk a lot around here about designing your life on purpose instead of living it by default. Most people apply that to careers, or where they live, or what they do with their one wild and precious calendar.
But the most important thing you will ever design on purpose is how you treat the person next to you.
Default marriage is 50/50 and a scoreboard. Designed marriage is two people who decided, on purpose, to spend their attention on each other instead of on the tally.
That is the whole secret. Linda gets everything she wants. And so does Matt. Not because we are pushovers, and not because we are saints, but because we both quietly decided a long time ago that the other person winning was the same thing as us winning.
Thirty-four years later, it is still working.
So if your marriage has been running on autopilot, on the scoreboard, on the bare-minimum 50/50, maybe this is your nudge. Put the scoreboard down. Point toward each other. Go first.
Hell yeah. We’re doing that.
With love and laughter,
Matt & Linda
No 2 The Quo
Before We Had the Framework, We Had the Stories
We didn’t start No 2 The Quo with a tidy little life design model and a color-coded spreadsheet.
Shocking, I know.
We started with a few lived decisions. Big ones. Messy ones. The kind where you say, “This is probably fine,” while quietly wondering if you have lost your entire mind.
These three stories explain how we got here before we had the words Declaration of Intendependence™ to describe what we were doing.
These are the origin stories behind No 2 The Quo.
👉 Why We Said No 2 The Quo After the Kids Left Home
👉 It Took Two Years to “Suddenly” Change Our Lives
👉 Yes, We Really Did Pack Our Whole Life Into a Car and Leave
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