Are you Co-Existing or Co-Creating?

Carli and I have been married for almost 13 years. In that time, we've had our fair share of wins and maybe more than our fair share of losses.

The other night, as I was giving Carli her nightly dose of Ivermectin, I asked her,

"What do you think was the hardest time of our marriage?"

1. Law school
2. Leaving Law to Start an Escape Room Business
3. Newborn Twins
4. The Stage III Cancer Diagnosis (Cancer Round 1)
5. The Stage IV Cancer Diagnosis (Terminal Cancer)
6. Moving 11 times in 13 years

She emphatically replied, "No question—Cancer Round 1."

I agreed with her. But as we reminisced together, we realized that the difficulty of the first diagnosis had nothing to do with the cancer itself. It was because our first journey through cancer was the first and only time in our marriage that we shifted from creating in the chaos to merely surviving the chaos.

When we were in law school, we spent hours on vision boards imagining what our future would look like together.

With newborn twins, Carli was focused on reclaiming her body and launching a fitness guide while holding babies and sporting a postpartum six-pack. And now, facing cancer again, we co-created a book, got serious about creating new memories with our children and started offering clarity calls to help couples find possibility within chaos.

This revealed something profound:

Marriage is about co-creating, not co-existing.

When a marriage that has resorted to co-existing hits chaos—it collapses. When a marriage built on co-creation experiences chaos, it's an opportunity to bring a new vision into focus and create a new life, together.

When the first cancer diagnosis came, we put too much stock in how everyone else told us to navigate the chaos. Doctors told Carli to stay in bed, so she did. They said she'd be too sick to try anything new, so she didn't. The only thing this survival period brought Carli was intense depression and misery through treatment. Before cancer hit, we were ALWAYS co-creating and dreaming together. When we stopped, it felt like our souls were disconnected from each other.

The most dangerous shift in marriage isn't from love to indifference. It's from creation to management.

Your marriage wasn't designed to be a mutual management agreement. It was meant to be the most powerful creative partnership of your life.

If you're feeling stuck in management mode—if the spark of creation has dimmed beneath the weight of responsibility—we'd love to help you rediscover the creative potential of your partnership.

We dive deeper into these principles in our book, "The Creator's Call," where we share the exact framework that helped us transform our hardest seasons into our most creative ones.

Your next chapter of creation is waiting. Let's bring it into view together.

Raleigh & Carli