My guest today is John Tilstra.

John is, as some of you know, my husband. He and I have talked about doing a podcast conversation together for all of the two years that I’ve been doing the Make Life Less Difficult podcast and we finally did it! You’ll get to hear the story behind the delay in our conversation so I won’t spoil that here.

In our conversation today, we share pieces of our own journey, being in relationship with each other. While some couples find each other and experience smooth relational sailing for the majority of their time together, John and I have experienced fairly rough seas that have at times battered the proverbial relationship sailboat.

We have found that being real about those struggles has been part of our strategy for making it work. And we’ve also been helped by others who are willing to be real with us, helping us know we aren’t alone…. It doesn’t fix all the issues, but it does make the difficult times less difficult.

I’m really grateful to have found a deep friendship that underlies every part of our connection and relationship. Having been through some extremely difficult times before meeting John, that has impacted our relationship and made it more difficult many times.

We also choose to live a life with a great many stressors. We’ve now been married for 12 years, lived in the US, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, been apart for a year as John worked in Iraq and I lived in France, and as of this recording, we are just finishing up 3 years in Sri Lanka and getting ready to move back to the US for the first time since 2012.

We’ve travelled the globe, climbed a lot of literal and metaphorical mountains, been struck by lightning in the Alps, almost died on our honeymoon, lived on a sailboat, camped in snow, hiked through swamps, and are currently training to do the “rim to rim to rim” at the Grand Canyon. For those of you who know us, you know we both seem driven toward the difficult. So, a conversation about making life less difficult is extremely apt!

John, thank you for your steady friendship. Thank you for the conversation here, for your willingness to dig in and share authentically. Thank you for being a great partner in life and adventure, and for helping me become a better person along the way.

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Raphaël Rapetti-Mauss

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