KLEMP INSIGHTS
NEWSLETTER

Here’s a sneaky mind virus that took us almost 20 years of marriage to notice.

We call it the “just this once” trap.

This is how it works.

Life is already a circus. You’ve got work, kids, in-laws, and about a thousand other responsibilities all screaming for your attention. The last thing you should do? Add more.

But that’s when the trap springs.

A college buddy texts you that they're in town.

A coworker ropes you into their Jamaican destination wedding.

Your parents guilt you into vis...

We've been interviewing a lot of couples lately for our new book Busy Love, and one of the things we've noticed is that the greatest threat to connection now arises from an unusual place: our phones. 

51 percent of people say that their partner is “often or sometimes distracted by their smartphone when they are trying to have a conversation with them.”  

71 percent now admit to spending more time with their smartphone than their partner.  

There’s now even a word for snubbing your partn...

What if we were to tell you that your life is really just an elaborate video game?

The purpose of the game? To win, obviously, and score as many points as you can.

How do you score points? Three ways: money, approval, and achievement. The higher your aggregate score, the faster you move up the leaderboard, the better you feel about your position in the game. 

You might notice though that there’s something peculiar about the scoring system: you only get points for the things you do outsi...

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of our engagement.

And if there's one thing we've learned from two full decades of navigating the holidays as a couple, it's this:

If you stay connected and in sync, you can manage even the most bat-shit-crazy emotional drama that comes your way.

If you don't, the stress of the holidays will land on your life like an atomic bomb.

So today, we want to give you a single practice for staying connected during the holidays.

Take a Grinch Day.

What's ...

Here’s a strange fact about busyness. 

Throughout most of human history, successful, high-status, people bragged about not being busy. That’s right, they flaunted their leisure time by sailing boats, playing polo, joining country clubs, or buying expensive clothes. 

But these days, we’ve flipped this old-school model on its head. To be busy in our current age is to be important, valued, needed, and in-demand.

For instance, the research of Columbia University professor Silvia Bellezza reve...