Love & Founders... a conundrum?

Yes, I’m about to talk about love on LinkedIn… but I believe that for founders, it’s incredibly work-relevant given how f*cking lonely the journey can be – and I’m not just talking about long hours and sacrifice; I’m talking about romance.

Yes, I hear the gasps ensue as I talk about something potentially non-work focused on LinkedIn but as we all should know, these things are inherently connected, especially for those who are building something themselves.?

Building a business takes an untold toll on your social life, your financial circumstances, and your opportunities while your head is stuck in a laptop managing things in the early days and potentially for the long term. This not only limits your holidays and events with friends but – in my experience and the experiences of others – your opportunities to date too.?

I mean, who wants to date someone sofa-hopping or living at home with their parents for longer than they should, with little time to spare for date nights on ramen budgets?

Not ideal.?

As you progress in your founder life, your friends with ‘normal jobs’ become accidentally less helpful too – as they start to settle into their own lives, with their own partners, and their own kids, meaning there’s no one around to take great candid photos of you for your dating profiles and you’re stuck either accidentally catfishing people with pictures 5 years out of date, or seemingly uploading every photo you have from work events, while trying to look like you actually live an interesting life otherwise.?

The resulting problem is that this ends up being a very lonely journey beyond just that of the surface level but also a deeper emotional one too, that many may not talk about.

Engaging in the martyrdom of your romantic life to build a company feels sh*tty but what’s the alternative?

In a world where you're statistically likely to meet your partner in the workplace, being a manager of a community, or in charge of a growing team and customer base makes that ironically harder as you have to maintain an integrity and clear line between work and play.?

I'll unashamedly put myself out on the line to illustrate this here; with ~14 years of running communities under my belt, where 5,000+ now meet every year, I've probably dated ~3 people I've met through the work I do (and even then one of them ended up stalking me but more on that story later).

This turns into confusion for others who exclaim “...but you must meet people all the time?!” and might ultimately assume that big gaps on the ol’ ‘relationship resume’ look like red flags because you’ve not been able to responsibly engage in a serious relationship while you’ve been building an equally serious business.?

The catch 22 of being attracted to unbridled ambition...

One thing I have come to realise though, is that unreasonably ambitious people are often attracted to equally ambitious people. Given their similarities in world views, appetites for risk, work ethics, etc, it stands to reason they’d have a lot in common, yet they find it hard to meet because they’re too busy with their heads in their laptops or steering clear of the blurry line between work and love.?

A few years ago we ran an April Fool's campaign where we announced we were launching a dating arm of Dffrnt by Rebellious Co (at the time called 'Yena', thus 'Yena Dating') for this very reason. After all, we had a community for ambitious folks,why wouldn’t we look to connect them for life too?

Knowing what I know now, I shouldn't have been surprised when we were inundated with requests for it to be a real thing. Validating that this wasn't just a tongue-in-cheek joke, but a very real experience for many folks.

No – don't worry – I'm not starting a dating company, but I do want to raise awareness here that your founder friends might feel a little lonely sometimes.

It’s not all doom and gloom either; we've had one wedding as a result of our community and I hope it won’t be the last?(congrats again Claudia Ghadimi and Dan Ghadimi !)

So what’s the call to action for this??

Two things:?

Firstly, if you’ve got a founder friend who doesn’t seem to actively date, maybe they’d like some help, or maybe not, but just like anything personal that might fall into a mental health box, be sure to check in on them.?

And secondly, the link to my Hinge profile is in my bio...*

*joke… unless?