Nelia

#NotAllMen

Guys…I have a girlfriend. Now I know what you’re thinking…how is it possible that anyone would want to be with me? I understand where you’re coming from. I think the answer is: her puzzle piece fits mine. In my early twenties, I read the biography of the American founding father John Adams. He and his wife Abigail had one of the great partnerships in American history; intellectually matched, emotionally intertwined, and co-architects of something bigger than themselves. I wanted what they had. But it wasn’t within reach. Years before, I’d married in a sort of arranged Mormon marriage. Unsure how else to explain it. We were functional, but we weren’t John and Abigail. We split after thirteen years. At age 34, after selling Braintree Venmo, and emerging from a mismatched marriage and the repression of Mormonism, I set out to rebuild myself and find partnership.  I met a woman in LA who became my first-ever girlfriend. Coming from a sheltered background, I was blind to the obvious warnings. I was dangerously naive. That relationship unraveled and was followed by litigation. The experience was unnerving and left me wondering if I could ever trust again. By the time I was 44, I started reconciling with the possibility of a life without partnership. @_katetolo and I met at my brain interface company Kernel. She’d discovered my work using neurotechnology to improve human well-being and merge human and AI. Even though she’d been dreaming of a career in fashion, she was drawn to what she foresaw as the defining question of our time: how will humans successfully co-evolve with AI. We shared the same obsession. The puzzle piece fit was immediate, as immediate as either of us had ever experienced. Yet we maintained our professional boundaries. When we worked on our first project together, the back and forth was effortless. She could conceptualize and feel what I couldn’t and vice versa. It helped that both Kate and I had a natural disposition towards hard work. Our joy came from creation. Kate was luminescent. When I saw her about the office, butterflies fluttered in my stomach.  Each day she’d show up wearing some unexpected combination of colors, textures, styles and accessories. Always tasteful, playful and interesting. She didn’t chase fancy brands. Most of her clothing was from the thrift store. It wasn’t how she looked but how her mind worked: original, eccentric, entirely her own. She was art. We both worked very hard and valued every second of the day.  One evening around 6:30 pm she dropped by my office and we talked for hours. It had been all business before.  This was the first time we stepped into each other’s personal lives. My heart strings pulled but my brain pushed back. ‘We know we can’t trust again’, my mind firmly stated. Our after-hours meet-ups in my office became a daily ritual. The favorite part of my day. We’d reminisce about work and tiptoe a bit deeper each time into each other’s personal lives. I’d recently started my new anti-aging project and one night Kate suggested to me that I should put the entire thing online to allow others to follow on. We worked together to put up a website and got a v1 out. We pondered what to call it, and decided on ‘Project Blueprint’. We were oddly from entirely different worlds but somehow the same person. Yet neither of us dared take the next step. We didn’t want to imperil our work relationship and we remained deeply skeptical of each other.  The combination of Kate being raised to distrust all things and me still feeling the sting of the previous relationship left us stirring in a pot of anticipatory disaster. Before long, whether we liked it or not, we’d become each other's favorite person. We’d spend every moment we could together. Social events and the weekends were still off-limits as our relationship was professional. We were both secretly wondering, ‘does the other person feel what I’m feeling?’ Unable to withstand any longer, after a year and a half of unspoken affection, one night I softly floated the balloon of inquiry. She confirmed it was reciprocal. Still, with things being so new, neither of us wanted to make our relationship public. We needed time to stabilize, mature and assess whether this was short or long term. I’m a 48 year old American, raised Mormon, with three children. She’s a 30 year old Bosnian-Australian-American. It took time to bridge our worlds. In our years of knowing each other, three of them have been navigating a relationship. All while building a business and movement. There have been many times where we didn’t know if we’d make it. In the last year, we’ve found our flow.  I trust Kate as much as my mother. She knows how to scaffold trust. She anticipates your anticipation and knows your reaction before you react. She’s meticulous in the integrity of our relationship. She’s even been pivotal in helping my father and me reconcile and navigate the contours of our relationship. In the past few years, Blueprint and Don’t Die have become global phenomena. Kate is the unsung hero.  She and I have been stride on stride since inception. She’s proven an exceptional executor and despite her unconventional background, intuitively knows things. Her creativity keeps me forever guessing what she’ll say or come up with next. Our minds have become so intertwined that life feels naked without her. Her story warrants being told as others will be better off emulating her practices and abilities. What I find most impressive about Kate is her prescience and thoughtfulness. She sees forwards, backwards, and side to side. Relative to her, I feel myopic in my awareness of the world. She can see through others, as an x-ray would. She then structures all that information and can package it in simple, understandable terms. In ways that allow for everyone to win. Kate is soft spoken, self-deprecating and understated. These attributes cloak her ferocious ambition, piercing intellect, and delightful creativity. Give her five minutes and she will reframe your world. But most people don’t know to look. They assume she’s my assistant. It’s such a loss because people are looking for what she has to offer. My son Talmage, Kate, and I are family. Nothing makes us happier than being together. Our conversations are fast, dark, and rowdy. Family feeds the soul, and we are nourished. As my son considers possible partners, he wisely models them off of Kate. Deep companionship is a universal human want.  And while there are eight billion of us on this planet, most struggle to achieve it, including those in relationships. It’s the most fulfilling of human experiences and also the most elusive. The joy of being seen, appreciated and loved, and offering the same to another. I wrote dozens of different sentences trying to capture what the want and struggle for deep companionship feels like. I deleted them all as none could holistically capture the emotional architecture of it. Then one day while exercising, I realized what it feels like: what the explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew must have felt returning to land after being shipwrecked and surviving 497 days adrift in brutal Antarctic. It’s a bit of a dramatic comparison, however, I suspect many of you can relate. Kate feels like land to me after being adrift and searching for 25 years. Life sinks or sails based upon the quality of our most intimate relationships. No amount of professional success can plug the sinking hole of an acrimonious personal relationship. At this point, Kate and I have nearly become one person. We have entire conversations with a single look, sound, gesture or image. We independently come up with the same ideas and insights, suggesting to me that maybe it’s our tandem effort generating them. Our relationship is stable, positive, and calm. I’ve wanted this my entire life and impatiently waited 25 years for it to arrive. It’s better than anything I imagined. Lucky me, I found my Abigail Adams.