Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. It comes as no surprise to

anybody that it takes a lot of work to make a relationship work.

For more than 30 years, our guest, psychologist Dr. Ellen Bader, has specialized in helping couples transform their relationships.

Ellen and her husband, Dr. Peter Pearson, co-founded the Couples Institute in Silicon Valley, where they work with entrepreneurial couples, including CEOs,

startup founders, and small business owners, helping them better understand and overcome the unique

challenges of managing a business and marriage simultaneously and successfully.

Ellen, thank you so much for joining us.

You're very welcome. I'm glad to be with you

and look forward to a dynamic conversation. Well, we wondered how you first became interested in

couples therapy. Actually, long ago, when I was a graduate student, I was working in a clinic

that worked with families of all types, and I saw that the parents were pretty dysfunctional in a lot of those families.

And so I got really interested in what does it take to make a good relationship

and a couple's relationship work.

And Pete and I wanted to do something together too.

So for almost a year we lived with this notion of we're going to do something together.

We're going to call it X. We're going to figure out what it is. And in the course of that year,

I mean, we did some wild things. We flew off to India and considered importing houseboats from

Indian. We explored a lot of things. Anyway, we landed on wanting to specialize with couples.

And in fact, it's hard to believe for me now, but in the days when we started, all of our mentors told us we would starve and we would have to only work at night if we specialized.

Because there wasn't really a couple's therapy specialty in those days.

But we just were determined.

And so we set out to figure out

...