I've never been a stranger to cutting people off. It was how I protected myself from the ills of this world — from people who wanted nothing but to suck me dry. I had never experienced being cut off myself, though, so you can only imagine how painful it was when my best friend decided to do some cutting.
We had been friends for over 15 years. We experienced life through middle school, high school, college, and graduate school. I was there for her teen pregnancy and rode shotgun when she wanted to key her ex-boyfriend's car. My mother was dang near her mother, and her grandparents mine. We were incredibly close, so I understood why she was upset when I opted not to attend her out-of-town birthday trip. I just didn't expect our 15-year friendship to be dismissed because of it.
She had been going back and forth for a while about what she wanted to do. Her birthday was in March, which meant on the East Coast, it was still too cold to go on a boat ride in Maryland like she wanted to do. I was with her plans at first – after all, it was her birthday – but as we got closer, and plans kept changing, I became unsettled.
Do I really want to pay this money to go with you on a boat in the middle of March? Nope. Not really.
I didn't say that, obviously, but I'm sure she felt it by the way I was offering better suggestions. After tons of back and forth and indecisiveness – mainly prompted by my desire to encourage her to plan something different – I backed out. I ensured her that I would do my own thing for her when she returned. I had already begun planning!
My. Own. Thing.
It wasn't my birthday, though. And as helpful as I thought I was being, it wasn't until a year later that I realized how insensitive I truly was.
For a long time, I deflected – thinking that the loss of our friendship was solely about her attitude toward me missing her birthday. But it was about more than that. Throughout our entire friendship – particularly after I had gone off to college – I'd been wanting her to be better, to push harder, to do more. I wanted her to create a life for herself that was unlike anything she ever imagined. I wanted her to soar with me.
I was trying to make her live up to a standard that I set for her, not one she set for herself.
For years, she conformed. She suppressed some of the most authentic parts of herself to accommodate my desire to make her more like me. She would do her best to meet me where I was growing, even if it made her uncomfortable. Our friendship was built on longevity, reciprocity, genuine support, and love, but the support I offered seemed to be more focused on pushing her into being a woman she didn't even want to become.
When and how did I become the standard for womanhood?
I wish she would have slapped me and asked me that back then. My good intentions missed the mark completely because I was focused on making my best friend meet a standard that I wanted her to meet.
So often we say we want our friends and family to become better, when what we really mean is that we want them to become like us. We want them to be ambitious like us. We want them to be poised like us. We want them to make decisions like us. And while this may all be with love, in doing so, we force our friends into a mold that they may not even want to be part of.
The true essence of friendship is being able to love people right where they are.
It took me a long time to learn that my role as a friend isn't to change people, it's to bring light, and love, and joy to their lives. It's to support and care for them. Much of that means doing so as the person they are, letting them be who they want to be, letting them make their own decisions, forge their own paths, and become their own person. Because true friendship isn't about conforming or forcing a like-mind, it's about embracing the mind (and person) that's already there before you. And if you don't like that person, then you don't have to be friends.
I hadn't realized any of this until after our friendship was over.
It's been about 4 years now, and I see her having fun and doing her thing with her new friends (social media tells all). I used to get mad—thinking about how they have her portraying herself online like a "wild child", like she's not raising a young impressionable daughter. Then my thinking changed, because I noticed that she is finally doing something I rarely allowed her to do publicly: be herself. She is letting her hair down and becoming who she always wanted to be; I love that for her.
Because as much as I wanted us to grow together, it is most important that she grew into her freest, most authentic self. And I am happy that her new friends are allowing her to do just that.
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Skylar sees things differently. At the time, she was shooting content on her iPhone. Temi came into the picture with a new perspective, an understanding of tech, and, eventually, a camera. “He doesn't give himself enough credit,” Skylar says. “He wasn't just my tripod. He wasn't just standing behind the camera and going ‘click.’ He was giving advice. He was giving me insight to how I could look at things from a different perspective. And I was like, 'Oh, he’s an artist.' I think it was maybe a heartbeat of that kind of energy of like, ‘Baby, can you take this picture?’ And it turned so quickly into, we're partners. We can work together in a way where we're advancing each other's creative thinking.”
The pair often says they’re two sides of the same coin. Skylar is an Aquarius. She attended art school, paints, and loves poetry. She’s more than happy to let the couple’s management firm and agency, Kensington Grey, handle their admin work. And, she loves to sleep in. Temi, on the other hand, wakes up early. He’s a Virgo. He loves a to-do list and regularly checks in on the couple’s brand partnerships spreadsheet to make sure everything is on track.
Because his storytelling was steeped in his love of technology, he didn’t always think of himself as a creative person. “Where I [am] the dreamer who wants to pluck things out of the sky and spend all day with my head in the clouds, Temi [is] so good at grounding me and helping me figure out how to make things make sense on paper. We just work together in such a complimentary way,” Skylar says.
It’s been more than six years since Brooklyn-based couple Temi and Skylar started dating, and nearly four since they cemented their working relationship. On TikTok and Instagram, the couple’s travel, fashion, and home content regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. They’ve worked with brands such as Coach, Aesop, Away, and Liquid IV, bringing their vibrant perspectives to every campaign they execute. Still, nearly two years since both Temi and Skylar committed to full-time content creation and creative directing, the couple says their romantic connection remains their priority.
“We told each other we would much rather go back to full-time jobs and preserve our relationship than to be full-time freelancers, barely getting a night's rest [and] barely kissing each other because we're so busy shooting,” Skylar says.
Working from home can make it hard to separate work from personal life for any entrepreneur. It can be even more challenging when your business partner is also your lover. Temi and Skylar had already used couples therapy as a tool to help them effectively communicate with one another. When they ran into challenges while working together, their therapist helped them set physical boundaries to help combat the issues.
"We told each other we would much rather go back to full-time jobs and preserve our relationship than to be full-time freelancers, barely getting a night's rest [and] barely kissing each other because we're so busy shooting."
“It actually took us doing very specific physical things to create boundaries between work and play in our relationship,” Skylar says. “So, for instance, we will only have conversations about work when we're out of bed or we're at the table or in the office. Initially, when we started, we had to light a candle to say that, 'Okay, this is a space where we're connecting, we’re not talking about work.' We needed really hard boundaries at the top. And then it became a little bit more organic.”
The boundaries have been crucial to implement, especially because the couple began working together so naturally. When the pair first met, Skylar was NY-based a social strategist for BuzzFeed and was using content creation to drive business to her lingerie company. She was shooting her own content. Temi was working for Microsoft in D.C. He’d recently traded in his DJing equipment for a camera. “I've always loved taking pictures,” he says. “Even when I was a kid, my African mother would wake me up at 3:00 a.m. [during a] party, and be like, 'Come take the family picture.'”
Growing up, Temi says he watched his parents support each other and be the true definition of partners. He knew he wanted the same for his own relationship. But, the couple also wanted to make sure they were being financially responsible. The pair didn’t quit their traditional jobs until they’d saved up two years' worth of their cost of living. And, Temi received his Master of Business Administration from New York University with the knowledge that it could either help him advance in his corporate career or be applicable to his business with Skylar.
Temi and SkylarCj Hart @hartbreakToday, they say their working relationship is more of a “quiet dance.” They still implement some of the boundaries they learned in therapy, but they also lean into their natural strengths and deep love for one another. When we speak, Temi has planned a date for the couple to see Princess Mononoke in 4K IMAX and added it to their Notion so they can factor it into their busy schedules. “I fully plan to date for the rest of my life,” he says.
Skylar says the couple doesn’t just wait for date nights to check in with one another, though. This often happens in the mornings, after Temi has made her peppermint tea and poured himself a cup of coffee. When they ask each other how they slept, she says, it’s not just a “nicety.” It’s a genuine question meant to foster connection.
“A lot of it happens during the day in the midst of work. We'll stop and we'll hug. Or we’ll slow dance in the kitchen,” she says. “Sometimes it's hard to set a whole date night when you have 7,000 things going on. So, we must grasp these moments and check in when we can. And I think it's become so organic to us that I actually didn't even realize how often we do it. But all day long, we're like, 'Are you good? I felt like your energy shifted,' because we're best friends, we just know. We just feel it happen.”
What’s better than being in love? Building wealth while doing it. Watch Making Cents here for real stories of couples who make money moves together.
Featured image by Cj Hart @hartbreak