Playing to Win in Marriage

Strategy Lessons for Building a Life Together

Most people drift into marriage with hopes, feelings, and good intentions. But hope isn’t a strategy. If you want your marriage to thrive, not just survive, you need clarity about how you’ll “play to win.”

In business strategy, Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley wrote Playing to Win, a book that changed how leaders think about success. The brilliance of their framework is that it can also be applied to marriage. Because your relationship, just like a business, needs clear choices, intentional design, and systems that keep it strong over decades.

Here’s how the five Playing to Win questions translate into building a successful marriage:

1. What Is Our Winning Aspiration?

In business, a company’s aspiration isn’t “to exist.” It’s to win. In marriage, your aspiration shouldn’t be “to stay together” or “to avoid divorce.” It should be something bigger:

• Do you want a marriage that feels joyful, even under stress?
• Do you want to be the kind of couple that your kids and friends look up to?
• Do you want your relationship to be a place where both of you become your best selves?

Your winning aspiration is your North Star. Without it, daily life decisions can pull you in opposite directions. With it, you know what you’re fighting for, not just what you’re trying to prevent.

2. Where Will We Play?

Couples often assume they’re aligned, but haven’t defined where they’re actually “playing” the game of life. In business, this means markets. In marriage, it means life domains:

• Where will you live? Near family, or somewhere new?
• Will you build a family, or focus on other kinds of legacy?
• How will you balance careers, community, travel, or faith?

If you don’t consciously decide where you’ll play, the world decides for you, through cultural expectations, family pressure, or random circumstance.

3. How Will We Win?

Love alone won’t guarantee success. The question is: What’s your unique way of thriving together?

• Maybe you’ll win through humor, keeping joy alive even when things get tough.
• Maybe you’ll win by being master communicators, making sure no resentment festers.
• Maybe you’ll win by designing systems, monthly money talks, yearly life check-ins, rituals of connection, that keep your marriage strong when life gets messy.

Couples who last don’t just hope their love will carry them. They define how they’ll succeed in their own way.

4. What Capabilities Must Be in Place?

In Playing to Win, a strategy means nothing unless you build the capabilities to execute it. For marriage, that means:

• Emotional intelligence: being able to self-regulate and show empathy.
• Conflict resolution: turning disagreements into deeper understanding.
• Financial literacy: knowing how to budget, save, and plan without constant stress.
• Boundary setting: with family, work, and even each other.
• Shared visioning: the ability to design a future, not just react to life.

Think of these as the “muscles” your marriage needs to stay strong. If you don’t invest in them, your strategy collapses under pressure.

5. What Management Systems Are Required?

Every successful business reviews performance, adapts to changes, and has accountability systems. Your marriage needs the same:

• Weekly check-ins: How are we feeling? What’s working? What needs attention?
• Annual reviews: Not just about finances, but your overall life plan. Are we still aligned on where we live, what we value, and how we’re growing?
• Rituals of connection: Date nights, spiritual practices, shared hobbies, systems that renew your bond.

Without systems, even great couples drift apart. With them, you stay intentional, adaptable, and connected.

The Bottom Line

Playing to Win insights are simple: strategy isn’t about vague goals. It’s about making hard, clear choices that stack the odds in your favor. Marriage is no different.

• Define your winning aspiration.
• Choose where you’ll play.
• Agree on how you’ll win.
• Build the capabilities you’ll need.
• Put systems in place to sustain it all.

Playing to win in marriage doesn’t mean competing with each other. It means being allies who design your life so love doesn’t just happen, it thrives.

Because at the end of the day, marriage isn’t just about being together. It’s about winning together.

Where to Start

Your marriage deserves a strategy. Not because it’s fragile, but because it’s valuable. And when you treat something valuable with care, clarity, and planning, it has the best chance of thriving.

That’s why at The Marriage Degree we built Mastering Matrimony. A space where couples can walk through these questions step by step and design the life they want to share. 

If you’re ready to start building your marriage with that kind of intention, this is where you’ll find the tools to do it.