Shareholder Control of Romantic Relationships
For five years the shareholders of KmikeyM held authority over Mike Merrill’s romantic life. They voted to take it in 2012, used it to steer him into a relationship, ratified that relationship as a contract, refused to loosen the terms when he asked, approved his marriage proposal, and finally approved the agreement that ended it.
It is the longest continuous thread in the project’s record, and the one with the clearest cost.
Taking the authority, 2012
The proposal opens as a productivity question, not a romantic one.
“Boy meets girl, boy is less productive. It’s a tale as old as time.”
The argument put to shareholders was that a relationship would change what Merrill read, watched, made and had time for, and that a publicly traded person owes that to the people holding the stock. It was written about ten months after the end of a previous relationship, with a shareholder, and it was careful to ask only one thing.
The vote did not set out how the control would work. It asked whether shareholders wanted the responsibility at all. A yes meant working out the mechanism later. It passed in May 2012 with 86% in favor.
Using it
They used it. A relationship followed that the shareholders had a hand in arranging, and the person became a shareholder herself, later voting in the market that governed the relationship she was in.
In June 2013 the terms were formalized as the General Relationship Agreement, a contract running 735 days, replacing a series of shorter ones and following an earlier approval for the couple to live together. It passed at 84%. Merrill offered a contract signing party open to all shareholders.
The refusal, 2015
By January 2015 the contract had run more than two years and Merrill proposed revising it. The case was that a maturing relationship needs fewer specific mandates and more general accountability. The revisions replaced strict terms with regular reporting, converting the Romance Advisory Board’s analyst into an auditor who would report to shareholders on the state of the relationship.
Shareholders rejected it at 16% in favor, the heaviest defeat in the sequence and one of the heaviest in the whole record.
Whatever the reasoning, the effect is plain: the people holding the authority declined to hold it more loosely.
The proposal, 2016
In November 2016 Merrill asked the shareholders whether he should propose marriage. It passed with 99% in favor, the highest margin in this thread.
The proposal notes, without much comment, that he had previously tried to obtain permission to propose by burying it in the small print of a larger vote, and that shareholders had rejected that overwhelmingly. The authority they had taken in 2012 could only be given back deliberately, and they intended to give it back at a moment of their choosing rather than his.
He describes the shareholders as having guided him to the relationship, and the vote as the last decision of theirs about it.
The ending, 2017
The engagement did not hold. In December 2017 Merrill put a Mutual Release and Non-Disparagement Agreement to the shareholders, and it passed at 99%.
The proposal is the most personal thing he has published to them. He describes proposing while both of them could already see the relationship failing, and what that did:
“I thought a big proclamation of love would be the software update that would fix the major bugs in the program. Instead, it crashed the system.”
It goes on to describe coming close to a breakdown while packing for a work trip, and then a separation the two of them negotiated carefully and without acrimony, including her buying out his share of the house.
The shareholders were asked to approve the terms of the ending as they had approved the terms of the beginning. The authority taken in 2012 ran all the way through.
What it cost
The project’s own record does not treat this as a success story, and neither should this page.
An earlier relationship ended over a different shareholder decision. As reported in WIRED and recorded on Politics, the woman Merrill was seeing when shareholders voted to change his party registration said she wanted to be in a relationship with Mike, not with the entity called Mike. The votes on his diet, his body and his politics landed on her too, and she had not bought any shares.
The relationship that this thread governed ended four and a half years after shareholders took charge of it.
Both times, the person absorbing the consequences had no vote, or bought one only after the fact. The mechanism works on a life, and a life has other people in it. That is the most substantial criticism of the project available in its own archive, and it is there because Merrill published it.
Merrill’s former partner is referred to here by role rather than by name, at her request.