Brick by Brick
Where did Troth come from?
I keep getting asked. And it deserves a real answer, not a tagline.
So grab a coffee. This one goes back a while.
Rewind about 17 years. I was on the road constantly for Microsoft. One night Carrie and the kids tried to call, and I missed it. I was probably stuck at one of those long client dinners where the wine is good but you’d trade all of it to be back in your hotel room, because you’re wiped and you still have two hours of work waiting for you.
They left a voicemail.
It was my son. Three years old. That impossibly sweet little voice telling me he missed me and couldn’t wait for me to come home.
I saved that voicemail for years. Played it back more times than I can count. It was a moment I never wanted to let go of.
And then, somewhere along the way, it got deleted.
Here’s the thing. I’m a bit of a digital hoarder. I don’t delete anything. My kids have had iPhones longer than I care to admit, which means I’m sitting on close to a decade of text messages with them. With Carrie too.
Think about what’s buried in there.
When they were little, it was “I love you daddy.” Now it’s “tuition is due” and “Johnny got rejected at the bar last night.” Somewhere in those years of messages is an entire story. A father and a son. A father and a daughter. Good mornings, soccer games, pep talks before the hard days. Season after season after season.
And most of it is just sitting there. Sorta lost.
For a long time I’ve wanted to reach into all of that and turn it into a storybook. But you can’t. And honestly, that’s a good thing. Nobody should be able to reach into your text messages and vacuum out your life.
Still. Imagine if you could. Ten years of messages, a little AI, and out comes something worth keeping.
I’ve been chewing on that idea for years.
Then we closed THAT Conference.
It started as an idea in 2010, became a real event in 2012, and in 2024 we held the last one. At the start of 2025 we made it official. Fifteen years from the first spark to the last goodbye.
Closing it lifted a veil.
For all those years I’d been running so hard that the things that mattered most were quietly getting the least. My health. My marriage. My career. We weren’t protecting any of it. We definitely weren’t celebrating it.
I’ll be honest with you. This was a dark stretch.
Shutting down THAT stripped an identity off me, an identity I didn’t even really claim anymore. Our income disappeared overnight. I found out my marriage needed work, real work, the kind I didn’t know how to do. And our kids were about to walk out the door off to college.
So Carrie and I started asking the question a lot of couples eventually have to ask. What does our life look like after the kids are gone?
Here’s what nobody warns you about. We were a couple for six years before we had kids. Then we spent eighteen years as the directors of their lives. Eighteen years. And now it’s time to move to the audience.
That version of Carrie and Clark from the olden days? Gone. That was a long, long time ago. We are not those two people anymore.
So we started intentionally rebuilding. And what did Clark do?
Of course. I went looking for a tool.
It’s the engineer in me. I wanted a better way to document the chapter we were walking into. I kept circling back to everything that felt lost or forgotten, frustrated that we hadn’t done a better job holding onto it.
And yet we had all of it. Pictures. Messages. Places. Vows. Milestones. It was just scattered everywhere, which is another way of saying it was nowhere.
And then it hit me.
That storybook I wanted to build for my kids? If I turned the idea 25 degrees, it became the thing I’d wished for since the day Carrie and I met.
Not a scrapbook. A home. A home for our marriage. Our messages, our pictures, our places, our milestones, the foundation of who we are as a couple, all in one place that was actually useful to us.
Here’s the newsflash. If you want a good relationship, you work on it. You don’t just hope it shows up.
It’s not that Carrie and I didn’t have a good marriage. We did. The question that gets under my skin is a different one. What could it have been?
Over the years, we lost sight of us. Honestly, I lost sight of me. Those chapters weren’t unimportant. We were just distracted. Blissfully unaware. And so much of what slipped through was completely avoidable.
But Carrie, and my marriage to her, is the most important thing I have.
So I want to glue the pieces back together. I want a place that makes it easy to celebrate what’s behind us and plan what’s ahead. Because it turns out it doesn’t matter how you feel about each other on any given Tuesday. You still have to do the work.
And that’s how Troth was born.
Troth is an old word. It means a pledge. A promise of faithfulness. It’s the root of “betrothed.” “I pledge thee my troth.” We barely say it anymore, which is a shame, because it names the thing exactly.
Troth was born to help us. We actually want it.
In fact, I’m writing this from a plane, because Carrie and I are on our way to what we’re calling our annual troth. Days set aside just for us. To work on us, celebrate the last twelve months, and plan the next twelve. Not in a business-plan kind of way. In a “this is who we’re becoming” kind of way.
We’re turning that annual troth into something you can do too. That part is coming a little later.
In the meantime, you can start one piece of it today. It’s the exact exercise Carrie and I did ourselves: finishing the sentence “We’re building a relationship where we…”
Download the workbook (it’s free)
Grab it. Do it with your person this week. It’s the first brick.
When I zoom out on my whole life, it’s always been the same thing. Helping people through technology. I spent fifteen years building THAT Conference on the side of everything else, chasing one goal: to connect people.
It’s hard to lose that. But it’s also hard not to feel like it had to end to make room for what comes next.
Troth.
We’ll give you the tools to build the most intentional, most connected relationship you’ll ever have with your person. Not by accident. On purpose. Brick by brick.
Because the best time to build a home for your marriage is before it needs one.
And the second best time is right now.
~ Clark and Carrie
p.s. Our first annual Troth was in Mexico. No Kids! It’s been 13 years since we have gone on vacation just the two of us.
Don’t make the same mistake we did.
