Last updated on August 31, 2026
Why do smart people do things that seem… not so smart?
As someone who specializes in personal risk, and has made my share of regrettable decisions, this question has been on my mind for quite some time now. It inspired my recent blog post Personal Risk Blindness: The Hidden Attack Surface of Everyday Life.
At the same time I was working on the post, I was devouring Belle Burden’s new book, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. Turns out, it’s a case study in personal risk blindness.
In March 2020, Burden was riding out the start of the COVID-19 pandemic at her family’s house on Martha’s Vineyard with her husband of twenty years and their children. During the second week of lockdown, she received a voicemail informing her that her husband was having an affair. By the next morning, he told her he wanted a divorce and left.
Three years later she published a New York Times Modern Love column asking whether she had been married to a stranger the entire time. Strangers is the long answer to that question, and it involves Burden going back through twenty years of marriage looking at the red flags she missed.
What Belle Burden Missed in Her Own Marriage
Strangers is a fascinating look at the disintegration of an upper-class marriage. Looking back, the author realized she had been blind to risk, sometimes voluntarily. Her purpose in writing the book was to help educate other women to not make the same mistakes that she did in her marriage (though these are life lessons that apply to any gender).
Risk blindness happens when we either don’t see, or don’t take seriously, red flags that are present. Culture, family history, personal identity, emotions, and a narrow focus on specific goals often cause us to ignore risk that seems obvious in hindsight.
Burden was a Harvard-educated attorney. She should have known better… right? But in the book, Burden admits to the following:
Against her family lawyer’s advice, Burden allowed her husband (called “James” in the book) to change their prenuptial agreement so that anything earned during the marriage would stay separate, which meant two decades of his income stayed entirely his in the divorce. She hid the change from her family because she was worried they would intervene.
She came from old money with two inherited trust funds, and she used them to buy an apartment in New York City and a house on Martha’s Vineyard. She listed James as joint owner on both, converting her own assets into marital property he could claim. She also stepped back from her legal career to raise their children and handed financial management to her husband, and by her own admission she did not know the specifics of their finances.
Every one of those decisions was made with full information and competent counsel sitting right there in the room. So yes, she knew better. But knowing better turned out to be beside the point.
Why Do Smart People Ignore Red Flags in Relationships?
Burden is certainly not alone; people ignore risk all the time in relationships. I work in risk management and still ignored multiple red flags and went against my better judgment during my own marriage. So why do we do this to ourselves?
- Cognitive wiring: Humans are built for pattern completion, which means we see what we want to see, fill the gaps with what we hope is there, and discount whatever conflicts with the story we have already settled on. Confirmation bias sends us looking for evidence that agrees with us. Optimism bias assures us the bad outcome is real but will happen to someone else.
- Goal fixation: Marriage, children, the house, the version of your life you already described to everyone. Once a goal is set, information gets sorted by whether it helps you reach it, and anything that would slow you down looks like an interruption instead of a warning. The bigger the goal, the more you are willing to not see.
- Emotional override: Love and attachment are strong enough to shut down threat detection entirely. For a lot of people, handing over control is what being loved feels like: someone else managing the money, making the decisions, holding the wheel. Sunk cost stacks on top, because once you have invested years, moved across the country, or emptied your trust funds, leaving stops feeling like a risk decision and starts feeling like failure.
- Inherited scripts: Our families teach us what love is supposed to look like, what a partner tolerates, and what it means to make things work. A lot of us are in our forties still running relationship logic we absorbed at nine.
Put all of that together, and it’s not actually a mystery why smart, capable people end up in situations they couldn’t see coming. We’re all wearing our own personal set of risk blinders that narrow our vision.
What Belle Burden’s Story Teaches About Relationship Risk
So what lessons can we take away from Burden’s story, from a risk perspective?
- Exercise personal governance. Burden didn’t just trust the wrong person. She outsourced governance of her own life and finances. Personal governance doesn’t mean you don’t share your life with someone; it means you stay the primary authority on your own. You maintain visibility into all personal and financial matters that concern you. You stay in the room for decisions that affect you, even when it’s uncomfortable.
- Know your assets, and protect them. Burden entered the marriage with significant assets and the legal expertise to understand exactly what was happening to them. Her own lawyer told her. She did it anyway. Knowing what you own, what’s protected, and what’s exposed is only step one. The harder part is staying disciplined enough to act on that knowledge, even when love and trust are pressuring you not to.
- Operate with zero trust as a baseline. Zero trust as a security concept doesn’t mean you become paranoid and treat everyone like a threat. It means you don’t grant permanent, unrestricted access just because someone earned your trust at one point in time. Trust is not a one-time transaction; access should be reviewed periodically. Situations change, people change, and the person who was a safe bet at 22 may not be making decisions with your best interests in mind at 52. Burden handed her husband admin access to her financial life early in the marriage and never audited it again.
- Trust your internal detection systems. Burden had signals. There were small anomalies she noticed and didn’t investigate, because investigating felt disloyal. In security, an alert you ignore is still an alert. Your intuition is a detection system, but it’s useless if you’ve been trained to dismiss it.
- Build backup plans & redundancy. Have something that’s yours, that survives the relationship if it doesn’t work out. A financial foundation. A career you haven’t fully walked away from, or at least skills you’ve kept current. A social network that isn’t entirely shared. An identity that isn’t entirely wrapped up in the partnership. Redundancy is what resilient architecture looks like.
Which brings us back to the question we started with. Smart people do things that seem not so smart because being smart only helps once you are actually looking at something. It has no say in what you let yourself look at in the first place.
Closing Spell: Knowing Better is Not a Security Control
Burden’s specific story isn’t necessarily relatable to everyone: the Harvard degree, the trust funds, the Martha’s Vineyard house, the hedge fund husband. But the risk blindness underneath it is. We all ignore risk due to our own backgrounds. The stakes just look different than hers.
You don’t have to approach every relationship like a threat assessment, or become someone who can’t trust or connect with people. But you do need to maintain awareness, stay in control of your own life, and guard the keys to your kingdom.
Want the full framework? Start with the Personal Risk Framework or read more about risk in relationships. You can also subscribe to the mailing list below.
This post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or therapeutic advice. Decisions about marital agreements, property ownership, and asset protection depend entirely on your jurisdiction and your circumstances. Consult a licensed attorney or financial professional about your own situation.
