BALANCE_OCTOBER_2019 - 28

HOW TO
THRIVE IN
A WORKING
COUPLE
Jennifer Petriglieri offers insider
knowledge on how to make your
relationship and career work in harmony

T

he most important career
decision you will make is
who you marry." When Sheryl
Sandberg (the chief operating
officer of Facebook) uttered
this statement, she put into
words what many professionals feel on a daily
basis. For good or ill, our soulmates have a huge
impression on our working lives. And when
both partners in a couple work, the influence
exchange is... complicated.
Research shows that working couples
enjoy a raft of benefits: more earning power,
freedom to take greater
career risks and a
lower-than-average
chance of divorce.
But how do you
juggle multiple family
commitments fairly
without having to make
sacrifices to your work?
Can both partners put
the same focus on their
professions, or must
the couple prioritise
one over the other?
Does every decision require a trade-off? All
these challenges raise a fundamental question
for working couples: How can we build and
sustain a loving relationship alongside two
meaningful careers?
Having studied working couples for more
than five years, interviewing more than a 100,
I've found that the challenges they face are most
salient at three predictable life stages. And the
way they tackle these transitions can set them
up for prolonged struggle, or allow them to
thrive, for the long periods in-between.

What makes the difference between couples
who thrive and those who struggle, is not the
decisions they make, but how they discuss their
ambitions and fears openly, and choose their
career and personal priorities deliberately.
Take Aisha and Jack. When I met them in
their late thirties, their lives felt like an endless
run on a precarious treadmill. They would wake
up, drop two toddlers at nursery, take a packed
Tube into the city. Then they would work
while praying neither child falls sick, and no
misadventure befell their ageing parents. After
work they rush home, spend a few precious
hours together, collapse
into bed , then repeat.
When they met
a few years earlier,
Aisha and Jack had
great careers and a
buoyant social life.
Sailing through their
thirties,
they
got
married and began
planning a family, and
little changed until
their children arrived.
At first, Aisha and
Jack assumed that the key to keeping it all going
was logistics. "With two salaries we could afford
help in the house and a good nursery," explained
Jack, "we weren't overly worried about keeping
our careers and lives on an even keel."
Despite careful planning and the means to
hire help, their lives changed dramatically. By
the time I spoke to them their relationship had
become tense, resentments were building, and
their fights were becoming frequent and bitter.
The more they invested in trying to crack family
logistics, the more strained their relationship

BOTH TOLD ME
THEY FEARED
FOR THEIR
MARRIAGE IN
THE LONG RUN

28

became. Both told me, separately, that they
feared for their marriage in the long run.
Aisha and Jack are not alone. Most working
couples flounder at some stage, and many end
up questioning their relationship. The best thing
couples can do to move forward from this is to
step back from day-to-day logistics and instead
negotiate and build a "couple contract". (See "A
Guide To Couple Contracting", opposite). An
important part of these deliberations is to agree
on a career prioritisation model.
There are three common frameworks to
choose from: (1) Primary-secondary - one
partner's professional commitments take
priority over the other's. (2) Turn taking - the
partners agree to periodically swap who has
the career worth investing more in, as a couple.
(3) Double-primary - the couple juggle two
careers that they consider equally important.
Couples can have a loving relationship and
two meaningful careers with any of these
models, I found. But, couples that pursue the
double-primary model are often the most
satisfied. Why? Although this model requires
a lot of juggling, it forces couples to build a
contract. And in doing this they have clarity
about what they can let go of, and the conviction
to pursue what they want, even if it requires
some trade-offs.
Once Aisha and Jack began talking through
what they really wanted and needed from each
other, they saw that they were actually very well
matched. Their bond had just been twisted by
unspoken assumptions. By explicitly agreeing a
double-primary career model, openly discussing
their fears and drawing some boundaries (such
as limiting work travel) to manage them, Aisha
and Jack lifted the burden on their relationship.
They recognised that they could no longer do
everything they once did, nor did they want to.
They wanted to focus on their family, and their
work, and were happy to leave the other aspects
of their lives behind for now.
"We gave each other permission to just stop
doing some stuff," reflected Aisha. "It didn't feel
too much of a sacrifice because we were doing it
to reach a bigger goal." By agreeing a model and
getting their priorities straight they were back
on track in their relationship, careers and life.
If you are striving to flourish in a working
couple, you can begin today. When you go
home tonight, start building a couple contract
with your partner. Discuss your ambitions
openly, jointly agree on your priorities, career
model and how you can support each other.
That way you can make sure that your partner
doesn't just become the other half of a great
personal relationship, but also becomes the
most important career decision you ever made.

Jennifer Petriglieri is the author of Couples
That Work: How Dual-Career Couples Can
Thrive in Love and Work (£14.99, Penguin
Books Ltd)
BALANCE_OCTOBER_2019

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