Episode 177: Couples That Work
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…dual career couples are the norm in many parts of the world. But most books and articles offer career advice – OR relationship advice – but they ignore the link between the two. My guest today has studied that link, looking at what works, what doesn’t, and the underlying expectations couples have for eachother…
“So let's imagine your partner’s working really hard. You might even say they're overworking, and on the surface, you may want them to stop. But imagine they just come home one day, ‘I've resigned.’ That's probably going to be incredibly anxiety provoking for you, even if you've been begging them to slow down their work.”
Couples that work – coming up on The Broad Experience.
I’ve always thought of this show as being about the invisible currents that run beneath women’s lives. This episode focuses on the currents beneath working couple’s lives – and there is a lot going on under the surface.
Jennifer Petriglieri is one half of a dual-career couple. She’s a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, the international business school based outside Paris. She’s also the author of the book Couples that Work – How Dual Career Couples Can Thrive in Love and Work.
Jennifer has spent years researching this topic. She interviewed more than 100 working couples all over the world and many of their stories make it into the book. Some are in their twenties, some in their sixties, and all ages in between. Her purpose: finding out what works over the long term for couples with careers, and how to navigate the roadblocks.
I found it one of the most eye-opening and profound books I’ve read in ages, and I was really excited to talk to Jennifer.
AM-T: “You have a really interesting story yourself. So how did you get interested in the first place in this topic of couples and careers?”
“Yeah. So it's really a kind of meeting of two forces. So on the one hand, I'm a business school professor, I research and for a long time, I'd research people's career trajectories. And I got to the stage where people would say to me, you know, if you really want to understand my career, you should talk to my partner, which rang a chord for me, because I'm also part of a working couple and know that it's not just about who does the washing up, right? I think we often think about the way life and work combines as to like, who manages the kids and who does the washing up, which of course is part of it. But I knew in my own skin, it's much more than that. It's like, how do you support each other? And how do your careers interact? So it really got me thinking, and it was also at the time when sort of Sheryl Sandberg and Lean In was coming to the front. And this idea of the most important career decision you make is who you marry. And apart from thinking that was incredibly unromantic, I sort of looked at it and thought, well, yes but no. I mean, it sort of frames it as a choice question. How do you pick the right person, almost the kind of Disney princess, you know, you choose the frog, you kiss the frog and you live happily ever after. But in my experience, the problems arise because I kissed the frog, right? I found the right person and then things started to get complicated. So I’m really interested in less of the, how do you pick the right person, but in the 'then what' question and how do you make it work once you've made that choice is once you've chosen, you want a career and you're deeply in love with someone, then what?”
AM-T: “And tell me how your own life played into this because you and your husband started to talk about sensible stuff to do with work and careers really early on – I mean really early on.”
“Yeah, so I think…let's just say both of us had a string of failed relationships. And I think when we got together, there was a sense that we'd met our match, but I think we were also both worried because we screwed it up so many times before. So I think there was a sense of, I don't want to mess this up and I also don't want to mess my career up. Like I want both. And how do we do that?”
So Jennifer and her future husband Gianpiero start seeing eachother and a few weeks later it’s New Year’s Eve and he asks her to come to his hometown in Sicily for a visit.
“You know, my first time in Sicily, I arrived, you know, classic...He picks me up on the back of the Vespa. I mean, how exciting is that? And we drive along the coast and we sit down and we start talking about this. And he was like, you know, I don't want to mess this up. How do we make this work? And the first conversation was really like, this will be a worthwhile relationship if, and what do we both want out of it? And it really started, I guess, the habit of talking about this stuff, which has really become ingrained in us. And I think when I started to do the research, what I saw was those couples who did well over time, and of course we all face challenges. It's not that they didn't face challenges - were couples who also had the habit of talking about the important stuff. So I think, you know, we read the usual relationships book and it's all about communication. And of course it's a truism, but there's so many couples out there who talk all the time and say nothing to each other, right. They're talking about the weather, the TV shows, Netflix, who's picking the kids up. This is not how to build a relationship. And I think over time, particularly those couples who are trying to combine a career and a relationship it's about developing the habit of talking about, well, how is that going to work? And what do we want and how are we going to support each other?”
So they had these conversations right at the beginning and they went on having them. And for quite a while all went well. But several years into the relationship, when Jennifer and Gianpiero had a young family, Jennifer came this close to doing what many women do in the early years – giving up work.
“So we'd gone all in. We'd had two children in 16 months. So you can imagine we had two under twos, neither of whom slept a wink, and it was the time I was doing my PhD actually. So I was studying really hard, and in an area where it's really what we think of as an up and out career, you know, you either succeed or you're out, so very high pressure and Gianpiero was really establishing his career at the same time. And it was just incredibly difficult to juggle it all.”
AM-T: “And just to be clear, he’s an academic too.”
“Yeah. He's an academic too. So he's on what we call the tenure track. So really high pressure, you have to publish, or they say perish, you can interpret that how you like. And our daughter, our second was born and on the 29th of December, so kind of middle of winter, and it was a really harsh winter. So snow, everywhere, super cold, like you couldn't go out at all. And it was March and the weather still wasn't breaking. And you know, I was breastfeeding, eight times at night, whatever you do at that age. And it got to one morning, I don’t know four o'clock in the morning and I just thought, I just cannot carry on. I sort of came down the next morning, which was still at like 5.30 in the morning and said, you know, I'm just going to stop.
And he said in slightly different words, ‘over my dead body’, and basically said, I'm not going to let you, because I know that you will bitterly regret this. And at the time I was very shocked. Let's just say, I wasn't happy. I was expecting a nice little support, of course, don't worry. And I felt like I got a bit of a kick, but it was a really helpful kick. And it was a kick, which took a lot of love to give. It would have been so easy for him to say, yeah, you give up your career. Like, easy life for me, but he didn't. And of course, if he hadn't right, we wouldn't be talking today. There would be no book. There would be no, there will be no career. I think it's, you know, he reminded me of the stuff we talked about on that Sicilian beach all those years ago that, you know, a good partner for me was not just someone who tolerated my ambition, but someone who supported it. And I think there are times when we're ambitious people, when support means a bit of a push, right, that is actually the kindest thing to do rather than what we think of as the classic empathy, which is don't panic, do what you like, you know, we don't always need that. And it's helpful to be reminded of that.”
At that time Jennifer and her husband were in what in the book she calls the first transition of their lives and careers together.
She outlines three transitions couples go through over their years together and how they can weather them, sharing stories of her research subjects and their own struggles and successes.
“So the first transition comes – it doesn't matter when you get together as a couple, it's coming. And it usually comes in the first five to eight years. And it's that point where you first have to make a tough decision, which really requires you to combine your, what were parallel tracks. So that might be, for example, you know, one of you get offers the job on the other side of the country. What do you do? Does one person follow? Do they take the opportunity? It's a time where we really need to figure out how are our careers going to fit together.
It might be the birth of a first child. You know, anyone who has children knows that is the end of parallel living. And on the surface, we tend to think it's a practical choice. You know, would we earn the same amount of money if we move cross country, how do we organize childcare? But of course, it's not, it's really a choice of power, you know, who gets to choose, who has the privilege to choose, whose career is priority? How do we support each other's ambitions? What if I take second place? How do we switch that back? And the big mistake couples make at this first transition is not to talk about that stuff, right? They talk about the practically, how might we make this work rather than thinking about what does this mean to us, and what might this set us up to do, and what roles might we get pushed into at this transition?”
That’s what happened to one couple she profiles…Jasmine and Alejandro…. They lived in Toronto, were about to get married when Jasmine gets offered an amazing promotion almost 3,000 miles away in Vancouver. Now until that point their careers had been individual. They had run in parallel, and neither of them had had to compromise.
So they thought practically – this was a promotion, it was a great opportunity, and Alejandro was able to find a good job in Vancouver. So they went. But after a few months in their new lives, things began to go awry. They started arguing about stupid things. But the reasons were all beneath the surface: Alejandro had a festering resentment that he’d moved across the country for HER job. She felt bad about that so she began to make up for it in other ways.
“And of course, really this was about who got to choose the move, you know? And so to compensate for that as many couples do, the woman who led the move then became very subservient in other things, you know, you decide what to do at the weekend, and you choose the apartment we're gonna rent and you pick the sofa we're going to buy and all this sort of stuff, which in some ways is a psychological way to rebalance. But of course it doesn't work, and eventually the house of cards falls down and they realized that the issue is it's put her in the powerful position, right? It's put her in the choosing position. Now they're a very egalitarian couple. It's not that they felt that he should be in the choosing position, but it's the fact that they fell into that without discussing it.
“And so many times with these couples, it's that, that gets them into trouble. It's not what they've picked. It's the way they've gone about picking it. If I can put it like that. So it's not that Vancouver was quote unquote, a bad choice for them, but the way they chose it led them into a bad process. And we see this time and time again. And in fact, practicality is interesting because it's often a word for money, right? We often think about the financial aspects. Now, of course, money is important for all of us. You know, let's not be naive. However, when we think about a meaningful life, it's more than about money. And when we just focus on that as a decision-making criteria, we often get these dynamics of regret, resentment. And we know that when resentment gets into a relationship, it's really difficult to get out of that space.”
What I found so interesting about this situation was all the underlying stuff about gender stereotypes, right? They thought they were egalitarian but you point out that we’re all bombarded with societal messages that reinforce those age-old stereotypes…I mean she even went all 1950s housewife with housework…
“We see this in the research as well. Actually, the women who do the most housework in the world are women who significantly out earn their husbands. And in fact, they do more than the average stay at home wife.”
AM-T: “Because?”
“Because it's this compensatory mechanism, right? We’ve upturned the apple cart. So I'm going to try and compensate by turning it back in a different direction. And of course this is unconscious. It's not that anyone sits down and thinks, oh, I'm panicking about this. I better do more washing up. You know, it's a very sort of unconscious mechanism that this occurs by, yeah.”
Another couple Jennifer writes about during their first transition was Hannah and Santiago. They were living and working in her hometown of Brussels. He’s Portuguese. They thought it made sense to live in Brussels because she had a good, well paying job – she earned more than he did…and they had twin toddlers to support.
But while her career took off, his didn’t. He felt he was passed over for opportunities at work because he was a foreigner. Their lives seemed like a frantic cycle of ‘doing’ – he missed Portugal’s customs and slower pace of life. In short, he realized how important home and its culture was to him. His wife had had no idea how strongly he felt.
Ultimately, the couple agreed they’d move the family to Portugal.
“And I think this speaks to the issue of how do we measure our lives, right. I think in our cultures, especially in the UK and the US externally, there's a lot of measurement on how successful you are in your career. But actually when you look at people, that's not how they measure their lives. There's a lot of other factors around community, around do I get to pursue some of the personal goals? And I think when people weigh all of those up, it can be easier to take a decision, which on the surface, like for them to move to Portugal, they had to take a cut in their pay. But when they measured that up against the other things that were important to them, that was worth it, you know, plus the cost of living obviously there is a lot less. So, you know, there's the relative amount. But I think society very often pushes us to see success as the career, as opposed to balancing these multiple yardsticks that are important to us.”
The second transition for dual-career couples often comes when they’re in their forties. They’ve built careers and now they take a step back and think, how did I get here? Is this where I want to be? If not, what do I want to do for the rest of my career? And when you get to mid-life there is a sense that life is starting to pass quickly – so you want to get it right.
“And so it's a point where we rethink the path we've been on, which can be very stressful in a couple, because if you're starting to question my life, my career, it's so easy for the other person to think, well, is this about me? Is this my fault? What does that say about our relationship? And of course, if we look at the divorce statistics, they're not linear across time, this is a real peak time for couples to break up. And we have all sorts of hypotheses why that is, but it really does coincide with this transition where we're both working through these I suppose you could call them existential questions, right, of what next, what's the direction? How am I going to make purpose in life more than getting my step on the career ladder? You know, maybe establishing a family, which are all good things, right? But I think we want more at that time of life.”
One thing that jumped out at me when I was reading about these couples in the second transition was how many of them had got caught up in what Santiago the Portuguese guy described – a cycle of do, do, do – couples are so busy between work and maybe their kids’ schedules and their own social lives, they don’t make much time for eachother.
“Yeah. And I think what's really interesting right now is a lot of couples are reconsidering that because of the pandemic, right. They've had a taste of how life can be different. I think what happens is the easiest way to describe it is we get onto a treadmill, right? And it's a treadmill of expectations. It's not necessarily a treadmill of what we want. And I want to be clear. It's not necessarily a bad treadmill. It's just that it's not right for everyone. And I think because most people do it, we just get onto it without really thinking.”
After work or before work there’s the gym or other sports, there’s entertaining friends at the weekends, and if you have children you become a taxi service for them.
“And we just add, add, add until our calendars become like every half an hour back to back all day long into the evening, collapse into bed, repeat. And it's a really hard trap to get out of because in many places we actually like this stuff, right? It's not quote unquote bad things. It's just too much. And we take on too much. And I think in doing, doing, doing, of course we stop being, right? We were not human beings, we're human doings.”
And this is everyone – not just couples with kids, not just heterosexual couples. The gay couples and child-free couples Jennifer talked to ran into just as many hurdles navigating their lives and careers as everyone else.
“We can sometimes look at couples with no children or maybe same-sex couples who aren't dealing so much with the gender polarization and think, well, it's all good for them. I mean, that's not true. We're all human beings. You know, we all face resentment. We all face envy. We all face, your career is going better than mine and I'm not sure I like that. It's all a question of, you know, are you supporting me? Do you understand me? These are really universal questions. And I also look at couples at different generational stages and also different cultures. And this stuff is so, so universal.”
“One thing that emerges from your research is that few of us leave ample time to reflect on our lives…when we’re unhappy, or going through something in our couple and career because of that ‘do, do, do’ thing you’re not allowing the time…you use this term liminality in the book, we need a liminal period to think about things and so few of us have that or will make space for that in our lives…”
“And I think what's interesting at the moment is we can see the rates of burnout increasing, for example, and this really, I mean, it hits everyone hard, but it hits working couples really hard when one or both goodness, for better burnt out, because a lot of the suddenly a lot of pressure on the other one as well. And we mainly, we often focus on the person who's burnt out or who's very stressed, but for the partner it's incredibly stressful to deal with. And I think the way we've come to think of burnout is okay, you get the meditation app, you eat healthy, you exercise an hour a day and you know, you'll be fine. Well, those things can help, but there is a certain amount of - it's a little bit like being pregnant, right. It takes nine months and it's not good to do it in eight, right? That's not what you want to do…a lot of these things, whether it's dealing with burnout, whether it's thinking through a career transition, they take a certain amount of time and trying to speed through that with tips and tricks and life hacks can often backfire long term. And I saw this a lot in the second transition, you know, couples will be like, ‘I'm unhappy with my life. Okay. Let's sit down for a weekend and try and sort it all through. And we're going to make a load of decisions.’ And then three months later, they're back to square one, right. Because they just didn't give it enough time, to settle and work through. We're so trained to go for action. We've under-appreciated the just sitting with the discomfort and how powerful that can be in the long-term.”
The third transition Jennifer outlines is about what happens in the last phase of our careers…
“So at the beginning of our career and the middle of our career, we're working really hard to establish ourselves. And we often have the pressure of childcare, elder care, you know, being people in the community, all that sort of stuff. And then at some point, those, those issues ease. So we've proven ourselves in our career. We've reached a, hopefully a decent position, our children, if we've had them, are leaving home and our parents sadly may have passed on, and suddenly we have this renewed freedom, and with it comes the sense of what, what do I do in the last phase? So it's this real sense of exploration and it can be a really exciting time. And we see people reinventing careers hugely and reinventing their lives. It can also be a real stressful time because it's like, well, I'm no longer that hands-on mum or I'm no longer that bright young thing raising the career ladder.”
She describes it as a time of loss and of opportunity.
And reading about the last two phases of couples’ lives something really hit home – which is that when one of you wants something different out of your lives and careers than you did 20 years ago…the other partner is often quite uncomfortable with the idea of their spouse changing, because we’ve become very attached to our role in the relationship. And if they’re changing…that means we have to change too.
“Yeah. And so I love this piece of my research because what I came to see is, you could think of it as a role and a counter role, right? Whatever your partner does, there's usually a payoff for you in it. Right. Even if you don't recognize it so much. So let's imagine your partner’s working really hard. You might even say they're overworking, um, and on the surface, you may want them to stop. But imagine they just come home one day, I've resigned, right? I'm going to take a break, I'll figure it out. That's probably going to be incredibly anxiety provoking for you, even if you've been begging them to slow down their work, because suddenly it puts different roles on your shoulders. My goodness, I need to be the breadwinner for a while. Ooh, where did that come from? Or, you know, if you suddenly turn into the reflective one, maybe I'm the person who needs to hold the progressing forward and the working.
And we often see this, not just in roles like breadwinner, home carer, but also in more psychological roles. So usually in couples, we split these psychological roles. So you're the organized one and I'm the laid back one, you know, but you may get to a point where you're like, actually I used to be quite laid back and I would like to be a bit more laid back now, but that means I need to organize a bit more. No, I'm not sure I want to do that. Because I'm quite invested in the identity of being the laid back one. And I think this pops up especially in mid or later life, is how do you unlock those familiar positions you've got yourself into.”
But it can work, as several couples in the book show. It requires patience, understanding, and a bit of generosity on both sides.
AM-T: “I have to say reading this book…there’s so much we don’t discuss as couple that we should – it made me realize anew how complicated our relationships are, and how communication is so vital and how most of us don’t communicate enough about the important things.”
“Yeah. So I think we have so many unspoken agreements, right? And those unspoken agreements are also the things we really not going to talk about because we don't want to go there. And of course on the surface, it would be a bore to talk about this stuff all the time. That would be a little bit much, but what happens is often in the early stage of our relationship, we're actually very good at talking about this. So when I interviewed those younger couples and I don't just mean in chronological age, but when they're new couples. So even those couples who are maybe on their second or third relationship, they may be mid fifties. They get together again. They're really good at discussing these things. In fact, those couples tend to be the best because they've made big mistakes in the past. But then all couples eventually fall into this, ‘Oh, we know, I know what you want. I know what you like. We don't need to talk about this stuff anymore,’ without thinking it evolves. And that's when the issue happens. So I think it's less of a case that we haven't got the skills to talk about this stuff. And I'm sure most people have the desire to fix these things. I think we just layer assumptions onto our relationship that become so ingrained, we just don't think about it.”
I know I said this earlier but this book has many profound insights – I highly recommend it to anyone who’s part of a dual-career couple and even if you’re not but you’d like to be at some point. You’ll be armed with a lot of useful tools going in.
And you haven’t heard the last of Jennifer Petriglieri. Next time I’m releasing a short show with some of your questions about your own dual-career couple dilemmas and Jennifer will be answering those questions. Look for that in the next couple of weeks.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.