Couples That Work
Three transitions and a secret recipe of the couples that work.
"The most important career choice you'll make is who you marry", Sheryl Sandberg once said. I find this statement a bit too simplistic, but I like it. I do not believe in perfect couples (including my own). I do not believe in "having it all", it's an illusion. But I do believe in couples and families that work. And when we are in a couple that works, both personally and professionally, when we are in a family that works, it makes our life/work journey really fascinating. The biggest question is, how can we make it work despite challenges inherent to dual-career couples, despite problems that life never stops throwing at us? Trying to figure out my own answers, I was excited to learn about Jennifer Petriglieri's new book "Couples That Work: How Dual-Career Couples Can Thrive in Love and Work" and to attend her recent talk about the book at the INSEAD Singapore campus.
I am still looking forward to reading the book - full of stories and step-by-step exercises - as soon as it becomes available on Kindle. However, the ideas Prof. Petriglieri shared during her talk resonated with me so much that I wanted to write about them without waiting any longer.
Three Transitions
The first fundamental truth is that we cannot figure out ALL the answers at the beginning of our relationship. Just when we think that we are all set and things look stable, life surprises us with another puzzle to solve, another challenge to tackle.
Prof. Petriglieri identifies 3 key transitions for a dual-career couple. Each transition comes with its own struggles, and each can either break the couple or strengthen the bond.
1st transition: How do we make it work?
The first transition happens when the honeymoon period is over: it's the time to take our first real decisions as a couple and, inevitably, to deal with first conflicts. We need to see how we blend together two busy lives, how we choose among emerging career opportunities, and, if we decide to have kids, how we support their needs. The key question of this first transition is 'How do we make it work?'
On the surface, those decisions seem to be about practical things. But it's always deeper than practicality. There are fundamental underlying questions that lie beneath: values and principles, hopes and fears, the lines we are willing or unwilling to cross in our relationship and in our professional lives.
One important fundamental question in a couple is the balance of power, the decision on who leads and who follows. Couples typically pick one of the three different models: some choose primary/secondary model, others - take turns, others - decide to both stay primary. I've just realized that in my couple, we have been through all three models, consecutively. The takeaway from the research Prof. Petriglieri's research is that it's not the arrangement you pick, but the way you go about it that matters: if have we been able to explicitly address and agree on the fundamental things, chances are that we successfully pass through the first transition and enjoy the period of relative stability.
2nd transition: What do we really want?
Welcome to a classical, existential mid-life crisis. Whenever one of the partners starts questioning his/her path - What do I really want? - the other may feel insecure. And if there has been a persistent imbalance of power in your relationship, the "secondary" partner might have feelings of resentment and regrets of not having given a shot at what she/he had always wanted.
During the second transition, we may need to renegotiate our direction and our roles in the relationship. It can be a very stressful time for couples; the divorce rates peak. Probably the worst thing in this transition is to deal with it in a cheerleading "it's gonna be OK" way. It is the time when the old ways we used to support each other have to shift. Quite counterintuitively, instead of trying to hold our partner close, it is the time where we need to be a "secure base", but lovingly push our partner outside of his/her comfort zone to go and explore new possibilities, to take risks. It takes a huge amount of confidence in each other. But it's difficult to be a secure base when we feel threatened. And what if the mid-life crisis hits both partners simultaneously?
It seems that the book offers a step-by-step guide to pass through this delicate stage of your couple's life - and I am looking forward to discovering it!
3rd transition: Who are we now?
The third major transition comes when the career game is largely over and kids are grown up. It is a transition where we have to reinvent both our working identities and our identity as a couple. It starts with a sense of loss, an end of the road. Yet as we now live longer and our working lives are expanding, probably for the first time in history this last transition opens incredible new horizons for late stagers.
For this transition, Prof. Petriglieri recommends developing a shared passion that is not about our work or our kids. Such shared passion can be the anchor to hold on to while figuring our third transition.
The Secret Recipe
In her five-year research, Prof. Petriglieri had interviewed dozens of dual-career couples at different stages of their life and career. The couples were very different from each other, yet the strongest ones seemed to share one very specific habit: having regular and deep conversations about the three fundamental things:
(1) What really matters to us: our values, principles, decision criteria, the yardsticks by which we measure success.
(2) What are the lines we are willing to cross: the constraints and boundaries that we define for ourselves - geography, travel time, time dedicated to work…
(3) What are the things that scare us: there may be so many unspoken fears - fears of being left behind, infidelity, fear of having kids, fear of bad health, etc… When we specifically address those deep fears, we may find out that they are completely unfounded. Or we may see clearly how to manage our boundaries. In any case, the fear brought out into the daylight suddenly becomes less scary.
There are no perfect couples and no perfect life and career journeys, but it's great if one day we can look back and say to each other "We might not have got all that we wanted, but we've both got a shot, and we keep a good relationship".