7
Transitioning to a New Path
“To the next adventure!” Wolfgang declared as he clinked mugs of frothing hot chocolate with Heidi. They shared a knowing glance before dissolving into giggles. “If I’d known this weekend would work out so well,” she replied, “I’d have suggested it a year ago!”
It was Sunday afternoon, and Heidi and Wolfgang sat in their kitchen, snow lightly falling outside. After eighteen months of debating—often at the top of their lungs—about what they really wanted out of their relationship and their lives, they’d arranged to have two days alone at home with the intention of agreeing a way out of their impasse.
Their married life had been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. The birth of their two children had triggered a period of stress and conflict as they figured out how to manage their new lives as parents with two careers and wrestled their way through their first transition. Nine years of relative stability followed. They had agreed that Wolfgang would have the primary career, and he had risen to a management position at a small manufacturer of digital camera lenses. Heidi had gradually built her expertise as a customer relations specialist while dedicating significant time to their family.
But in their early forties, their hard-earned balance started to unravel. Wolfgang found that he had a gift—and a passion—for mentoring junior colleagues. Encouraged by Heidi, he had enrolled in a part-time coaching course and began to dream of becoming a freelance coach. Every time he considered it, however, he concluded that his family responsibilities made it financially impossible. Feeling increasingly trapped, Wolfgang became resentful and withdrawn at home and his work performance began to suffer.
Meanwhile, Heidi was facing her own impasse. For the past decade, she had deliberately slowed her career progress to focus on the family. Initially, the slower pace felt right, but as her youngest child entered his last year of elementary school, she began feeling regretful. Some of her peers were now on the path to becoming managers while she remained a team supervisor. She was a gifted manager, well respected by colleagues and clients. Wolfgang encouraged her to investigate and apply for a more senior position to pursue her ambition. But how could she take on a management role while keeping up her duties as the chief family organizer? Like Wolfgang, she became resentful of her role in the family and the limits it placed on her career.
Heidi and Wolfgang had always prided themselves on their “no drama” way of life. Now this approach had become stifling. Reluctant to rock the boat, neither of them shared their discontent. Tensions rose; they became snappish and critical with each other and their children.
Things came to a head when Wolfgang’s doctor prescribed him a course of antidepressants. Heidi took her surprise as a sign that she had failed to grasp the depth of his suffering. Wolfgang was embarrassed that he hadn’t told her more about it before. There was a silver lining, at least. They were now talking again. They started couples counseling and gradually began to recognize the connection between their impasses. After months of couples work, tensions began to ease and they started to see a way through. Knowing they needed time to figure out the practicalities of change, they’d asked Heidi’s parents to look after their kids for the weekend.
Over Saturday and Sunday morning, Wolfgang and Heidi spoke more deeply about their dreams, fears, hopes, and fantasies than they’d ever done before. They were moved and surprised to discover there was more common ground between their future plans than they had imagined. By the time Heidi’s parents’ car pulled up outside their house, they had agreed that Heidi would accept a promotion she had recently been offered and move into the stable breadwinner position in the family. Her increased salary and their joint commitment to curtail family spending would enable Wolfgang to quit his job, launch a freelance business, and shoulder the role of chief family organizer.
The plan involved some wrenching changes for both of them. Wolfgang would have to relinquish his role as the source of financial stability; he’d have to get used to being economically dependent on Heidi and to stepping up at home. For her part, Heidi would have to accept a secondary role in family life, a shift she found a little frightening. Together, they would have to change their lifestyle, cutting back on family outings and other nonessential expenses until Wolfgang built up his coaching practice.
Would it work? Only time would tell. But at least their path ahead seemed clear.
Laying the Ground for a Broader Path
Like other couples who spoke to me while resolving their second transition, Wolfgang and Heidi were broadening their joint path to accommodate what each of them really wanted out of their careers and lives. Realizing what they wanted to do was an important step, but it was not enough for them to make a successful transition. They needed to lay the psychological ground for their broader path before they cracked the practicalities of embracing it. To do this grounding, they needed to work inside-out.
Successful transitions begin on the inside. They begin with couples renegotiating the roles they play in each other’s lives, which in turn shape who they become and what they do. As we explored in chapter 5, couples settle on these roles during their first transition, not always consciously. If couples navigate the first transition well—that is, if their accommodation to their first major live event was deliberate—their roles align with their path. Over time though, these roles constrain couples and need to be renegotiated for them to recraft their path on the basis of their reciprocal individuation.
While Wolfgang and Heidi both had careers and were involved in family life, Wolfgang took the role of the dependable financial provider and Heidi the role of the chief family organizer. In his role, Wolfgang held the ambition, drive, and financial responsibility for the couple, while Heidi held the caring, balance, and family responsibility. Of course, Wolfgang was still caring and Heidi was still ambitious, but neither expressed nor developed these sides of themselves because the other expressed them so well. They thus became polarized and incomplete as individuals but whole as a couple. During their early years, this psychological division of labor worked. As a couple, they were able to progress in their careers, raise a family, and fit into their social world. They also enjoyed an emotionally stable period thanks to their no-drama approach. However, as they hit the struggle of their second transition, these roles and approach became a hindrance.
Their no-drama approach, averse to intense emotional expression, blocked them from sharing their impasses with each other. At the same time, their psychological roles locked them into a life path they no longer wanted. Heidi felt unable to express her growing sense of drive and live out her career ambitions because she was trapped in the role of the chief family organizer. Meanwhile, Wolfgang felt unable to transition to a more balanced career and approach to life because he was trapped in the role of the dependable financial provider. Although they could both see a way forward, neither felt that they could embrace it because they were stuck in complementary roles. To move forward as individuals and as a couple, they would have to betray those familiar roles.
Rebalancing Psychological Roles
Heidi and Wolfgang’s experience was common among couples I interviewed for this book. The roles they negotiated in their first transition rarely fit their second. Once couples had wrestled through the struggle of their second transition and identified what they each wanted from their careers, lives, and relationship, they needed to figure out new psychological roles and approaches that fit their broader path.
The first step for Wolfgang and Heidi was to recognize how enmeshed their roles were in their couple, family, and social circles. Although they felt trapped by those roles, those roles also gave them valued identities. Wolfgang was proud of his work progression, which gave him status in his social circle and a unique role at home. His children relied on him for practical advice, and he in turn pushed them to achieve academically. As the son of a breadwinning father, he also felt a sense of comfort and continuity in his position. On her part, Heidi was proud of being the family rock, a role that her mother and most of her female friends also played. Her children’s reliance on her made her feel valued and she reveled in helping them develop into interesting and considerate people. She was also proud to juggle a career in parallel to her family life.
Wolfgang and Heidi were ambivalent about changing their roles and having to let go of the clear and cherished identities that those roles afforded them. For months, they wrestled with the fantasy of transitioning to new paths without making any changes to their psychological division of labor. Their fear, one that many couples I spoke to shared, was that to transition, they would need to entirely relinquish the roles they had played to this point and thus lose their valued identities. No wonder they felt trapped.
The reality is that for most couples, Wolfgang and Heidi included, the second transition requires a rebalancing and broadening of roles, not relinquishing them. It is an opportunity for people to undo the polarization of roles in their couple, not reverse it. Each partner needs to reclaim the underdeveloped pieces of themselves that their partner currently holds on their behalf and loosen their grip on, without entirely letting go of, those they hold on their partner’s behalf. By embracing new and sharing old roles, couples can move to the psychological center ground. This movement facilitates couples outer-world transitions and make them more multifaceted and psychologically whole. Between embracing new and sharing old roles, most people find the latter the hardest.
The Fear of Rebalancing
Wolfgang feared he would lose the respect of his friends and family if he relied financially on Heidi while he built up his freelancing business. Heidi feared that she would no longer be valued by family and friends if she shared the chief family organizer role with Wolfgang. Both partners’ worries concerned their value in the eyes of others. Like most of the couples I spoke to, before their second transition, Wolfgang and Heidi had spent their lives following a life path shaped by social expectations, and their concerns were therefore unsurprising. Looked at through their individuated eyes, neither truly believed their self-worth was attached to their role as financial provider or family rock, yet it was hard for them to escape decades of internalized expectations.
The role of others in Heidi and Wolfgang’s transitions was particularly salient because these transitions required them to unpack a traditional gender role divide. This challenge heightened their anxiety about changing, because they rightly assumed that their family and friends would push back against their transition. Every couple I spoke to who made a transition similar to Wolfgang and Heidi’s experienced some pushback. Men usually had to deal with offhand comments or jokes; banter between the boys that was used to convey a message. For example, Wolfgang told me that his best friend joked that Heidi would need to give him permission to come out for drinks in the future. Women, on the other hand, usually have to deal with “well-meaning” conversations with friends who are worried about their husband’s ability to cope.
Occasionally couples face stronger pushback, usually from extended families. One man I spoke to who, at forty-six, had left his job as a software engineer to pursue his dream of setting up his own business, recounted his father’s reaction: “He sat me down and told me it was utterly unacceptable that I had become financially dependent on my wife, and that in doing so I had lost my manhood.” Such proclamations are still unfortunately common. Gender norms are changing, but when couples make choices that deviate from traditional norms, it is not unusual for them to encounter hurtful pushback.
It’s not just when couples’ transitions involve an undoing of gender roles that they experience pushback from others. Remember Carla, whom we met in chapter 5? Her inner-world transition involved stepping back from her constant running approach to life and loosening her grip on the organizer-in-chief role that she played for her family and friends. Yet the more she tried to pull back, the more her family and friends tried to hook her into it. “I couldn’t escape,” she lamented, “They would tell me I was the best organizer, that they needed me to take charge, that it was my job in the friends’ circle. They constantly tried to make me feel guilty. They just could not let me go.”
The truth is that whatever psychological role you play, your partner as well as other people in your social circle are often invested in your continuing to play it. Often, they rely on you playing it so they do not have to. If you manage your second transition well, your partner will understand and buy into your need to change. Convincing your friends and wider family can be more challenging.
While on the surface the pushback from others may not seem like a big deal, when you are in the midst of a transition, it hurts. You may feel raw from liminality, a little uncertain, and crave support. You may also have some ambivalence about letting go of your old role, so anything that reaffirms the old can make embracing the new more difficult. Taken together, people’s ambivalence toward change and the pushback they experience can slow down or even hinder their transitions.
Rocky First Steps
Alone in their home, Wolfgang and Heidi felt sure that the broader path they had chosen was rooted in their unique interests and desires. They recognized the challenges it posed but were 100 percent behind each other. When they began to transition, however, they discovered that it was harder to make inner changes than outer ones.
Heidi was full of excitement when she accepted her promotion. She gladly worked longer hours and invested the energy required to succeed and progress. What she found hard was to loosen her grip on her role as the family rock. The couple had agreed that Heidi would start work early each day and Wolfgang would pick up the morning madness of breakfast, packing lunches, and doing the school run that used to be Heidi’s domain. In spite of this explicit agreement, Heidi constantly worried that Wolfgang would drop the ball on their well-organized family life. She found it hard to accept when he made choices that deviated from hers, and she regularly interfered. Her worries were heightened by her girlfriends and mother, who questioned how well Wolfgang was coping with the demands of the family.
On his part, Wolfgang felt enormous relief when he resigned from his job. He thoroughly enjoyed launching his coaching practice, but the two years it took to build up his business were tough. He found it hard to accept that Heidi outearned him and was embarrassed by his friends’ jibes that he was no longer the primary breadwinner. He also felt guilty that his transition had forced the family to rein in their spending and robbed their children of their annual holiday. Wolfgang enjoyed being more actively involved in his kids’ lives and balancing this involvement with his career, but he found Heidi’s constant interference annoying and resented her helicoptering.
Luckily Wolfgang and Heidi had learned the importance of ongoing dialogue through the difficulties they encountered in the struggle of their second transition. Although the first six months of the new order were rough, they kept talking things through, challenging each other when they found it hard to loosen their grip on their old roles, and encouraging each other to stick with the new path. The thing they spent the longest time working through was their rebalancing of psychological roles. They knew that neither could change without the other. This knowledge helped them to hold each other to account and to work together to deal with the pushback.
Dealing with the Impact on Others
Wolfgang tackled his friends head-on by talking about his love of his new work. They gradually backed off. Some even acknowledged the courage it took him to change and revealed that they wished they could do the same. On her part, Heidi learned to challenge the pushback she received from her mother and friends. She openly praised Wolfgang’s role in the family and was honest about her struggles to walk away from the “helicopter wife” position. Her candor was met with respect, and the concerned conversations slowly declined. What surprised them both was how easily their children embraced their transition. Like many couples I have spoken to, they experienced few complaints and minimal pushback from their son and daughter.
Many parents I spoke to imagined that what their children craved above all else was stability. This belief made them wary of making radical changes. Research, however, shows that children themselves like something quite different, especially if it is not caused by an exogenous shock, but proactively initiated within the family. When asked in a study what they would change about the way their parents’ work affected their lives, children’s most common response was that they wished their parents were less stressed.1 They weren’t concerned about which parent did what, or how many hours they worked. They were concerned with their parents’ stress and its impact on them.
Transitioning to an individuated life path will inevitably involve change for a couple’s children and likely some stress at the beginning. Over the long term, however, the couple’s increased fulfillment is likely to decrease their stress and make their kids happier, accepting of changes in their family life, and less sensitive to social demands.
Wolfgang and Heidi are a couple who navigated the second transition well. They endured a long and hard period of struggle but were able to build a mutual secure base relationship and support each other to find new individuated paths. They faced pushback from friends and family but could shift their roles to the center and lay the ground for a good transition. Two years later, they had stabilized their broader path, and felt content and fulfilled traveling along it. Not all couples follow this pattern. For some, the second transition doesn’t lead to reciprocal individuation, but to a frozen path and to a strained or broken relationship.
Developmental Freezing
When people freeze their development, they become stuck on a path that no longer aligns with their interests and desires. While they may still be objectively successful—progressing up a career ladder for example—they feel trapped on a train taking them in the wrong direction. The freezing is developmental because it stops people from becoming the person they desire to be. In this state, people are like caterpillars trapped in their chrysalises, longing to be butterflies but unable to break free.
I found that developmental freezing occurs most often in couples who build an asymmetric secure base relationship during the struggle period of their second transition. Let’s return to the story of Camille and Pierre, whom we met in chapter 6, to understand how the freezing occurs. In his previous marriage, Pierre had enjoyed support from his wife but was not given much in return, while Camille’s first husband had actively discouraged her career and development. Both wanted a different model for their new relationship, and both were committed to supporting each other in their careers, but their good intentions did not translate into actions. They formed their relationship and entered their second transition hot on the heels of their first. Although they needed each other’s support to individuate, after two years together, it became clear that they had an asymmetric relationship in which Pierre was a secure base for Camille, but Camille did not reciprocate this role for Pierre.
What Camille and Pierre had done was to replicate their previous marriages in reverse. Pierre flipped from the “bad husband” to the supportive one who self-sacrificed and got little in return. Camille flipped from the downtrodden wife to the supported one who had no energy to return the support she received. On the surface, the polarization of their roles seemed to benefit Camille and hinder Pierre. With Pierre as her secure base, Camille was able to explore alternative options, reflect on what she wanted, and transition from being a project manager in an accountancy firm to an in-house accounting manager for one of her former clients. Without Camille as his secure base, Pierre could not engage in the exploration necessary to figure out his individuated life path. After two years struggling, he resigned himself to developmental freezing.
When we take a deeper look at Camille and Pierre’s situation, we see that the polarization of their roles actually hindered both. As their paths diverged—Camille’s becoming increasingly individuated, and Pierre’s increasingly frozen—they began to resent each other, and their relationship deteriorated. Their troubles made it hard for Camille to thrive, and it bred resentment in Pierre.
Six months into her new path, Camille shocked her new colleagues by resigning and moving back to her old accountancy firm. “It released a wave of pressure from our relationship,” she explained, “We were back on a level playing ground. And it was OK professionally—I mean, it’s not like I hated being in the firm.” In making this move, Camille sacrificed her individuated life path for her relationship with Pierre. On the surface, they had a relationship that worked practically—they juggled two careers and their complex family life—but they were developmentally stuck. Camille may not have hated her firm, but it kept her stuck in a support role longing to break free. As Pierre described their arrested development, “I feel like we’re treading water.” They had maintained their relationship but failed to answer the defining question of the second transition—What do we really want?—and instead resigned themselves to a frozen path that they followed until hitting their third and final transition.
Not all couples who find themselves in Camille and Pierre’s situation resign themselves to a frozen path. Some break up. One woman I spoke to, who divorced in her mid-forties, described her relationship’s unraveling as follows, “We were the classic high-flying couple, good jobs, wonderful friends, and we were on a great track. Then in our early forties, we both had crises of confidence. Neither of us felt in the right place. We wanted change, but we didn’t know what to move to. We were stuck. I tried to support him, but he didn’t really try or couldn’t support me. Eventually we retreated to our own worlds. Resentment built, and that was the beginning of the end.” Following their divorce, both she and her ex-husband moved to new individuated life paths. While Pierre and Camille sacrificed their individuation for their relationship, this couple chose the opposite. Reflecting on it, the woman recalled, “Looking back, it was as if we needed to break up to be able to move on in our lives.”
I found that developmental freezing was relatively common for couples in their second transition, but hardly inevitable. By building a mutual secure base relationship, you can avoid getting stuck and ensure that you both move forward to a broader path.
Cracking the Practicalities of a Broader Path
Once you have figured out what you really want and laid the ground for your reciprocally individuated path, you must switch to managing the practicalities. The more radical the transition you are planning, the more important these practicalities are.
After two years in shared liminality, Indira and Nick, whom we met in chapter 6, gradually settled on what they wanted. They realized that they needed to share the sense of progress and the sense of purpose that had until that point been polarized in their couple. Indira had drifted into her job in corporate communications and had progressed through the ranks to manage the communications team of a midsized logistics firm. The continued sense of progress had kept her motivated through her thirties, but when she hit her forties, she wondered what it was all for.
Although Indira had never been attracted to Nick’s career as a teacher, she found herself envying his sense of purpose. He had been drawn to teaching because he wanted to change young people’s lives and because he loved math. He acknowledged that he had made a difference in the lives of countless young people, but he felt stuck. “I was living in a perpetual Groundhog Day. Every year repeated itself. Yes, the students changed, but I became overwhelmed with the sameness of it all.”
Indira and Nick realized they had been living on opposite ends of a purpose versus progress polarization and both wanted to move to the middle ground. Nick wanted to stay in the world of education but realized that he needed to get out of teaching and into a career that would give him a greater sense of advancement. Indira knew she had to leave the corporate space and seek progress in a realm that was more personally meaningful. Living close to Boston, home to many nonprofit organizations, inspired them to seek new careers in this world. Practically restructuring their lives to make it happen, though, required careful planning.
They had, until that point, relied on Nick’s working schedule and holidays to raise their three children and juggle their jobs. With no extended family to turn to during the long summer holidays or for everyday emergencies, how could they manage two middle schoolers and a newly minted high school student? Although comfortably well-off, neither Nick nor Indira earned big salaries, so they could not buy their way out of family logistics problems. With all this in mind, they entered an intense planning phase.
“I felt like we were back in our early thirties, figuring out how we could fit our careers together,” recalled Indira, “only this time it wasn’t out of a sense of panic but a sense of purpose.” Before they applied for new jobs, Indira and Nick mapped out the shape of their future careers. They realized that they would have to invest significant time and energy during their first year in a new job to learn the ropes and get themselves established. Although the couple felt that they had a double-primary career-prioritization model, Nick was definitely the lead parent. During the long school holidays, he took care of almost 100 percent of family logistics, housework, and child care; and during term time, he still managed the lion’s share. That would have to change.
Over a series of weeks, they developed what Nick referred to as their “new pact.” They first agreed to stagger their transitions: Indira trying to make the move to a nonprofit first to establish herself, and then be ready to pick up more at home when Nick made his transition. On the home front, they agreed to move to a true co-parenting model and engage their teenage children to help out more. Neither thought these changes would be easy, but both realized they could not successfully transition without making them. Finally, they agreed that they would revisit their pact every six months to ensure they were on target and keeping each other to their promises.
Indira and Nick’s story illustrates how couples need to revisit agreements forged in their first transition to successfully complete their second. First, it’s helpful to map the projected shapes of your transitions, and subsequent career paths will reveal the relative levels of investment, and peaks and troughs of pressure, that you will need to balance. The career-mapping exercise I explained in chapter 4 will help you here. Armed with this realistic picture, you will then need to revisit, and potentially renegotiate, your career-prioritization and parenting agreements. Again, you might want to refer back to chapter 4 for a guide on how to do this. Lastly, just as Indira and Nick negotiated their “new pact,” the cusp of a transition is the perfect time to redo the couple contracting exercise outlined in chapter 2. This will help orient and ground you in the coming years.
Struggling to Make It Work
Some couples agree on what they both want, lay the psychological ground, but simply cannot agree on or make the practicalities work.
We Just Can’t Afford It
Having mapped out their transitions, some couples I spoke to reached the disheartening conclusion that they simply could not afford to make changes they would have liked. Launching into a period where one partner has little or no income while they retrain or build a new business feels unaffordable. Likewise, some couples were so financially committed to a mortgage or heavy costs of living that the prospect of one partner moving to a job with a permanently lower salary felt impossible.
Khalil and Amal found themselves in this situation when Amal decided that her individuated path would be to set up her own business. Until that point, she had worked in an events-organizing company and had provided the couple with stability, both financial and emotional. In contrast, Khalil had set up a small business and had lived out the couple’s excitement and risk-taking. As a couple, they were optimistic and lived to the fullest, but they were not financially prudent. They had a hefty mortgage and few savings.
Khalil understood Amal’s frustration with the corporate world and realized it was time to share some of the excitement of entrepreneurship with her. He was prepared to shoulder his share of the family stabilizer role. But neither he nor Amal could figure out how to afford Amal’s transition. She had developed a solid business plan with a friend to launch an events company specializing in corporate retreats. Both she and her friend had experience in this area and felt they could steadily build up a solid income stream—steadily, but not quickly enough to cover her and Khalil’s financial commitments. After months of back-and-forth, the couple concluded that Amal needed to shelve her plans. They committed to tightening their belts and start saving, but both knew it would take several years to build a nest egg big enough to enable the transition.
Khalil and Amal’s story is discouraging, but hardly unique. Its not unusual for couples to get trapped on a financial treadmill. Many just don’t make enough to build significant savings after all their expenses are paid off. Some, even as their salaries grow, stretch themselves to buy a bigger house, locking themselves into a cycle of spending more as they earn more. It’s natural to reward yourself for your success, but rewarding only through spending locks you into always needing the income level you currently enjoy or more. If you think long-term, saving is a much better reward because it buys you the option to change in the future.2 One of the key benefits of being in a dual-career couple is that two incomes can provide a financial cushion to enable transitions, but realizing this benefit takes self-control, planning, and of course an element of luck.
We Just Cannot Agree
What happens if you understand each other’s desire to transition and support changes to your psychological roles and agreements, but simply cannot agree with each other’s new career plans? Margot and Jeff found themselves in this dilemma at the end of their second transition. When they met in their mid-thirties, neither anticipated major hurdles in juggling their careers and relationship. Both were committed to their work and to each other, neither wanted children, and they were like-minded on most aspects of life. What could go wrong?
Fast-forward to their mid-forties, and they entered the familiar pattern of restlessness with what they had and questioning what they really wanted. Both agreed that they wanted more adventure and excitement in their lives and careers, and they wanted to break free from the constraints they had accepted in exchange for stability and progress until that point. Everything seemed to align, except that they had very different ideas of what adventure and excitement looked like.
Margot longed to live abroad. She had backpacked around Southeast Asia as a college student and thought it would be fun to live the expat life in that region. They could explore new countries and experience a totally different life. She didn’t anticipate a permanent move but was set on a three- to five-year period. They had no kids, their parents were young, and they could easily rent out their apartment and cover the mortgage. Why not take the plunge?
Jeff, however, wanted to plunge into very different waters. In the previous five years, he had developed an expertise in a sought-after aspect of forecasting technology and he longed to set himself up as a freelance adviser in this area. It would be low risk. Several companies had already asked him to consult for them, he had a large network, and with a little luck he stood to earn more than his current salary. The issue was that he firmly believed he needed to remain in the United Kingdom to make this career move.
For months, Margot and Jeff tried to sell each other their preferred options. Margot argued that Jeff would be able to set up his freelancing from any location in the world, while Jeff argued that Margot could find adventure through a career move rather than a geographical move. Neither budged, and they reached a stalemate.
What can you do if you find yourself in Margot and Jeff’s situation, when your ideal paths conflict such that pursuing one makes the other impossible? First, it’s helpful to know that these situations are not necessarily deal breakers. Deal breakers typically arise when one of you wants to have children and the other doesn’t, when one of you wants to permanently live in a country that the other could not tolerate, or when you want to live according to very divergent values. In these situations, you may be better off in a relationship with someone else. For everything else, you can usually find a compromise with an investment of time and effort.
Seeking professional mediation when in stalemate is particularly helpful. Your friends and family will all have their own opinions and ideas on what you should do. But what you need is someone to impartially help you explore the dilemma—to see it through different eyes without telling you what to do. This is the route that Margot and Jeff took.
Although their relationship was still strong, they entered marriage counseling with the explicit aim of working through their deadlock. Over the course of a few months, they recognized how important each other’s transitions were and looked for ways in which both could get what they wanted. They decided that Margot would take a year’s secondment to her company’s Hong Kong office while Jeff stayed in London to strike out as a freelance consultant. They could manage a long-distance relationship for that period, and the flexibility of Jeff’s new freelancer life meant that he could visit several times during the twelve months.
Jeff resigned six weeks before Margot boarded the plane for Hong Kong. Over that year, they both thrived in their adventures and enjoyed professional success. Jeff warmed to the idea of moving abroad, but when the year ended, Margot returned to the UK. They agreed that the next two years would be spent in London while Jeff established his freelance business, and then they would return to Asia together for a second stint. Not the ideal solution for either, but one that was good enough for both.
Embracing What We Really Want
Figuring out what you really want and transitioning to a broader individuated path together will not resolve all your questions. Nor should it. The questions we face in our second transition—Where does my passion lie? Am I who I want to be? What should I do with the rest of my life?—are long-term developmental projects. The best we can do is partially answer them and then continue to live them. As Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet and novelist, wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet,
. . . have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.3
If you can embrace your new individuated life while continuing to live your questions, you will enjoy a stable period of shared growth before your third transition begins. Then, with some luck, you may find that you have lived your way into the answers.
SUMMARY: THE SECOND TRANSITION
What Do We Really Want?
NATURE OF THE TRANSITION
Shift focus from adapting to social demands and expectations to identifying and pursuing what each partner wants out of their careers, lives, and relationship.
TRIGGERS
A combination of two forces—the drive to individuate that is part of the life cycle and the need to tackle the division of roles within a couple that is a consequence of the first transition.
DEFINING QUESTION
What do we really want?
Each partner must identify their unique interests and desires and the couple must figure out how they can help each other pursue them.
TRAPS
Mistrusting our partner’s explorations and becoming defensive
Not mutually supporting each other’s development
Mutual individuation
Building a mutual secure base relationship that allows both partners to individuate
Rebalancing roles each partner plays in the other’s life
Renegotiating the division of career and family labor that they established in their first transition
TOOLS
Develop a mutual secure base relationship: Understand how best to support your partner in their transition and build mutuality in your relationship (chapter 6)
REFLECTIONS
Relational resilience: Tips on how to build a high-quality connection with your partner that can withstand adversity (chapter 5)