Beyond Dividing the Chores

My aim in writing this book is to move beyond the practicalities and provide a greater understanding of the psychological and social forces underlying the challenges that dual-career couples face. I also show how thinking and talking about these forces can help couples be more successful and fulfilled in love and work.

Five years ago, I set out to lift the lid on the lives of dual-career couples, to understand not just when and why couples struggle, but also when and why couples thrive. And to develop, based on this understanding, a more nuanced approach to guiding couples on how to make their lives work for them.

I started my research with a simple question: How can dual-career couples thrive in their love and work? At the beginning of my inquiry, I naively assumed that couples struggled early in their relationships, then at some point figured out how to fit their love and work together in a way that let them travel through their lives more or less smoothly. The further I got into the research, the more clouded the picture became. There were struggles throughout couples’ working lives, which meant that they had to revisit how their relationship and careers fit together more than once.

As I interviewed more couples, the fog began to lift. I noticed similarities between their struggles. Moreover, I saw that these struggles were predictable across a couple’s life together. I discovered that dual-career couples faced three transitions during their working lives. Each required couples to face different challenges, and each, if well navigated, renewed their relationship and took it to a deeper level.

Mapping out these transitions helped me to understand the challenges that dual-career couples face in a new way. It revealed the psychological and social forces that drove the challenges—life events, conformity pressures, role changes. It also taught me how thinking and talking about these forces can help couples thrive in love and work, avoiding regrets, imbalance, and slowly drifting apart.

The result is this book: a portrait of what dual-career couples’ lives are really like—and a guide to making them better.

The Rise of Dual-Career Couples

Before we dig in, it is important to recognize that being in a dual-career couple relationship is now the norm. In more than 65 percent of couples in North America and Europe, both partners work, a number that grows each year.¹ Even in countries like Japan, where the proportion of dual-career couples is lower, the trend is consistently upward.²

One obvious reason for this trend is economics. In today’s expensive and uncertain world, having two salaries helps couples cope with the ever-increasing cost of living and provides a financial safety net should one partner be laid off.

But economic necessity is only part of the picture. Across the globe, couples are becoming more egalitarian. Men and women increasingly define a meaningful life as having a good career and having active roles at home. And although it is less often talked about, there is mounting evidence that couples reap benefits when both partners work and dedicate themselves to home life.

When one partner has a stable income, the other has more freedom to retrain, explore alternative paths, and make career changes. Taking the plunge to become an entrepreneur, for example, is much more palatable when you know your partner’s salary will cover the bills. Research also shows that when both partners work, they have a greater respect for each other’s careers, which leads them to feel closer emotionally.³

At home, when both partners are active, their children and their relationship benefit. Kids have better social skills and higher academic results when both their parents play with them and help out with homework and when the family eats together.⁴ Couples have less conflict, more satisfying relationships, and more sex when both partners contribute substantially to household chores.⁵ Perhaps most striking of all, couples in which partners earn roughly the same amount and share the housework equally have a staggering 48 percent lower chance of divorce than the average couple.⁶

Despite this array of benefits, life is not a bed of roses for dual-career couples. Logistics, which are perhaps more straightforward when one partner earns the bread and the other takes care of the home, can be a minefield. Many couples I spoke to shared horror stories of business-travel disasters or sick children on the day when both had critical meetings. Managing life is made even more challenging for those couples who live away from extended families. With smaller social support networks, some couples are under pressure to manage complex personal and family lives alone.

On top of this, careers are more mobile for everyone, in couples or not. Average workers will transition between ten and fifteen organizations over their working life.⁷ Organizations no longer guarantee lifetime employment, and people actively move around to pursue growth and opportunities. There are many upsides to having more career choices, but there is no doubt that making these decisions is stressful and can be more so when you’re coordinating your choices with those of your beloved.

Even as people place less emphasis on organizational belonging, they place more emphasis on their careers as a source of meaning in their lives. Now more than ever, what we do is intricately connected to who we are and how we define ourselves.⁸ With identity, self-esteem, and sense of meaning all wrapped up in our careers, it is no wonder that we are heavily invested in making them successful. In short, we work a lot.

The above trends present dual-career couples with a host of struggles, dilemmas, and questions: Can we both have equally important careers, or must we prioritize one over the other? How can we juggle children and family commitments without sacrificing our work? Does everything require trade-offs, or can we find solutions that benefit us both? And most fundamentally: How can we thrive in love and in work?

These questions are not just a matter of academic interest to me. They are questions I have personally lived through and wrestled with for the past fourteen years.

Researching Two-Career Couples While Being Half of One

I decided to quit my career at 3 a.m. one March morning in 2010. I was in the midst of a transition from the corporate to the academic world and, at thirty-three, one of the oldest students on my PhD program. I was also the mother of two wonderful, lively, and extremely wakeful children under two.

Like many new parents, my husband Gianpiero and I were on a roller coaster. We adored the two little creatures we had brought into this world; they gave us a sense of deep meaning and a daily dose of surprises. To us, they were gorgeous in every way; yet the energy and time we needed and wanted to pour into them was often overwhelming. We were on our nineteenth month of interrupted sleep, and the pattern of three or four nightly get-ups showed no sign of abating. We were beyond exhaustion.

As I looked to the coming years, I could not see how we could make it work. We were both ambitious and we had faith in each other’s talent, but academia is a demanding, high-pressure, up-or-out system. It’s a grind. If Gianpiero did not keep excelling in his teaching and writing, he would lose his job in the business school in which he worked. Likewise, if I did not produce novel, publishable research, I would never find a job. Although we were driven, neither of us was willing to give up too much time with our children or each other. Something had to give.

My friends and parents (who were a dual-career couple themselves) all encouraged me to take time out. Initially, I resisted. I knew that if I stopped for more than a few months, my door to academia would likely close, and I wanted a shot at my dream. I searched for books, advice—anything that could show me a way—but all I found were prescriptions of how to split housework or tales of couples who had somehow found a perfect balance. Gianpiero did a good chunk of the shopping, cooking, and cleaning, but balance eluded us. When 3 a.m. that March morning rolled in, I had had enough. I waited for our breakfast of thick black coffee and warm milk to announce my intentions. I expected his relief and half-hearted resistance. What I got was different.

“That’s your sleep deprivation talking,” Gianpiero told me. “There is no way I am letting you give your dream up, not now.” I sat in stunned silence as he told me that I was about to make a huge mistake that I would bitterly regret, and that he would not stand by and watch me do it. He reminded me that he had been the first person to whom I had confided my wish to do a PhD, and how much it meant to me. He reminded me that this was not the first time I had hesitated since starting, and it would not be the last. I was annoyed. He could tell. I had been looking for tea and sympathy; what I got was a loving kick. Yet he was right. If he had not pushed me to step up and plow through that painful period, there is no way my career would be where it is today. I may not have even had a career.

Gianpiero’s loving challenge saved me—or maybe, more precisely, shaped me. He continues to affect who I am not only as a wife and mother, but also as a professional. And I shape him in turn. Hard as it was to take back then, his challenge was not unfamiliar. I had done the very same to him, over another breakfast, a few years before. We were in Sicily, visiting his hometown, and even the excitement of our still-new love could not quench his professional restlessness. He was freelancing as a consultant and instructor, but longed for a full-time teaching job. He had been looking for two years without success, and each rejected application hurt.

That morning, he told me in passing as we ate the local breakfast of almond-flavored granita, he had deleted an email from the department chair of a European business school he would have loved to work at. They had invited him for interviews twice already, but each time, no offer had followed. Now, she had written, there was an opening for an instructor, but only on a temporary basis. He had had enough of gigs and of rejections, he said, and could not take one more.

“You’re crazy not to accept. They won’t be able to let go of you, once they have you around,” I said, knowing something about it.

“You’re in love,” he replied, “they’re in business.”

I did not know then that I would end up writing a book about how blurry that line is for dual-career couples, but I could not help replying, “I’m in both.” Then I pulled out his laptop, went into his trash email folder, and wrote a one-line reply to his future department chair (and later mine). “When do I start?” He has worked there for thirteen years.

As I put the finishing touches on this book, I know that right now, things are good. I also know that, just as in March 2010, or December 2004, everything in life is a phase. We have faced, and are certain to continue to face, many challenges in our life together. At times, we work through them well; at others, less so. Each time we face a hurdle, I have searched for meaningful advice and mostly come away empty-handed. We, and many of our friends, colleagues, and students, have muddled through our dual-career challenges, not always successfully. Living through my own experiences, and witnessing those of so many others, I have often thought, “There must be a way. There must be a way of approaching this life we have chosen that can help more couples thrive.”

Observing Early Patterns

I’ve spoken to over a hundred couples in the course of my research. Although each couple’s story was unique in its details, they experienced similar patterns of highs and lows. All struggled through similar challenges, which they faced at similar periods in their lives and relationships. When I began to see how these patterns cut across couples, and when I realized that the periods of upheaval aligned with career stage and the length of their relationships, I began to think of couples in terms of their life cycles.

It struck me that while psychologists had mapped adults’ life cycles, the same had not been done for couples. Neither had anyone mapped how these life stages related to careers, and how people’s movement through each stage influences their partner’s.

The notion that life is a journey in distinct stages is old. It appears in ancient scriptures, in Shakespeare’s plays, and in the work of other great writers. In more recent times, the work of psychologists Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson has led to a deep understanding of adults’ life stages and in particular of the transitions between them. In these transitions, Erikson argued, we must resolve developmental issues distinct to each stage.⁹ These “crises of development” as Levinson called them, are not only necessary but desirable.¹⁰ It is the developmental crises we face in our transitions that hold the potential for growth, and without them our development stalls.

The deeper I got into my data, the more clearly I saw parallels between the individual developmental transitions that Erikson and Levinson described and those of the couples I studied. I also saw key differences: distinct couple transitions and challenges that needed to be addressed for both partners to thrive in the next stage of their relationship, career, and lives.

The Three Transitions

I found that dual-career couples pass through three distinct transitions on their route from becoming a couple to retirement. Each transition plunges a couple into a landscape of new questions, different concerns, and novel ways of relating. And each requires couples to tackle specific psychological and social forces that underpin their relationship. While the transitions push couples to tackle a deeper layer of their relationship and lives, they involve revisiting the agreements forged during previous transitions.

The first transition requires couples to move from having parallel, independent careers and lives to having interdependent ones. The work of this transition is a deliberate accommodation to the first major life event—often a big career opportunity or the arrival of a child—that couples face together. To navigate their first transition, couples must negotiate how to prioritize their careers and divide family commitments in a way that lets them both thrive with few regrets. In doing so, they craft a joint path along which they travel until their second transition.

The work of the second transition is reciprocal individuation. Don’t be put off by the term. It means that couples must shift their focus from conforming to others’ demands and expectations and figure out what they each really want out of their careers, lives, and relationship. This transition is usually sparked by feelings of restlessness and oppression that give way to existential questions of direction and purpose. It requires couples to figure out their unique interests and desires, and renegotiate the roles they play in each other’s lives. In doing this work on deeper levels of their relationship, couples also renegotiate the division of career and family labor that they established in their first transition. If completed successfully, the result of this transition is a broader path along which couples travel until they reach their third transition.

Couples’ work in the third transition is to reinvent themselves in a way that is grounded in their past accomplishments, while opening possibilities for the future. This transition is triggered by role shifts—becoming the most experienced workers, the empty-nester parents, and being seen as the older generation—that result in identity voids. Those voids come with feelings of loss that must be tended to, but they also make space for new opportunities. Couples can sink into these voids and drift, or they can use them as a place of exploration and reinvention. To do the latter, couples must tackle any unresolved developmental tasks of the first two journeys, then play with the idea of who they might become given their new ambitions and priorities. In doing so, couples craft a path along which they can travel with renewed purpose.

The three transitions are linked. In the first transition, while making deliberate accommodations to a major life event, couples implicitly negotiate the roles they will take in each other’s lives. Over time, these roles become constraining and spark the restlessness and questioning that lead to the second transition. The second transition is thus in part about tackling the side effects of the first one. Likewise, the third transition cannot be completed unless couples address regrets and developmental asymmetries left over from their first two transitions.

Some people will face the three transitions with the same partner, while others will move through different transitions with different partners. Despite these variations, all of which I will explore in the book, the three transitions follow a similar pattern.

The Pattern of Transitions

Each transition begins with a trigger that makes it difficult for couples to continue traveling along the path they crafted in their previous stage—be that the independent paths that partners travel on before their first transition, the joint path that couples design in their first transition and travel until their second, or the broadened joint path that couples structure during their second transition and travel until their third.

The triggers for the first transition are major life events that originate from people’s careers or personal lives, such as the need to move geographically, a promotion or a layoff, the arrival of a new baby, the need to care for aging parents, or family health issues. The triggers for the second transition originate from our inner worlds and present themselves as existential questions and doubts about whose life we are really living. The third-transition triggers come in the form of role shifts that create identity voids and open up the questions of what to do with the time and energy we have left.

Although the triggers are important, they don’t define each transition. The triggers only reveal a transition’s defining question. Answering this question becomes the couple’s task for each transition. The pattern my research uncovered suggests that the three questions most couples will wrestle with during their transitions are:

• First transition: How can we make this work?
• Second transition: What do we really want?
• Third transition: Who are we now?

These defining questions go to the core of how couples live their lives and how they structure a path to allow both partners to thrive. When couples encounter the defining question of their transition, they are thrown off balance and doubts abound. This destabilization, while unsettling, is actually helpful. It creates the motivation for couples to revisit and recraft their path.

The central experience of all transitions is a period of struggle, when couples are suspended between old and new. They sense that the path they previously traveled on no longer works for them, but are not yet clear how to recraft it. Each transition has a set of traps, unique to its struggle, in which couples can get stuck. Some couples cannot escape these traps, and they end their journey together. Others find direction and figure out how to reshape their path in order to move forward.

After each transition in which they work on their path, couples enter a more stable period in which they travel along it. During these periods, couples relax and enjoy some breathing space. The deeper psychological and social forces that felt all-powerful during their transition recede to being gentle influencers. They build happy memory banks full of special family times, romantic moments, career growth, and activities with friends. Or they just go through familiar routines, enjoying their quiet familiarity. Eventually, they face new triggers and embark on their next transition—and the cycle repeats.

Life Is a Series of Transitions

Although my research revealed that these transitions are predictable, they often come as a surprise to couples. That’s what happened to David and Melissa.

They’d just completed a five-hour drive to their Florida home from Emory University in Atlanta, where they had dropped off their youngest child at college. As they settled with a sigh into their usual seats in the kitchen and poured a couple of glasses of their favorite wine, they reflected on the journey that had brought them here.

Thirty years ago, they’d been the ones graduating from college—David, a business major embarking on a promising career at a large accounting firm; Melissa, a psychology major taking her first steps into the world of public relations. They’d married, bought a home in Boston close to their parents, and begun planning a family of their own.

Two lively daughters arrived just eighteen months apart, and life suddenly got complicated: they abruptly found themselves in the first transition, battling sleepless nights while struggling to master increasingly interesting—and difficult—assignments at work. Just as they began to find a rhythm, David was offered a promotion to head a team in Florida.

Their careers had always been on equal footing, but if they moved to Florida, David’s would unquestionably take priority. Juggling careers and family had been hard even with parental support nearby; how would they manage over eleven hundred miles away? And what would happen to Melissa’s career?

Weeks of agonizing ended with the decision to move south. David’s firm helped Melissa find a new job, and his new higher salary helped pay for child care. Their toddlers grew into girls. Weekends exploring Florida beaches, holidays with family, blossoming careers—it was a golden age until the next impasse hit, twelve years later.

Their second transition began in their early forties. David had become disillusioned with corporate life and begun to question whether accounting was still for him. Melissa was longing to strike out on her own. She dreamed of launching her own communications advice agency. But could they afford to explore new options? With two teenagers, a mortgage, and college fees on the horizon, a lot was at stake.

The uncertainty of this phase took a heavy toll on their relationship. Neither David nor Melissa felt that the other truly understood or appreciated their desire for change, and their career dissatisfaction spilled over into their marriage. Petty disagreements fueled growing resentments, and thoughts of divorce crossed their minds more than once. But six years later, they seemed to be back on track. They had supported each other’s move to new roles. David had moved into a management position at a smaller accounting firm, where he was enjoying more independence. Melissa had taken the plunge into independent work and, after initially struggling to attract clients, was now thriving. Their girls were happy and excited about college life. David and Melissa felt they’d cracked the dual-career code and become strong role models for their daughters.

So why did they suddenly feel so unsettled? The two sat for a while without speaking, savoring the wine and noticing the unaccustomed quiet in their now-empty house. The little time they had spent just with each other over the past decade was apparent. They were a little awkward, like long-lost friends who, upon being reunited, wonder how much the other has changed. Finally, David broke the silence. He turned to Melissa and admitted, “Honey, I’m just not sure who we are anymore.”

Suddenly, after all that they had been through together, they found themselves in a new transition: the third transition.

Many couples I spoke to during the course of my research were surprised by their need to go through successive transitions. Melissa and David had successfully navigated their first two, only to be shocked by the realization that they were now embarking on a third, with an outcome that they could scarcely anticipate. While these transitions can feel arduous, they are also reinvigorating if approached in the right way. They represent a developmental imperative, and they hold the power to give meaning and energy to the lives of dual-career couples, helping them thrive in love and work.

How to Use This Book

The rest of this book is divided into three parts, one for each transition. Every part has three chapters: the first focuses on the triggers of that transition and the developmental question that defines it; the second tackles the transition’s struggle period and the traps and dead-ends that can ensnare couples; the third explores how couples can resolve the defining question of that transition and recraft their path. At the end of each part, you’ll find a summary of the key dynamics of that transition that you can use to reference back to the exercises and tools in each chapter.

Each chapter begins with the stories of real couples that illustrate that chapter’s themes. Throughout the book, I’ll share the stories of more than thirty couples I interviewed. You don’t need to keep track of all the characters or plotlines. Each story stands on its own, and together they are meant to add richness and variety to the theory and advice, to bring the concepts in this book to life. Each chapter ends with practical ideas and exercises that can help you work through your transition with your partner.

I have written this book for people at all stages of their dual-career life, from recent couples who are at the beginning of their careers to those who are approaching retirement and may be on their second or third significant partnership. Some people will enjoy reading the book from cover to cover. Others will want to dive into the chapters that relate to the transition they are currently in. If you are drawn to the latter approach, I still encourage you to dip into the transition that comes before and after where you currently are. Looking back is a great way of helping you make sense of where you are today, and looking forward can help you anticipate what is to come.

The Research

In all, I collected the stories of 113 couples. The full study design is described in the appendix. The couples whose stories I will chronicle are diverse. They range from high-powered executives occupying C-suites, to midlevel professionals struggling to build their careers, to entrepreneurs laboring to build brand-new companies, to freelancers. They include couples in their early twenties, couples in their sixties, and couples in every decade in between. Some couples are in their first relationship, others in their second, or even third, marriages with complex family situations. They come from thirty-two countries on four continents. Many have children, others are childless; some are straight, others are gay. Their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds are varied. They all have undergraduate degrees; some have graduate degrees. The commonality among them is that that both partners are committed to their careers and to each other.

In all the couples I spoke to, both partners had careers, not just jobs. I follow in the footsteps of much research on careers in defining careers as sequences of professional or managerial jobs that demand a high degree of commitment and have some form of continuous development. Some people with careers hope to reach the top of organizations, but not all. The commonality among them is the central role that work plays in their life, and their commitment to growing in and through their work—be that by moving up a hierarchy, deepening their expertise, or continuing their learning.

I’m sometimes asked why I focused on dual-career couples, and not on all couples in which both partners work. The reason is that for people who have a career orientation, work is a central piece of their identity. Their psychological investment in and commitment to their work sits alongside their commitment to their relationship. It is this combination of commitments that this book focuses on. It can create tension, conflicts, and sacrifice, and it can also create mutual growth, fulfillment, and harmony. My research describes the paths that lead to these different outcomes.

My focus on dual-career couples means that most of the people I interviewed are middle-class. While this sample does not reflect the whole of society, it is an important group because, for better or worse, members of the middle class tend to set the norms for other classes in the realm of relationships and work.¹¹ This group has the luxury of options and opportunities to improve their lives that few other classes enjoy. Yet this luxury is often accompanied by anxiety and turbulence.¹² It is this combination of opportunity and turbulence that allowed me as a researcher to see the challenges these couples face and the deeper psychological and social forces that underpin them.

Almost everyone I interviewed asked to remain anonymous. To respect their wishes, I changed every person’s name, where the couples live, and other features that may identify them, such as gender and names of their children. People’s occupations are so intimately tied to their stories that these are mainly unchanged; the organizations in which they work, however, have been disguised. But all of the events—the decisions each couple made; the actions they took; the frustrating, exhilarating, and occasionally wild things that happened to them—are as they were told to me.

Although this book is based on rigorous qualitative research and analysis, I do not pretend that the way I have systematized couples’ experiences and dilemmas is objectively or factually true. Like all social scientists, my work attempts to capture people’s subjective experiences in a way that makes them understandable and relatable without losing their humanity. My aim throughout the book is to highlight the commonalities among couples and lay out an approach that has something to offer all.

Charting Your Own Path

My research reveals that while couples who successfully navigate their transitions make radically different choices, they share a common approach. As a result, this book focuses on how couples can best work through their transitions, and not on what specific choices they should make or life structure they should adopt. This focus on process and approach will allow you to make mindful life decisions and understand their consequences, all while maintaining a solid relationship.

Following my approach to tackle the three transitions won’t make the challenges of life for a dual-career couple disappear. But it can increase your chances of enjoying long-term growth and fulfilment in your careers, your family life, and your relationship.

If you and a partner are seeking ways to enjoy richer, more rewarding careers while also nurturing a deep and lasting relationship, this book is for you. There is no such thing as the perfect dual-career couple—life is too complex and unpredictable for that. But understanding the challenges ahead, the transitions you will face, and the tools for communication, problem solving, negotiation, and mutual support that other couples have found useful can increase your chances not just of surviving, but also of thriving.