Episode 178: Working Couples - Your Questions Answered

Show transcript:

Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.

As promised at the end of the last show on working couples, I’m bringing you a short show this time featuring a few of your questions about your own dual-career couples, and Jennifer Petriglieri’s answers. Jennifer is a professor at INSEAD business school and the author of the book Couples That Work.

One of these couples has children, two don’t.

Let’s start with this one.

AM-T: This woman says, ‘in my house we both have careers, one of us is an overworking driver the other is content with just working…it can cause friction and judgment from both sides. Any thoughts on balancing these extremes?’”

“First, I would say, I'm assuming, oh, I don't know if she, she or he is the overworking one…”

AM-T: “She’s the driver. She’s the overworking driver. And she says my husband is happy to just go out and play golf in the afternoon sometimes, and I guess she frowns at that and he’s like, what’s your problem?”

“Yeah. So I think very often when couples have become so polarized like that, they're doing a little bit of work on behalf of the other person. I bet there are days when she, even if she's super ambitious, super driving, which I can identify with because I am, there's still the occasional day where I'm like, oh my goodness, I would love to just go to the swimming pool this afternoon. But when we cling to that identity that, well, I'm the overworking one, I'm the driving one, I'm not going to do that, what we're doing is pushing ourselves further into those positions.

So I'm sure they have natural tendencies, where she is more driven than he is, and that's fine. But what we see over time is that we tend to become more extreme versions of ourselves because that's our role. And the first thing to do is to watch for those times where we're on the opposite spectrum. And there will be some, I guarantee, but it's really important when they happen that we claim them because we don't just get us off the hook. We also get our partner off the hook of taking the other extreme, which can drive us bananas, right. Because I'm sure her husband, clearly he's less driven than she is, but that doesn't mean he's not driven at all. And if she's the only one expressing that, then he's kind of left on the hook of the other end. So I think it's really important that we claim the other side when it pops up so we don't become exaggerated versions of ourselves.”

In other words, when a tiny voice tells YOU, the hard-charging one, to go to the pool on a summer afternoon, try it – go. Don’t tell yourself you MUST stay at your desk just because you’re that person.

 “And then I think the other thing to say is, um, the best, the most successful couples are not necessarily the couples who are just like each other, and I think it's really important to accept that, that it's not necessarily great if you were with someone else who was super hard driving as well, that may not be the healthiest thing. And I just think kind of recognizing that, to have someone maybe not who's your polar opposite. Cause I think when that happens, it feels as if you've both gone too far in that direction, but has just kind of oppositional tendencies to you can be a really, really healthy thing. And, and as long as it's not impeding on your goals, that's fine.”

The next dilemma is one I hear about a lot from friends in heterosexual relationships…

This person says: I’m curious on Jennifer’s take for the lead parent who does the invisible tasks  – because I feel like this falls on moms even if both parents are working full time. How can couples actually balance these invisible tasks in a real way?

“So first of all, it's true, right. Even if we are both working and we commit to co-parenting or co kind of householding, it doesn't always work. And the reason is there's a big difference between the doing and the planning, right? So it's one thing to do the shopping. It's another thing to look in the fridge, write the list, what have we not got, plan the meals. And many couples are quite good at splitting the doing, but the planning will fall onto one of them. And when we look, the planning actually takes longer. It's more cognitively taxing, it's more stressful. And it's really invisible work. So the best way to get over that split in the planning is to divide and conquer the tasks. Now, what do I mean by that?

I mean that you take sole responsibility for one task, the planning, the doing the everything. Obviously there are a couple of tasks, maybe cooking, you don't want to do that every night, but almost every task you can totally divide. So let me give you a personal example. Within the childcare bucket, my husband, he owns the health task. So the dentist, the doctor, the vaccination schedule, my kids are older now so it's all the braces and the orthodontics…he does all that, I don't need to think about it. Right? He books, the appointments, he takes them. He does everything. I am all the friends things, the parties, the sleepovers, the remembering the name of the baby brother or whatever, that's me. He doesn't need to think about it. And what we see in this actually quite a bit of research on this is when we do that, when we totally divide, it gets rid of the invisible work, because this is just not my responsibility, so I don't do it. And you'd be surprised, you can do that for almost everything.”

And she says don’t just TALK about this, don’t make a verbal agreement – make it official by writing it all down.

“So essentially you get a big piece of paper. You write down everything, all the chores. So I'll give you another funny example, gardening, right? I am in charge of the lawn. He is in charge of the weeding. I never think of the flowerbeds. I never think of the weeding. That's his job. He never thinks of the lawn, right? So it's not just about saying the whole garden is yours or the whole childcare is yours. It's like literally writing out the tasks, dividing them up, committing to your half of the list, and then just don't interfere, right? It may get done the day later. But if it's not on your list, it's none of your business. And this is the best way. When you start to split the tasks this week I'm doing this, next week, you're doing that, Monday, Tuesday, I do this Thursday, Friday, you do that. It's a disaster. Now, obviously there are some things like cooking, like maybe picking kids up from school. You might need to do that. But for most things, strict divide and conquer.” 

AM-T: “OK that’s great, that’s great, thank you. And finally, this question relates quite a bit to some things you write about in the book because this is some of the couples that you cover. But she says, ‘I’d love to hear her thoughts on how couples can best manage dual careers when one of you gets a big opportunity. For example my spouse and I are currently temporarily living in separate places because of our careers. It makes it easier because we don’t have children but what are the implications for love and work, or even if one of us gets an offer for  a job that’ll be more demanding for a particular amount of time.’”

“So this is where a preemptive conversation is really helpful and the preemptive conversation should be around boundaries. Now, when I think about boundaries, there's four big ones. One is place, location. A great way to do this is to get a map of the world or a map of your country or a map of the region. And literally circle in different colored pens, green for you, red for him, whatever, the places you could realistically live and work together. What this does is it takes choices off the table. And very often what happens, especially for early stage of our career is we get a little bit seduced by these amazing opportunities without thinking through the consequences further on.”

So place is the first boundary. Second is time. Some weeks will always be crazy of course, but Jennifer says you need to think about if your partner works more than X hours per week, how is that going to affect your relationship?

The third boundary is travel.

“How much travel is too much travel? You know, if you travel more than 20% of the time, can we manage that in our couple or not? And then I think the fourth boundary, which people talk about less is the boundary between your couple or your nuclear family and the wider extended family. And this can be a really stressful boundary if you don't manage it right. So like how much time are we really going to spend with your parents or your wider family? What do we do for holidays?

When we negotiate these boundaries, two things happen. One is we get a bit more certainty on the table, which takes off a lot of stress, two, is it makes decision-making easier because we have some parameters, we know, okay, this is the field we're playing on and anything outside of the field, we're not going there. So it enables you a little bit more guilt-free decision-making and three is, it gives you some parameters, almost like the canary in the mine, right? A warning that if you get close to these boundaries, it's like, okay, we need to reassess the situation. But I think if you  - if have couples have that, they can make a lot of different arrangements work. I think sometimes you read these articles, you should never live apart, or you should always do this. I mean, this is ridiculous. All of these things can work. The question is when they work and they work when they're very clearly negotiated in advance and mindfully negotiated, not just, ‘I want this, you want that,’ but what are the implications if we make this choice in three years, in five years, I think it's a bit hard to work more than five years out, but doing that can be really helpful.”

Thanks to Jennifer Petriglieri for being my guest on these last two shows. Her book is Couples That Work – How Dual Career Couples Can Thrive in Love and Work.

You can find a transcript of this and nearly all other episodes at TheBroadExperience.com.

 I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.