TRANSCRIPT

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael, executive editor.

NICOLE TORRES: I’m Nicole Torres, associate editor. Our cohost, Amy Bernstein, was away at the World Economic Forum when we taped a lot of this episode.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But you’ll hear from her a little later in the show. This episode is about the support that we women get or don’t get from their spouses, partners and significant others, because the people we love have a big impact on us professionally.

NICOLE TORRES: One study of dual-career couples found that people put more time in at work when their intimate relationships are going well. And another study found that people were more successful when their partner tested high in conscientiousness.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And then there’s the one that found that while high achieving women are obviously happy to get emotional support from their partners, what really makes their marriage stable is getting material help: laundry; errands; caring for children and aging parents.

NICOLE TORRES: But Jennifer Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD, has a nuanced take on that. She studied 50 dual-career, highly educated opposite sex couples from countries around the world. She says the ones who are thriving did not split chores 50/50.

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: It was a much more kind of mutual between them.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s because the practical support those couples were giving each other was coming from deep shared psychological support, the kind of support we need if we’re going to thrive in our careers.

NICOLE TORRES: We’re also going to be talking about what can happen to your relationship in the long run if you don’t get the support you need.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: First, though, our conversation with Jen. We asked her to tell us more about her research and how the psychological support we get at home shapes our identities at work.

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: So there’s a study that’s about to come out that’s coauthored with my colleague, Otilia Obodaru, which is looking at the psychological aspects of being in a dual-career couple. And what we find is that if you look at the sort of narratives in society on dual-career couples, there’s very much this narrative around that it’s hard, and it’s hard work, and it requires tradeoffs and compromises and sacrifices. And if we drill down, this narrative is really what we might think of as a zero-sum game. OK? So there’s a winner and a loser, and if we’re in a couple, the more you win, the more I lose. And what we found in our research was something actually quite different, that yes, there are couples like that, where it is all about tradeoff and sacrifices and compromise. But there are other couples who have a very different mindset. And what’s interesting is, that mindset then impacts how they think of their careers, what they do in their careers, and how successful they are. So instead of trying to work out how I can get the best of me versus you, they’re looking at how we can get the best for us. So they’re really psychologically supporting each other in a different way.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of your findings is that the thriving couples experienced each other as what you call a secure base. What is a secure base?

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: The support we often initially crave, and we think about from our partners, is very much the tea and sympathy support. So when we face a setback in our careers, like not getting that promotion, or not getting the job we wanted, our immediate reaction is to think, you know, I want a little bit of mollycoddling. I want someone who’s going to take my side, tell me I’m great, and sort of cocoon me.

But what we find the support that really matters is, that plus this push out. So this push away from that security blanket, that safety blanket, and just telling, well, what you are going to do about that? How are you going to change this? How are you going to make it the world you want to make it? And so what’s counterintuitive about that is, instead of keeping our partners very close, we’re actually pushing them away from the relationship. Obviously in a loving way. And we’re not interfering with that exploration. We’re not saying, you know, have you done this? Have you followed up? Have you done XYZ? We’re really giving our partners the independence to go and explore and grow and develop in the way they need to. And sometimes this might not feel very nice. Right? We all want that love and sympathy and the cuddles. And sometimes when we’re feeling vulnerable and wobbly, we don’t really want to be pushed back out into the world. But we know from many, many decades of studies on psychological development that this is how we thrive. This is how we develop and grow. It’s by picking ourselves up and going back out there and trying again and exploring.

NICOLE TORRES: Can you give us an example of what being a secure base looks like from your own experience?

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Yeah. So I’m going to give an example, which might be familiar to many of your women listeners and to many other couples. So I had two children relatively close together. So they were 16 months apart. And it was a period that was very busy for me. I was doing my PhD. We had two under twos. For anyone who’s ever had two under twos, they know how crazy that can be, and how wonderful it is, but it is crazy. [LAUGHTER] And like every woman, I went through a period of thinking, I just cannot keep this up. Right? There is no way I can keep my career going, and be the kind of mother I wanted to be to these children. And at times like that, many, many women get messages from their partners, and from other people around them, don’t worry. Take some time out. It’ll be fine. And we know that that’s total career killer. Right? We know how hard it is for women to get back in. Well, this happened to me, and my husband said to me, there is no way you are giving up your career. I’m not going to let you. You will regret it. Now, at that time, did I like it very much? No. But was he right? Absolutely. And if he hadn’t have done that, there is no way I would be here today. And I am incredibly grateful that he pushed me. And of course he was also supportive, and you know, trying to dust me off. But if he hadn’t have given me that kick to carry on, my career would just not be where it is today. And I think we can see this in the opting out, so many women don’t get that loving kick. They get the tea and sympathy. And they get the support, but they don’t get that little extra push that would really make the difference in their careers.

NICOLE TORRES: I’m going to get that a lot of our listeners are probably ambitious, hard-working, terribly busy women, and men. What are some small but meaningful ways that we can all show support for our partners?

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: I’m going to give you three things. The first is a relational thing, if you like, which applies whether your partner has a career or not. In these days, we are attention deprived. OK? We are always on, always on a device, always have to-do lists running in our brain. We’re very busy. We may have children running around who we need to feed and read bedtime stories. We are, it’s very hard to pay each other attention. And yet, even five minutes of total undivided attention every day can go a million miles in a relationship. And that’s both in terms of feeling understood, feeling heard, and also feeling supported. You know, I often do an exercise with couples where I’ll ask them, you know, when was the last time you just sat down for five minutes and said nothing, but just listened to your partner? A simple question, how was your day? And just listen, not interrupting, not kind of connecting to something that happened to you, but just five minutes. I think that’s one thing that will really help the relationship, but also help that support.

I think the second thing is actually a recognition that things will be tough, and that’s OK. I think very often, especially in today’s day and age, we’re sort of molded to think, we need to be happy all the time, and things need to be going well all the time. And if it’s not, there’s something wrong with me. Well, you know, it is hard having a career, and it’s even harder if you’re both trying to have a career. But it’s very meaningful. And I think just to recognize individually and in the couple that there will be moments where it is pretty painful, but that’s OK. And we can deal with them. It’s really important. And part of this is a managing expectations, but also part of it is a recognition that very often, you know, if we all think back on the most meaningful times in our couples and our careers, that very often those painful times, which we come through, and afterwards we can say, you know, we got through that together. And it was good. So I think about managing those expectations.

And then the third thing is to take the time, you know, again, this doesn’t need to be every day. It doesn’t need to be every week. But take the time every so often to have those preemptive conversations. What is it we’re aiming for individually and together? What is it that’s going to make us thrive? And what choices might we need to make to make that happen? Because all too often, a decision sort of comes upon us, and we’re trying to make the decision at the same time as figuring out what we want, and at the same time as figuring out how that’s going to fit in with each other. And that’s when the conflicts really rise. So if we can take that time, even if it’s just twice a year, to really sit down and think about what we want, and this isn’t like 15 years in the future planning. It might just be the next year or two years. But like, what’s coming up, and how are we going to make this work together before we get to that firefighting phase, that would be exceptional.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So the 50 couples that you interviewed for this research with your co-author were drawn from all over the world. Tell us about any cultural differences that you observed.

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: So there were the obvious cultural differences, you know, some countries in the Middle East, some Asian countries, it was perhaps much more common for the man to have what we think of as the primary career, and the woman to have the secondary career. Now, of course, and these couples both have good careers, but in terms of who’s career takes priority for, say, a geographic move, or if you need to travel a lot, it would be the man. The big trends, though, actually came in family support. So in many countries, if we look at the African countries, in many Asian countries, it would be rather strange for a mother of 30s and 40s to take time out and look after the children, because this is a person in prime productive economic age. So there’s a lot of family support in child rearing, which takes a lot of the pressure off dual career couples.

But the really interesting difference, actually, is a generational difference. So if we think of career prioritization, there’s three basic forms. There’s the primary/secondary. There’s a turn taking, where we both take turns in the primary position and the secondary position and sort of rotate every few years. And then there’s something we call double primary, where we’ve both got a primary career, but we have some boundaries around it. Let’s say we’re going to base ourselves in New York, and not move outside New York, but within there, we can both go full steam ahead in our careers. What we found was that, for the younger generations, so maybe below about 45, there didn’t seem to be a penalty, if you like, for the genders of saying they were primary or secondary careers. There were men who were secondary careers who were very happy to say so. And likewise women. When we looked at the older generation, it was very, very hard, and we had absolutely no couples say that they weren’t primary/secondary, the man being primary, the woman being secondary. It seemed difficult for the women to claim that primary career, even when, from the outside looking in, it really looked like they had it. And equally, you know, for the men to let go of that primary career slot. So I think that’s quite an interesting finding, which is breaking down in the younger generations, which is a really great sign.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Jen, this has just been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for making the time.

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: It’s great to talk to you, Sarah.

NICOLE TORRES: Thank you Jen.

JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Thank you, Nicole.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I thought that was super fascinating.

NICOLE TORRES: She was amazing. Because I think we often hear about practical support, but women are less likely to get the loving kick.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was helpful for me, because I think sometimes I’m guilty of mixing up all those different things. I get a lot of the deeper kind of support from my husband, and then I will look at like an unmade bed and fly into a rage and just be like, this is the patriarchy. And it’s like, no, it’s just an unmade bed. Something I also realized, coming out of that, is that I’m not so good at giving that loving kick. I am the tea and sympathy person who’s, oh, that sounds so hard.

NICOLE TORRES: I am, too.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, and I realized like, I mean, in part, it’s expectations. Right? It’s like, it seems mean. And also maybe isn’t always what the person really wants to hear.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But it’s sometimes maybe what they need to hear, and maybe there’s a way of doing it that feels acceptable. I don’t know. I also don’t know if my husband would agree that I don’t give a loving kick. He’d probably like, oh, that part is fine.

NICOLE TORRES: But it’s at least something we can think about and like ask a partner, like is this something you would want more of? Maybe they’ll say, no, but maybe they’ll also say, like, yeah, actually, a little shove out the door might be helpful.

[MUSIC]

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So it was interesting to hear from Jen that younger couples seem to be figuring out how to kind of do this dual career thing, and figuring out how to support each other and balance each other’s career. But it seems like the older couples that she studied are still really kind of locked in those traditional roles and having a hard time.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah, a Pew study actually found that divorce is becoming less common for younger adults, but for adults ages 50 and older, the divorce rate has actually doubled since the 1990s. This so-called gray divorce is on the rise.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So that’s why our next guess is Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. She’s a consultant and the author of the new book, Late Love: Mating in Maturity. And in doing research for that book, she talked to a lot of these Baby Boomer opposite sex couples who are just seemingly having a really tough time supporting each other. And she wrote a really popular article for us called, “If You Can’t Find a Spouse Who Supports Your Career, Stay Single.” And in it, she writes, even for couples who are committed to equality, it takes two exceptional people to navigate tricky dual career waters.

NICOLE TORRES: Yes, so we talked to Avivah about how to find a spouse who supports your career, and then what to also do if you have one who does not.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Amy started by asking her about her own experience.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So Avivah, you left a 20 plus year marriage at age 50. You have studied gender differences in the workplace for years, and you’ve recently remarried. How did you go into your second marriage differently from the way you went into your first?

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: A lot more self-knowledge. And I made all of my desires and dreams really, really clear. And I was in a much sort of calmer and more mature place in order to listen to the other human being who had his own story. And how could I really be of best use? I think in the end, why I really left, and why I remarried is, in this relationship, I really know how to make another human being way happier than he could have been without me. And I think he does the same for me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: In this second marriage, what have you learned to help yourself be happier?

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: I usually say that there are two things, learning to be more loving and more loveable. And so I think both of those are kind of self-awareness and skill building, to really focus time, attention, intention. We spend a lot of time talking and sharing about the relationship, about what do we need from each other? But what we most want and prefer from the other person. So I think that’s kind of skill in being loving in a way that is appropriate to the needs of some other human being. And then being loveable is, I think, a real issue for a lot of power women. We’re used to being strong, in control, perfectionists, taking charge, doing everything. It’s not always the easiest person to be loveable.

NICOLE TORRES: It just seems so hard because women like aren’t afforded the chance to be that, to be vulnerable and loveable, you know, if they want to succeed, if they want to become a power woman, a lady boss. [LAUGHTER]

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: I think that’s exactly right. And I think that’s the secret in the spouse the power women are looking for. It’s men who love the full spectrum of what womanhood is becoming, that yeah, we can be super powerful, super successful, super tough when required. And we can be super soft, super vulnerable. And you know what? We want men who are exactly the same.

NICOLE TORRES: So I’d love to learn a little bit more about the research you’ve done on dual career couples and how much career support, how important that’s become in relationships.

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: Yeah, so it’s not so much like career support that’s the frame that I use. It’s more about this notion of, are couples mutually self-enhancing? And then what I found is, as they grew older, and as the children left, which was usually somewhere in these 50s, these women suddenly discovered, much to their surprise, quite often, that they were facing their best career decades, not looking back at them. And so suddenly their careers were kind of taking off. And they had new opportunities. And they’d set up new businesses or write books or start traveling the globe, whatever their career was asking for them. At the same time that their spouses were often, who had had a much more linear career cycle, with a lot of intensity and unbroken sort of upper or out, from 30 to 50, were starting to think about retirement and starting to think about slowing down and playing golf and getting on a cruise ship. And those two dreams cannot be mutually complementary. And they come as a bit of a shock, particularly to the men, who expected their wives to be their partners at play the way they had been their partners throughout their working lives.

AMY BERNSTEIN: You know, I’d love to pull the camera back a little bit and ask you to talk about what you see as the four phases of a woman’s career, because I think you’re talking about one phase, but there’s actually a lot more going on there.

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: Yeah, and the reason for a lot of the divorce is that the, what happens is pent up unresolved issues from the earlier phases. The 20s is really a decade now of ambition. Those ambitious young women tend to delay a lot of personal choices. So they tend to statistically marry later, have children later, and they tend to do all of those things, on average, right now, somewhere between 30 and 35, which is exactly the same time that most companies start really gearing up their high potential identification moments. And that’s not meant at all to discriminate against women, but it really hits unfairly hard on women who have families, and increasingly on men, too.

The 40s, which is a phase I call reacceleration, a lot of them are not necessarily in workplaces that are open to reaccelerating people at that age. So there’s a little bit of a non-alignment between women’s career cycles and men’s, which is only really addressed by a certain number of companies that have really flexed their career and leadership development systems. And it’s a shame, because this reacceleration of highly educated, really smart women who’ve only been plateauing for a little while, pays off, and as I say, they end up with women coming into their 50s who are going to be working for another 20 years, who are at the peak of their commitment, their time, their knowledge, their networks and everything.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: We’ve talked a lot about men and women. But I’m wondering if you hear different stories from same-sex couples, the same stories? What do you hear there?

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: Yeah, I find, it’s not so much an issue of gender as it is an issue of role. So in same-sex couples, what I hear, and I don’t have like huge banks, I’ll make a coda that I don’t have a huge bank of specialized research, and I don’t think there’s that much of, enough of it yet, to really say. But it would seem to me, from what I have seen, that inside same-sex couples, there’s a same sort of spectrum of, who has a lead career, a follow career, who has primary parenting responsibility, who takes turns, who has a slightly more masculine role, who has a slightly more feminine role? But it doesn’t strike me as being like dramatically different from the dynamics that you would find, or the issues that you find in same-sex couples.

NICOLE TORRES: What advice do you have for women who are thinking about preparing to build a life with someone? What conversations should they be having?

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: I think for this young generation of really ambitious women, do you have a spouse who is as excited and interested in your career as in their own?

NICOLE TORRES: What are some signs that might indicate that?

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: I think listening is a big one. Do they actually enjoy listening to your stories about your work? Do they kind of jump in and want to fix your problems? Or do they kind of help you in figuring out what it is you might want to respond? And do they have like really thought-through ideas about your situation? And how much time do you spend at home in the balance talking about your career and your issues, versus talking about their career and their issues? And I think it’s just keeping an eye on that balance. Right? And the other thing I would say, if you go out to a dinner party, who is getting all the interest in whatever it is they do? And is that OK with the other partner? What I heard a lot of feedback from these successful women is their spouses really hated accompanying them into public and professional venues, where they became Mr. her name, as opposed to their own professional identity. And you want to be sure that you’ve got a guy who’s really comfortable enough in his own skin and his own self-confidence that, you know, he laughs and says, yeah, no, my wife, she makes twice what I do. Isn’t it great?

AMY BERNSTEIN: So what happens, Avivah, when some of us in long term marriages have suddenly gotten a career boost. No one had discussed this ahead of time. It changes the power dynamic. How do you have the conversation? It is a really tough one.

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: It is a really tough one. So I think it depends so much on the couple. Right? There are some couples that are used to having regular, deep, consistent conversations. There are others that really aren’t. And one of the challenges and why I think you’re seeing such a spike in Boomer divorces and remarriages is, I think, a lot of Boomer men have not really been educated or socialized in having deep, intimate discussions at home involving personal and professional roles and dreams and alternating with their wives. I think that’s just not yet as easy for some as for others. And so, what happens when those things suddenly alight into a couple, is you discover, is my spouse ready to lean in, into redefining what our relationship is and what are our respective roles? Some people will love that, say, oh, this is so cool. Change, I love it. We were boring. We were in a rut. And others are going to be absolutely horrified. Wait a minute. We had an agreement. We’ve been in this for 30 years. What the hell do you mean, you know, you want to be some famous star? That’s not what I want. And then there’s usually a bit of a crisis. Right? And really successful long marriages have a lot of them, and you learn how to get through them, how to reengage, how to have those conversations.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, Avivah, while we have you, there was something else from your article that I wanted to ask you about. You wrote that professionally ambitious women really have only two options when it comes to their personal partners, a super supportive partner, or no partner at all. Anything in between ends up being a morale and career sapping morass. I’m curious to know what percentage of women you’ve spoken with are in that morass, and what can they do? I mean, they’ve already signed up and done it right. They’re in it. Is there anything that they can do to get out of that situation without necessarily leaving their partner?

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: Yes, absolutely. I mean, and again, I think, bring all your leadership skills. Start reviewing the agreement. Start renegotiating the contract. Start exploring. It’s not like people don’t know how to do this. Right? You do this every single time you have an issue with anybody at work, in a team, or right? You start saying, OK, what’s your position on this? My position, let’s talk. If we need a facilitation help, we’ll get a coach in. Where we could learn to get better at this, as most of the women I’m working with, is, we tend to get resentful, angry, bitter, hard, passive-aggressive, you know. We’re wounded, and so we bite back. And I think we need to sort of heal ourselves with our own resources, our own other friends, coaches, to build ourselves up. And then start this negotiation from a place of supported strength. But in a much nicer, more loving tone than a lot of us are initially able to do.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So bottom line, like if there’s one thing, what do you want people to understand better about how gender equality really works in a relationship?

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: That it’s changing fast, that women are changing every decade, and that men will have to adapt to the consequences of the women that we now have in the world. And men who celebrate it and embrace it and adore what’s happening are going to have better sex, happier home lives, and much, much more resilient couples.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Thank you, Avivah.

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: My pleasure.

NICOLE TORRES: Thank you, Avivah.

AVIVAH WITTENBERG-COX: OK, talk to you.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Bye-bye.

[MUSIC]

AMY BERNSTEIN: One of the things that I’m still chewing on is that in a two-career marriage, you really have to be prepared to renegotiate the terms of the marriage. And you have to be very aware of what’s going on in your head, what’s going in your partner’s head, and you have to be alive to the sensitivities and brave enough to take them on.

NICOLE TORRES: And what I took away is, before you enter those relationships, before you do the renegotiating, you have to set the terms initially. You have to have conversations about your ambitions, your career goals, your other dreams, and you have to see if your partner, this person you’re thinking about investing in, is willing to support you, and not just support you, but be willing to renegotiate later, if the terms change.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the things I thought was interesting, too, was that she talked about how, when women are leaving these marriages in their 50s, it’s actually the women who are leaving. It’s not necessarily what you would have thought of 25 years ago, maybe, where it was like the men leaving to have a trophy wife. You know, or marrying his secretary. It’s that as women gain more economic power and more confidence, they’re not willing to put up with something that’s subpar. And I think we’ve seen the same thing in some of the research we’ve seen, too. Like there was a paper recently that was called, the Oscar Curse is real, which showed that when women win Best Actress, they are more likely to get divorced, but it’s not, or not just because the men feel sort of threatened by their wife’s success. It’s because the women are like, Well, I don’t have to put up with this anymore.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And the kind of soft factor here is confidence. And some of it comes from, you know, earning your own living and so forth. But some of it just comes from being 50 and having gotten there, and not being subject to the same kind of market requirements of being a woman who wishes to be married and have children. It totally changes the equation for you.

NICOLE TORRES: And there is research that I find really interesting about how men benefit in different ways from being married, you know, professionally and emotionally. But women can often be disadvantaged. So men who marry earlier, one report found, they earn more. But if women marry earlier, they earn less over their lifetime.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s interesting that you mention that, Nicole, because I remember a paper, too, by Claudia Golden, the economist at Harvard, and a number of her colleagues that looked at the wage gap overall that men still earn more than women. And she found a significant chunk of it could be attributed to mobility, that men will move for a job, and women often won’t, who are married. And that actually, it’s the wage gap for married women that drives a huge chunk of the overall wage gap, and that, you know, while there’s a lot of factors that go into the wage gap, it is this kind of marriage holds women back professionally in some ways that really contributes to a lot of men.

One of the other things Avivah talked about that I’d love your thoughts on is that she talked a lot about using skills she had learned for professional purposes in making her relationships better. Is that something that you guys have done?

AMY BERNSTEIN: I think managing is really the art of sort of figuring out what you want and how to get there in a way that is authentic and that embodies your values, and that will help you figure out how to move people in the same direction. But there’s so much values woven in to, otherwise it’s just manipulation. So if you can do it effectively, then of course you’re going to take those skills home. It teaches you to set priorities. And that’s part of what growing up in the workplace does. It teaches you that you have to do this now, but not that. It teaches you that you have to be able to differentiate the important from the urgent. And that alone will help you in a marriage.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You know, Amy, it’s interesting to hear you say that, because something I’ve heard from a lot of women is that becoming a mother made them better employees, better managers. They learned lessons from their kids, and I don’t have children, but it’s something that I’ve sort of thought a lot about, because there is also research that supports that. I think it was a study of female economists found that female economists with children publish more papers than those without. And so I think you could say that’s a case of learning maybe to prioritize or manage time better, who knows.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I think that’s absolutely what’s going on. And learning not to overreact to everything. It’s setting priorities, but also understanding what’s really important and being able to let the rest just roll off your back. But the other thing you have to learn to do is to deal with messiness of other human beings. And that’s where learning to let things roll off your back, to just, to say to yourself, ugh, he’s having a bad day, rather than, I hate him because he’s being a jerk right now.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Or he’s being a jerk right now, he must be mad at me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Right, he must be mad at me, or oh, oh, she looked at me funny. She must hate me, or that work I just did must suck. It’s, you know what? Here’s one of the most liberating things you can learn. In work and in home, it’s usually not about you. And once you’ve embraced that, it really helps you kind of ignore all the stuff that you would have let scratch your surface, bruise you. There’s so many fewer slings and arrows coming your way than you think there are.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So it’s interesting to hear all of this conversation, because I have always been better at school and at work than I have been at relationships. That’s just something about myself. So one thing that has really helped me become a better wife to my husband is learning to do some of these things that I do well naturally in a professional setting at home. So like a specific example is, if I’m giving someone feedback at work, like that’s critical feedback, I don’t do the sandwich, cheesy sandwich thing, I try not to. But I start being like, listen, like you’re really important to this organization and to me, and I want to help you, and I say like nice things about why, that I care about them. And then I say, and like the thing you need to do to get better is this. And I realize at home I was just like, the thing you need to do is this. And I hadn’t said any of that stuff up front. So when I started actually doing all that stuff, suddenly I got so much better results in my relationship at home. So that’s just one thing where I clearly just made a conscious decision to do this thing I do at work, do it at home. And it’s worked so much better.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And it’s so much kinder.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.

NICOLE TORRES: So what did you both think about Avivah’s advice, not advice. I think she said she learned to be more loving and also to be more loveable.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Absolutely rang a chime for me.

NICOLE TORRES: Definitely.

AMY BERNSTEIN: One of the things I learned in my relationship is that, you know, all of the, I know can do it by myself stuff, was very off putting. So just saying, yeah, I could use a hand here, made the relationship so much warmer and more mutual, on both ends. I mean, that was such a breakthrough for me. I just thought was being self-sufficient, because I always had to be self-sufficient. I actually didn’t even think about it. But you know, who else was going to do it? Well, you know, learning to accept a hand was a very important thing for me to learn.

NICOLE TORRES: It just seems scary, too, learning how to ask for help and how to accept help and how to depend on someone for help, because then you’re saying, you know, I need this support. And if you don’t get that support, then that, then, poses all kinds of problems.

AMY BERNSTEIN: But it also reveals something vitally important, which is, if you ask for help, and you don’t get that help, that might be a deal breaker, and it might ought to be a deal breaker. So understanding the truth early before you’ve signed on the dotted line, bought a house and had two kids, is a good thing.

But the other thing that I just want to say to what you said, Nicole, is when you need to make decisions and when you don’t want to make decisions, and recognizing that and being articulate about it. I’m in my 50s, and I’m not asking my partner to, you know, we don’t need to pick up the kids. And the laundry’s not, you know, it’s a pain in the neck, but it’s not, you know, it doesn’t define the relationship. But on the weekend, I don’t care what we have for dinner. I don’t want to make that decision. I make 300 decisions a day. I just don’t care. Yes, let’s have sweet potatoes. That’s fine. It’s that stuff that’s kind of idiosyncratic but kind of not idiosyncratic, where you have to figure out what matters and what doesn’t matter, not just to the other person, but to you, and then to the two of you together.

NICOLE TORRES: So how did you figure that out, though? Was that because you had, you know, deep conversations about your priorities, what you’re care least about? You know, you don’t care about dinner Saturday night? Or does that just happen after you seen someone get annoyed when you don’t try to say what we’re having for dinner?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, more the latter. I’m not a huge fan of state of the union conversations in general. Maybe in a crisis moment. But that’s me. It’s being able to read all of the cues, like maybe the screamed response [LAUGHTER] or, you have to sort of, even in the middle of a heated conversation, at work and at home, pull yourself away from it for a second and ask yourself, what’s really going on here? What are we really talking about? Because it’s rarely about where you left your boots. You know? And it’s rarely about the misspelling in the second paragraph.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes. So it’s interesting, when you have those moments where you were arguing over like where to store the toothpicks or something, that you sort of realize something else is going on, but I it’s also, and like that’s one of the reasons why I think long term relationships to me are ultimately, like they’re a lot of work, but they’ve ultimately been rewarding, because you learn all this weird stuff about your partner, and I think one of the hardest phases in my personal and professional life was when I was first cohabiting with the person who became my spouse, and we hadn’t learned all that stuff yet. There was constant conflict about like, you know, we’d come home from a day of having made 300 decisions, and they’d be like, what do you want for dinner? And you’d say, I don’t care. And they’d be like, no, really. Tell me what you really, what your heart desires. And I’m like, I’d like to not be hungry now. That’s what I desire. [LAUGHTER] Like I need fuel to continue as a living organism. [LAUGHTER] And like you end up having these arguments, but then after a couple of those arguments, your partner learns that when you come home, and you just say, I need to not to be hungry now, where is food? I need food. They just, like, OK, I’ll order pizza. They’ve learned not to press you for your innermost desire in that moment. And things get easier as you then go along.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And then there’s the other thing that goes on, which is, you go home. You really just want to sit down, feed your face and go to bed. But you have to have a conversation. Or your spouse says, hey, could you help me chop the carrots? The answer is always, sure. Right? You just have to ask, what’s it going to cost if I say no? Right? Because what it costs if you say no is so much more than it costs if you say yes. And I’m not saying, you know, go along to get along. This is really under the heading of, what’s really important here? You know?

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NICOLE TORRES: So we’ve been talking a lot about modern dual career couples, the difficulties and demands that couples face today. We can also think about the longer arc of history here. So at least now, many women are in relationships where equality is at least an ideal. And another big change is that women today have careers that are strong enough to let us leave marriages when we want to.

NICOLE TORRES: To remind ourselves just how far women have come in their work and home lives, we talked to Stephanie Coontz. She’s an historian of family life at Evergreen State College and the author of Marriage: A History. We asked her about coupledom has changed over time. So Stephanie, thank you so much for making the time for this.

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Oh, my pleasure.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I thought a place to start would just be a little history lesson. What was our concept of love and marriage 100 years ago, if 100 years is the right timeframe to talk about? And how is it different today?

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, I’d go back even further than 100 years, because there have been so many changes in it. One of the things that we really need to understand is that for thousands of years, marriage was really not about love. You know, we talk today about how you want to work at your marriage. People didn’t work at their marriages. They worked in their marriages. Marriage was a way of acquiring useful in-laws, expanding the family labor force, organizing the family labor force. And love was considered to be a real interference with that, a very dangerous kind of thing. It was fun if you fell in love afterwards. But love was not a particularly, a good reason to get married.

NICOLE TORRES: So the institution of marriage, it used to be structured around women’s complete economic dependence on men. Right?

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, yes. I mean, again, going back even further, women were not economically dependent on their husbands. In fact, husbands were very economically dependent on their wives. In colonial days, wives were not referred to as, you know, the gentle, the better half. They were referred to as yokemates and helpmates. And for thousands of years, there was no such thing as a male breadwinner family. But there was a male boss in the family. And women were dependent upon, their labor was taken from them. So in that sense, they were dependent. They didn’t have the right to earn wages outside. And as you develop this new definition of love in the 19^th century, and the new definition of the male provider, gradually that began to be undermined. But for 150 years, women were basically legally economically dependent upon men in ways that were not structured by saying, OK, the men are the boss, but were structured by this new idea that men had to take care of women, because women couldn’t take care of themselves, and therefore women, it was in women’s interest to let men run the businesses, take care of the money, etc.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So it sounds like in a way, even though we now look back on sort of Victorian notions of separate spheres, and the angel in the house as being a way to kind of keep women down, it sounds like that might have been better than being the yokemates whose labor was stolen from her.

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, yes. And it had contradictory effects. One of the interesting things about the premodern definition of marriage is that there was a gender hierarchy that had to do with your position, but rank, your social class and your status outweighed your gender, so that if you were an upper-class woman whose husband was away, or who was an heiress, or who was a widow, you could exercise power over men as the boss of the head of household. So this new idea that the relationship between men and women is not a power relationship but is a protection of women who are not capable of acting in a public sphere, was a real setback for the exceptional woman who had been able to act in the public sphere and to exercise economic independence.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So when did that start to change into what we’re seeing today?

STEPHANIE COONTZ: A real change occurs in the 20^th century as women enter the workforce, and the society needs them in the workforce, but they want them also to be a reserve army of labor. They don’t want them to compete with the men. So the ideology was, you should work until you’re married, or you can even work after you’re married, as long as it’s to help set up the family. And the advice books, right up through the 1960s, said to women, You should never have any real interest in your job, because you are going to quit it, and if you do happen to continue work after you’re married, your husband will find that your work is competing with the deference and love and the attention that you owe him.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So where do you see us today with all of this? I mean, some of these echoes still sound very familiar to me. Which one of these do you still see in our conception of marriage and partnership and work today?

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, you see them in different forms. We should talk about some of the ideals about women that still affect us at work. But when you’re talking about marriage and partnership, there’s a really interesting set of ideals that I think get in the way of not only women gaining and equal spot in the workforce, but also in the way of men and women who increasingly want equality at home, developing workable love relationships. And to explain that, we have to go back a little bit to this ideology that love was a union of opposites. This develops very strongly in the 19^th century, and becomes a way of saying, you know, here, marriage is still going to be absolutely central to our society, because you need a soulmate. And the result is a development of love, and an erotization of difference that I think has become a real problem for us today, as most people over the last 30 or 40 years have become really much more interested in having a partner whom you share interests and talents with, and respect because you have so much in common, rather than someone who’s your opposite. But men have learned over that 150 years of the domestic spheres, that they have to be strong. They have to be silent. They have to be powerful. They have to take the initiative. I tend to be a little more tolerant of even mansplaining, because men under this regime were taught to believe that the way they showed their love was to provide for women, to protect women, and to explain to women, to teach them. [LAUGHTER]

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, man. So much is now explained to me.

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Yeah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So since our struggles to create these egalitarian partnerships have such long roots, I’m wondering, how can we create more egalitarian marriages if we’re not really sure we know what that looks like? It sounds like we’re trying to sort of paint a picture of something we’ve never seen.

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, that’s one of the reasons that I think that historians tend to be more optimistic, I think, than some people who come along and say, hey, how come we’re not equal? One thing we have to remember is, we’ve only been even interested in creating these egalitarian marriages, really for most people, over the last 40 years. You know, there’s the glass half-empty, glass half-full thing. Well, it’s a big glass, and we have filled up a lot of it. But there’s still a ways to go. People really are developing the idea that mutual respect is important, and our challenge is to make sure that it becomes erotic. And we’re making tremendous progress that way. Just in the last 20 years, 20 or 30 years, a lot of the things that were patterns in the era of specialization and loving your opposite have been reversed. It used to be that if a woman had more education than her husband, that was a risk factor for divorce. That’s no longer true. It used to be that if she earned more than her husband, and you still hear people saying this, but the more recent research shows that in fact, a women who earns more than her husband, that does not raise the risk of divorce. It used to be that women with the most education were the least likely to marry. Now they’re the most likely to marry and the least likely to divorce. And that means that men’s attitudes have been changing along with women’s, maybe not at all the same speed, but there have been tremendous changes, and we see that in the dynamics of modern marriages.

NICOLE TORRES: So related to that, how well do you think men are supporting their wives today? And then, vice versa?

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Well, I think we have made tremendous progress. I do think, as I said, we are now seeing this tremendous change in what men want out of a partner. They’re much less threatened by high achievement and by capability than in the past. And in fact, many men find it very attractive. Men, I think, want to support their partners. You still have, though, that there’s two things going on. First of all, you still have a significant number of men who, despite their desire for equality in many areas, still expect that when push comes to shove in family life, that the women will be the ones who step back and adjust their career to the needs of family life. But even ones who would like to be involved find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, because, first of all, men, they still earn more than women, and in fact, over the past 20 years, there’s been this increase in overpay for overwork—that is that people who work the longest hours not only get more money because they work longer hours, they’re actually paid higher hourly wages. So there’s huge penalties, then, in many professional families for a man who cuts back, and huge incentives for him to continue the overwork, which puts the pressure on the woman.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You know, before we let you go, I realize we’ve been awfully heteronormative in our conversation today. So I was wondering, do you know of any research that shows that there might be differences among same-sex partnerships? Do they have, maybe, healthier, more egalitarian partnerships? Or are they replicating some of the things that we’ve seen in opposite-sex partnerships?

 

STEPHANIE COONTZ: There are some very important things that heterosexual couples can learn from same-sex couples. First of all, they tend to be more egalitarian, not necessarily by dividing things up 50/50 and counting who’s done what. But more able to negotiate on the basis of not having these stereotypes about who should do what. John Gottman’s research suggests that gay and lesbian couples tend to be better able to talk out problems, to inject humor into them, and I think that may be because heterosexual couples are so oriented toward the couple. They don’t have the kind of close friends that they can go to and get some of their other needs met. And therefore, they’re very dependent on marriage, and very threatened by the idea of a fight. And they tend to get more defensive. What Gottman found in his lab was that the more a heterosexual couple discussed a problem, the angrier they got. But the more a same-sex couple discussed it, the less angry they got. And in some ways, I think that may be because there is this long tradition of communities and friendship outside the couple. Now, that can also undermine the couple if it’s friendships that compete with the couple. So there’s a balance to be made. But I think that one of the things that heterosexual couples can really learn from same-sex couples is how to step back from this anxiety about solving every problem immediately, to interject humor, to be able to recognize that it’s not the end of the world to have a fight.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s super interesting. Stephanie, thank you so much for spending some time with us. I know you’ve been really busy, and I really appreciate it.

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Oh, it’s been a pleasure to chat with you.

NICOLE TORRES: Thank you, again.

STEPHANIE COONTZ: Thank you.

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SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s our show. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.

NICOLE TORRES: I’m Nicole Torres. And our cohost, Amy Bernstein, is back in town and back with us next week. Our producer is Amanda Kersey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholtz. Curt Nickisch is our consulting editor, and Maureen Hoch is our supervising editor.

NICOLE TORRES: Thank you everyone who has emailed to tell us what you think about the show and to share your own workplace stories. Hearing that you’re finding our practical advice helpful means a lot to us. Please keep those emails coming. womenatwork@hbr.org.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: We’re also working on an episode about the advice that women get about work. So please write us an email about the best and worst advice you’ve been given, or send us a voice memo. We’ll pick out pieces of advice from listeners to read or share during that episode. Just let us know in your message if it’s OK for us to use your name or not. Again, our email address is, womenatwork@hbr.org.

NICOLE TORRES: Talk to you next time.