Couples That Work: How Dual-Career Couples Can Thrive in Love and Work

Finding fulfillment in both love and work isn't easy — but it's possible. The majority of couples today are two-career couples. As anyone who's part of such a relationship knows, this presents big challenges. Yet most advice for two-career couples fails because it treats the challenges as a zero-sum game in which one partner's gain is the other’s loss. This pits partner against partner and frames solutions in the language of sacrifice and trade-offs. This book is different. INSEAD professor Jennifer Petriglieri shifts away from conventional, one-size-fits-all solutions for two-career couples and instead focuses on how couples can tackle and resolve the challenges they will face throughout their lives—together. She identifies three key phases of exploration and personal growth in every couple's work-life journey, showing how couples must navigate these together in order to strengthen their bond. Each phase is crystallized with a question: How can we make this work? The first phase focuses on the logistics of combining two busy lives and often involves the demands of young children. What do we really want? In the second phase, couples learn to navigate their midlife crises in ways that allow each partner to continue to feel happy and fulfilled. Who are we now? With careers winding down and kids grown up, this last phase offers new freedoms—and uncertainties. Based on a five-year research project including interviews with couples from over thirty countries—from executives to entrepreneurs and from twenty-something newlyweds to two-career grandparents—Couples That Work is filled with vivid real-life stories as well as keen analytical insights. There are also engaging exercises and activities designed to help couples develop their own unique answers to that most pressing question: How can we successfully combine love and work?