Couples That Work

Finding fulfillment in both love and work isn't easy--but it's possible. The majority of couples today are dual-career couples. As anyone who's part of such a relationship knows, this presents big challenges: trying to raise kids and achieve career goals while caring for and supporting your partner can seem impossible. Yet most advice for dual-career couples fails, framing the challenges as a zero-sum game in which one partner’s gain is the other's loss and solutions feel like sacrifices or unsatisfactory trade-offs. This book is different. In Couples That Work, INSEAD professor Jennifer Petriglieri rejects conventional, one-size-fits-all solutions and instead focuses on how dual-career couples can tackle and resolve the challenges they face throughout their lives--together. She identifies three key phases of exploration and personal growth in every couple's work-life journey, showing how partners must navigate these together 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, the book includes interviews with couples from over thirty countries--from executives to entrepreneurs and from twentysomething newlyweds to dual-career grandparents. Filled with vivid real-life stories, keen insights, and engaging exercises, Couples That Work will help couples develop their own unique answers to that most pressing question: How can we successfully combine love and work?

Every couple wants a happy relationship and a meaningful career but how do we balance both? In Couples that Work, Professor Jennifer Petriglieri shifts away from the language of sacrifice and trade-offs and focuses on how couples can successfully tackle the challenges they will face throughout their lives--together. The book explores key questions like: - Can you and your partner have equally important careers or must you prioritise one over the other? - How can you juggle children or family commitments without sacrificing your work? - Does every decision require compromise or can you find solutions that benefit you both? Identifying common triggers and traps, and presenting engaging exercises to help you avoid and overcome them, this book will help every couple design their own unique way to combine love and work at every stage of their journey. 'Hugely insightful. All couples must read this now' Susan David, author of Emotional Agility 'Managing one career is hard enough; two often seems impossible. In this book, Jennifer shares what she's learned about how couples can not only survive but thrive' Adam Grant, author of Originals

It's quite easy to get distracted from your career when you're happy in love or devote all your time to securing a promotion at work only to find your relationship is on the rocks. Balancing the demands of your career and your partner's while trying to nourish a relationship and family can be tough - but it doesn't have to be. In Couples That Work, Professor Jennifer Petriglieri reveals how all couples can thrive in work and love at the same time. Petriglieri has spent the last five years studying over a hundred couples in a variety of roles and types of relationships from all over the world. Drawing on this research, Petriglieri highlights the three distinct yet predictable developmental stages that all couples go through and offers practical guidance in the form of questions, exercises and activities that couples can use to overcome the most pressing challenges they face. From couples in their mid-20s to those in their mid-60s, from heterosexual couples to same-sex couples, from high flyers to steady careerists, and from those based in the US, to those in Asia, Europe and the Middle East, Couples That Work holds something of interest to all couples in which both members are committed to their careers and to each other. Couples That Work provides two-career couples with all the insight and tools they need to have it all and thrive in work and love.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Over a million copies sold! “An eminently practical guide to an emotionally intelligent—and long-lasting—marriage.”—Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work has revolutionized the way we understand, repair, and strengthen marriages. John Gottman’s unprecedented study of couples over a period of years has allowed him to observe the habits that can make—and break—a marriage. Here is the culmination of that work: the seven principles that guide couples on a path toward a harmonious and long-lasting relationship. Straightforward yet profound, these principles teach partners new approaches for resolving conflicts, creating new common ground, and achieving greater levels of intimacy. Gottman offers strategies and resources to help couples collaborate more effectively to resolve any problem, whether dealing with issues related to sex, money, religion, work, family, or anything else. Packed with new exercises and the latest research out of the esteemed Gottman Institute, this revised edition of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is the definitive guide for anyone who wants their relationship to attain its highest potential.

How do two-career couples manage in a one-career world?It's about Time examines this mismatch between outdated scripts and the experiences of dual-earner couples. It broadens our understanding of occupational and family career strategies couples use in light of the widening gap between their real lives and the outdated work-hour and career-path roles, rules, and regulations they confront. It's about Time draws on the data from the Cornell Couples and Careers Study to demonstrate that:*Regardless of income, time is a scarce commodity in dual-earner households. With two jobs, two commutes, often long work hours, high job demands, business travel, several cars, children, ailing relatives, and/or pets - time is always an issue.*Time is built into jobs and career paths in ways that make continuous full-time (40 or typically more hours a week) paid work a fact of life in American society. *The multiple strands of life—career, family and personal—unfold over time. Spouses move through their life courses in tandem, with early choices - to have children or not, to work long hours or not, to switch jobs or not, to relocate for his or her career or not—all having long-term consequences for life quality and for gender inequality.The evidence from this book suggests that it is about time for the United States to confront the realities and needs of contemporary working couples and indeed, all members of the new workforce. To do so requires more than Band-Aid, short-term (and often short-sighted) policy remedies. It's about Time argues that it is essential to re-imagine and reconfigure work hours, workweeks, and occupational career paths in ways that address the widening gaps between the time needs and goals of workers and their families, at all ages and stages of the life course.

From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together

A bold and inspiring memoir and manifesto from a renowned voice in the women's leadership movement who shows women how to cultivate the single skill they really need in order to thrive: the ability to let go. Once the poster girl for doing it all, after she had her first child, Tiffany Dufu struggled to accomplish everything she thought she needed to in order to succeed. Like so many driven and talented women who have been brought up to believe that to have it all, they must do it all, Dufu began to feel that achieving her career and personal goals was an impossibility. Eventually, she discovered the solution: letting go. In Drop the Ball, Dufu recounts how she learned to reevaluate expectations, shrink her to-do list, and meaningfully engage the assistance of others—freeing the space she needed to flourish at work and to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships at home. Even though women are half the workforce, they still represent only eighteen per cent of the highest level leaders. The reasons are obvious: just as women reach middle management they are also starting families. Mounting responsibilities at work and home leave them with no bandwidth to do what will most lead to their success. Offering new perspective on why the women’s leadership movement has stalled, and packed with actionable advice, Tiffany Dufu’s Drop the Ball urges women to embrace imperfection, to expect less of themselves and more from others—only then can they focus on what they truly care about, devote the necessary energy to achieving their real goals, and create the type of rich, rewarding life we all desire.

What can we learn from looking at married partners who live apart? In Commuter Spouses, Danielle Lindemann explores how couples cope when they live apart to meet the demands of their dual professional careers. Based on the personal stories of almost one-hundred commuter spouses, Lindemann shows how these atypical relationships embody (and sometimes disrupt!) gendered constructions of marriage in the United States. These narratives of couples who physically separate to maintain their professional lives reveal the ways in which traditional dynamics within a marriage are highlighted even as they are turned on their heads. Commuter Spouses follows the journeys of these couples as they adapt to change and shed light on the durability of some cultural ideals, all while working to maintain intimacy in a non-normative relationship. Lindemann suggests that everything we know about marriage, and relationships in general, promotes the idea that couples are focusing more and more on their individual and personal betterment and less on their marriage. Commuter spouses, she argues, might be expected to exemplify in an extreme manner that kind of self-prioritization. Yet, as this book details, commuter spouses actually maintain a strong commitment to their marriage. These partners illustrate the stickiness of traditional marriage ideals while simultaneously subverting expectations.