The Dual-Career Couple

A legend or an attainable goal?

In my mid-20s, I was lucky enough to live with a roommate who doubled as a good friend. We occasionally grumbled about who was letting dishes pile up in the sink or leaving hair behind in the shower. More often, though, we indulged in that particularly 20-something practice of lingering for hours side by side or across a table, content without doing much of anything. Maybe we packed our lunch for the next day, halfheartedly browsed the internet, or folded our laundry, all while talking about our days, gossiping about mutual friends, and of course fretting and dreaming about our futures.

A perennial topic, even when we were both very single, was how we would one day balance work and family. Longtime readers know my spiel by now, but just to recap: I grew up without any IRL model of a truly dual-career couple. Really, I’ve racked my brain and cannot come up with a single example.

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I knew plenty of stay-at-home moms and work-part-time moms and flexible-work moms and even a handful of single moms. But I can’t recall any coupled mom whose career seemed primary or carried equal weight to her husband’s. And so I concluded, perhaps prematurely, that my career ambitions were incompatible with “good” mothering.

So it was a revelation to learn, in those meandering conversations, about my roommate’s divergent experience. Whereas the social landscape of my childhood was peopled by “traditional” couples, her community was decidedly more varied. Both her parents held big jobs throughout her childhood and, in her memory, most of her friends’ parents did, too. She grew up around female physicians, academics, and business executives, many of whom also had children. Unsurprisingly, as a 20-something, my roommate was also less worried than I about finding a way to meld her equally strong career and family ambitions. She knew it wasn’t easy, but could be done. She’d seen it firsthand.

Look how well this couple is working together

I grilled my roommate on the how/what/when of her parents’ arrangement, but it was difficult to extrapolate from her small sample. My sociology training exposed me to plenty of rigorous research on the challenges of “work/family balance” but was mostly silent about how to do better. So I was intrigued to discover Jennifer Petriglieri, whose 2019 book purports to explain “how dual-career couples can thrive in love and work.”

Despite the aspirational subtitle, this is not your typical relationship advice book.

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Petriglieri is a Professor at INSEAD, a French business school, and she’s conducted interviews with more than 100 dual-career couples around the globe. Couples that Work summarizes her findings and translates them into actionable steps.

I picked up the book a few weeks ago with some trepidation. My partner and I were in the midst of major work/family decisions of our own, and I worried Petriglieri would tell me we’d done everything wrong. Instead, she validated my experience.

Petriglieri’s argument is that most dual-career couples will face three major transitions over the course of their lives together. Figuring out how to work through them successfully can be a make-or-break proposition for couples. From what I could tell, my partner and I were going through a textbook case of transition number one.

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Here's how Petriglieri summarizes it:

“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.”

Let’s break that down a bit further. Before the first transition, combining two careers isn’t (usually) all that hard. Sure, it’s annoying when your spouse comes home at 9pm for the third night in a row. And you might wish they were better at responding to your texts during the workday. But when you really get down to it, in those early days your work lives are largely separate: your choices at the office rarely have a big effect on your partner’s options.

But alas, this idyll cannot last forever. Sooner or later, one partner is offered a promotion—with the catch that it requires frequent relocation. Or one partner finds their dream job in a city the other dislikes. Or you have a child, and the practice of leaving the office whenever you each happen to be finished is no longer viable. If he moves, do you go with him? If her boss expects long hours, do you pick up the childcare slack? Suddenly, the two of you cannot operate on independent tracks. Your decisions, big or small, are intertwined, and you have to find a way to move forward together.

Managing the first transition

Yes, yes. How?! We’ll get there, but first Petriglieri explains what not to do. Much of her advice boils down to this: don’t mistake the forest for the trees. Don’t over-focus on your present dilemma and, in the process, neglect the long-term consequences of your choice or the underlying psychological dynamics at play for each of you.

It might be tempting, for instance, to solve a childcare problem by having one partner take time off, especially if their earnings would be eaten up by childcare costs anyway. But if paid work is core to that partner’s identity, the difficulty he might have getting back into the workforce later has to be factored into your calculus. Similarly, if you solve the relocation question by deciding to stay put but don’t have frank conversations about why you’re doing that, and what values or goals or priorities are reflected in that choice, you’re simply kicking the can down the road.

Rather than begin with your current predicament, Petriglieri recommends starting with the big picture. What are your shared values and, critically, what do those values mean to each person? If we both value “community,” but only I understand that to mean living close to family, we may run into problems.

Next, what are the boundaries you’ll each adhere to? Are there certain places you will or won’t consider living? Limits to the number of hours you’ll consistently work? Arrangements—living long-distance, routine international travel—you want to avoid?

Finally, what do you each fear most—about your work, your relationship, your family? Getting those fears out in the open can help you find ways to better support each other and preemptively put up guardrails to keep you on-course.

Many of Petriglieri’s couples also found it helpful to explicitly decide what “kind” of dual-career couple they wanted to be. The model that’s familiar to me from my childhood is primary-secondary. Both partners work for pay, but when challenges arise, one partner’s career needs take priority.

The second is turn-taking: couples follow a primary-secondary model but agree to switch roles periodically. Petriglieri cautions that this model sounds great but can be challenging: setting a timeline in advance is realistic in some fields (e.g., once I make partner, once you finish residency) but more difficult in others, where promotions and opportunities are harder to plan for.

The third model, double-primary, is the one my former roommate witnessed up close. In this approach, neither partner’s career takes precedence; instead, they work together to “dynamically juggle two primary careers.” Dynamic juggling sounds to me like something only the highly-coordinated should attempt. And Petriglieri agrees it is the most labor-intensive model. In the absence of a clear decision heuristic (Partner A’s career comes first, either at this point in time or always), everything is subject to discussion.

Nevertheless, Petriglieri finds that most of the happy couples in her sample are dual-primary model. Counterintuitively, she argues that their satisfaction is because of, rather than despite, those taxing discussions. Even if they didn’t always agree, the double-primary couples were engaged in ongoing dialogue and made explicit agreements about whose career was prioritized and why in each instance.

It's on this point in particular that Petriglieri’s work on relationships overlaps nicely with mine on household labor. We both conclude that what you do matters less than making a deliberate (mutual!) decision to do it. If you and your partner agree that you will carry more of the childcare load, and then you end up doing more childcare, everybody’s happy—or at least, resigned to their lot. But when you expect to share the childcare equally, your partner assumes you’ll do more, and neither of you clearly voices those expectations to the other, anger and resentment ensue.

So we’ll conclude with a friendly PSA: talk to your partner! About the big stuff, not just the immediate and everyday. You will not always like what you hear, but it’s probably your best shot at finding relationship bliss—or at least, a mutually satisfying coexistence.

1. Surely there was someone, but if so, they didn’t make a distinct impression.

2. Seriously, there’s some crazy stuff out there.

3. It is somewhat disheartening to realize there will be two more, but we’ll cross those bridges…later.