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?