Why Working Couples Need to Talk More About Power

There was plenty to celebrate on our first Valentine’s Day living in France: My husband Gianpiero and I had just received job and PhD offers — and we were engaged! But our mood wasn’t exactly jubilant. We were the only people in the small Chinese restaurant that was wedged into a corner of the train station parking lot and, though a lively joint at lunch, it wasn’t quite the place where couples dined on Feb. 14. We wouldn’t have chosen to eat there either, if one of us had made a reservation elsewhere. But I had been busy at work and assumed that he would take care of it. So had he. The server must have sensed the tension between us as she deposited a plate of limp spring rolls on the plastic tablecloth.

It was a far cry from another memorable dinner, only a year or so before, a few weeks into our relationship. Gianpiero had whisked me to one of his favorite pizzerias in Milan. The place was packed. Mindless of the subtleties of flirting in public in Italy, I sat on his lap between pizza and dessert.

“What are you doing?” he asked, feigning alarm.

“What I learned in the savanna!” I grinned: I had just told him about the months I spent as a researcher in a game reserve in Uganda. He asked what I had studied there. “Sexual selection,” I said, delighted to explain.

“And what did you learn?” I’ve always liked it when he follows my lead and when he asks about my work, and there he was, doing both.

“That the girls pick by getting close,” I answered. “That’s their power.”

Yet here we were a year later, quietly picking at cold spring rolls under a neon light. It was not the place, or the food, that bothered us. It was the shift from the promise of empowerment that comes with new love to the quiet daily power struggle that had led us to each wait for the other to manage dinner plans, each choosing instead to focus on our work. We had known from the beginning that our love would have to make room for our career ambitions, and we wanted it to: We loved each other and we loved each other’s work. But the reality of that balance had become different from what we had imagined.

Since those dinners, I’ve embarked on a career studying personal and professional identities at work and, more recently, on a five-year study of dual-career couples across career and life stages. (I describe my findings in my recent book Couples That Work.)  I wanted to find out what made some couples thrive, others fail, and yet more hobble along. What I’ve discovered is that all dual-career couples’ lives have moments like our two dinners: Moments in which our partners make us feel seen and powerful, and moments in which a power struggle makes one or both partners feel forgotten and shrunken. Even couples who thrive, I found, cannot avoid the latter. But they put in the work to get back to the former.

I titled the book Couples That Work because dual-career couples, and perhaps all couples, only thrive when they keep working to acknowledge, support, and balance both partners’ power. I found that people in these relationships felt powerful when their partner saw and supported all of their work and life ambitions, not only those they shared.

That means taking time to be curious about your partner’s ambitions, professional and otherwise. To delight in their dreams. To feel their struggles. To figure out together how you can support them. Engaging in their dreams in this way gives them power. And asking for this engagement in return can empower you. While I wrote my book, for example, it took me a while to realize that I needed Gianpiero to ask about it and cheer me on, but I did not want him to read my early drafts. To feel most empowered, I needed him to encourage my writing without commenting on what I was writing. Had I not shared that realization in our conversations, however, I might have felt constrained and he might have felt left out. That is precisely what happens, I found, in couples who do not make the effort to help each other clarify and pursue what they want, at home and in their work. Their relationship begins to feel like a constraint.

We often talk about our dreams and wishes at the beginning of a relationship — and they’re part of what makes new love feel so empowering. Most couples begin like my Italian dinner. We see our partner and make them feel seen, we want them to reach and live out their ambitions. We pick them for who they are but also, inevitably, for who we imagine that they might become, and us with them.

But as our relationships mature we lose sight of them and power itself often becomes a dirty word. As circumstances and expectations start tugging, couples often drift into a dynamic more akin to my Chinese dinner. Habit takes the place of negotiation, asymmetry that of reciprocity. We feel that only one part of us gets seen, or only one person’s ambitions are supported. Even if power isn’t all in one person’s hands or the other’s, it is no longer abundant or shared. When that tension lasts, love feels conditional or diminutive, and couples slide into resentment and regret. They begin to fail.

Couples need to be vigilant about imbalances as well. Power, left to its own devices, most often falls into an asymmetric distribution. That imbalance is not, per se, a doomed arrangement. I studied couples who thrived even as one partner appeared to have more power than the other. But what made those couples work, and avoid guilt and resentment, is that they had openly and carefully chosen to live their life that way. For example, I studied many couples who took turns in making what one called the “career push.” At any given moment, in those couples, one partner was far more invested in work, while the other took a step back and played a supporting role at home. But the couples who were most successful were those in which each individual got to push and support in turn. While their career arrangements were asymmetric, their power balance was not, because the asymmetry was of their own shared making.

Most power asymmetries in couples are not the result of considered and examined choices. Far from it. They are the result of social pressures that slowly corrode early promises of egalitarianism. This is especially true for heterosexual couples, I found. Because power is not allocated equally to men and women in societal norms and corporate policies, efforts to sustain equality require a conscious act of resistance. They are a genuine revolutionary act. That is why they are demanding, and exciting.

Whether it is on Valentine’s Day, for an anniversary, or for another occasion, couples often come together for a special meal. (I hope one of you makes a reservation if you are dining out). Discussing power might be the last thing on your mind on a romantic night out. It should not be. Especially if you are using dim lights, your partner’s favorite recipe, or a tasting menu to cover up for an uncomfortable power asymmetry in your relationship. Those are nice props, but no way to make a couple work.