What Can We Learn From the Work-Life Balance Couples?

I read the Power Couples topic from Harvard Business Review's Spot Light in the September - October Issue. Personally, I empathise with the stories from the article. My parents were a dual-career couple, my mother was a quality manager and did shifts back then; my father was running his startup, so I saw him twice a week maximum. I was raised by my grandparents, and we got a housekeeper to do some chores, who was living apart from her husband for work. I started to wonder what made couples to make decisions such as live apart for a career?

I had my first child while my husband was working in the UK and I was in Shanghai. Maintaining a good relationship as well as building our career was a mega challenge. Ensuring a reasonable relationship between father and child was a constant challenge, made slightly easier by modern technology. We reunited after two and a half years apart, then realised that how great it is to be a family living under the same shelter. While the time apart was a hurdle, it was worth it. 

Now we are planning for our future; how should we nail it?

I believe that a lot of people have experienced living apart for work, or witness others experiencing the process. Based on the article and personal experience, here are some questions I want to raise and discuss.

Can couple choose career purely based on money?

Quite a lot of couples avoid talking about money in their relationship. Not necessarily about who pays the bill and who covers the childcare fee, but setting up a sustainable financial plan for your life together. Running a family is similar to business (family businesses make a lot of sense to me); you need to manage both of your income, debt, investment and cashflows. Money is important, as one of the facilitators to support our happy life. 

It only helps when you have goals to achieve in both the short term and long term. In my case, in the short term, we want to move to a bigger house so our kids can grow comfortably there while we can develop different hobbies with our kids, enjoy life as a family. In the long term, I want to travel a lot with my husband after our kids leave home and explore the world together. 

I believe those goals are achievable when we layout our plan, with numbers and articulate the way to execute it. Then we know what kind of career path we want to take to maximise our mental health at work (passion for career) meanwhile support the family. This process involves trust, in-depth communication and re-evaluation of the plan based on performance from each phase of the plan.

If the couple decide to move on to their dream career or dream life, apart from the positive side, What are the risks? What is the opportunity cost? What is the strategy? Most importantly, how can they have joy through the transition period? 

Living apart from each other or family – quite a lot of young Chinese parents working apart from each other, or working in the same place but living apart from their children. Both cases in the long term will affect the relationship. For example, people can earn more from big cities to support their family back in the country. The initiation is great, but how long they plan to do it? The opportunity cost can be poor connection or resentment with other family members such as kids and parents and personal health from hard working. Again, this brings back the bottom line, what is the goal you want to achieve?

Quoting Jack Welch on strategy, “It’s all in the sauce!” Your life partner is your companion and friend, you need each other to go through a lifetime together, treat the other half nice, the worst thing is to treat that person as a foe or ultimate competitor. 

Back to my life, my husband and I are both geeks, at the moment he loves sharing tech news and the techniques of baking proper bread with me. We often discuss for hours and realise that it’s bedtime long past time, having had a vigorous discussion for what felt like minutes. Same when I throw business topics at him. We found joy by sharing bits and bobs, and allow ourselves to be nerdy in our areas.

I saw some couples finding joy by discussing and doing gardening together. My foundation year teacher who organised a trip in Sri Lanka in summer, he flew from Shanghai, and his wife flew from Oxford to meet there for a holiday, then separated again for their work. They loved it, did it several times. 

I think it's all about finding the right pace to achieve equilibrium. The joy lies in the details, and those nuances influence our life.