Tips for Working with Your Significant Other
By Laurie Wheeler on 02/28/2011 | Read more from Laurie Wheeler
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Navigating your professional career can be challenging, but throw your significant other into the mix and it can can create a lot of drama and heartache. Here are a few hard-earned tips on how to keep your professional life at work and your love life at home.
Respect!
It sounds so easy and obvious, but it is really important to respect your significant other in their role as a professional and their role as your partner. Try to keep these two roles separate, and treat each other as you would treat any other co-worker. It can be hard for me to call my husband by name, since I rarely do outside of work, but he appreciates that I don’t call him “sweetie” in front of our co-workers.
Work is done at work, not at home.
Even if you work from home, there needs to be a separation between work time and off hours. It can be really easy to fall into the pattern of discussing work over dinner or over the weekend, but stop yourself. That causes work to bleed into your personal life. My husband and I do a “happy hour” during the week, where, at the end of the day we sit on our deck (we may or may not have a glass of wine, but it’s usually better with a glass) and catch each other up on our day. Once happy hour is over, we cannot bring work up again for the rest of the night.
Make sure there is a balance of power.
This can be extra challenging if one of you has a higher position than the other. In these situations, I recommended concentrating on maintaining a balance of power at home. I am technically my husbands boss at the office and I have had to assume that role to get the job done. Again, when it is done with respect, it goes pretty smoothly. At home, we insure that I don’t have the upper hand. We make personal decisions democratically, each having an equal say.
Maintain separate interests outside of work.
This is always important, but even more so when you work together. You need to have something to talk about that is not work-related. If all you do is work, and work together, that makes you a very boring couple with not much to say to each other. Your interests don’t have to be extremely exciting. It can be going to a yoga class, meeting a friend for coffee, or shopping for that perfect pair of shoes. Something inevitably happens that is interesting, or at least more interesting than work.
Besides being challenging, working together can also be a lot of fun and I think the effort it takes to make it work is well worth it. The goal is not to blur the lines. Keep work as work, and play as play.
“Office Space” photo by Andrei Tarvosky used under Creative Commons License
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Leave your questions and comments below.
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- Jessica LeRoy Interviewed by About.com on Working with Your Spouse- 5 Tips for Getting Over A Breakup
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Garry says: 08/31/2012 at 2:09 pm
Thanks! Great tips as I start to work with my partner!