3 Ways to Balance Your Career with Love

Episode 389 | Author: Emilie Aries

Happy Valentine's Day!

We’re’s talking about love and ambition today, bosses. Do you put career before love? Relationships before work? It’s time we had this conversation because let’s be frank: the data isn't great when it comes to how women, specifically heterosexual women, are navigating career and love.

The latest research compiled by Stephanie O'Connell Rodriguez in her Too Ambitious bulletin finds that women who make more money than their husbands in heterosexual marriages, are up to three times more likely to be cheated on. In fact, a 2019 study by ScienceDaily shows that men feel stressed when the women partners in their marriages make more than 40% of the household income. 

Men who have high-achieving and high-earning women should feel rightfully delighted by their success. Instead, data from the APA Journal and Personality and Social Psychology finds that men feel bad when their wives win in almost any arena personally or professionally. 

This applies to all generations across the spectrum. According to an August 2020 report by Too Ambitious, millennial mothers are nearly three times more likely than millennial fathers to report being unable to work due to a school or childcare closure during the pandemic, relying the fact that millennial women in heterosexual relationships are still shouldering the majority of childcare and housework duties, as compared to their millennial counter male counterparts.

So what is an ambitious woman to do?

Marriage isn’t the end goal

First, let's remember that marriage is not necessarily the goal. Intimate relationships, while important, are not the only source of long-term meaningful social connection. Strong relationships are important, but that doesn't mean one strong relationship has to be the main source to feel connected, loved, and a sense of belonging in your world. 

The section “Partners and Professional Success”  from my book, Bossed Up: A Grown Woman's Guide to Getting Your Shit Together explains this:

“First, it's significant to note that people in high quality relationships have higher levels of happiness and health than those who are in the wrong relationship, which can be incredibly destructive to one's health. And for those who do find themselves in a relationship gone south, it's more socially acceptable than ever for women to GTFO or get the f*ck out being single time and again is found to be better for your health and happiness by far than being in a ‘low quality’ relationship.”

Let’s normalize ambitious women & expect more from men 

It’s critically important that all of us do our part to normalize ambitious women and frankly, expect more from men. Research shows that when men are present, heterosexual women actually downplay their own ambition because they know it's costly to them.

 In another snippet from Bossed Up, here's what I write: 

“In a recent business school study, for instance, researchers found that single women reported lower levels of career ambition, lower desired pay, lower tolerance for work travel when they were required to share their goals publicly among their peers. When women knew that their responses would only be seen by a career counselor, single women and attached women answered similarly with higher self-reported ambitions. Researchers concluded that part of what caused the single women to aim lower when sharing their goals with their classmates was the fear of reducing their appeal in the quote ‘marriage marketplace’.”

We, as ambitious women, cannot be complicit in building our own gilded cage. I would rather be unabashedly ambitious and alone, than feel like I have to mask my true self for the sake of being in a marriage in which I cannot even be my true self.

If you’re in the dating arena dampening down your own ambitions, then you’re potentially attracting someone who's attracted to that reduced ambition form of you. Remember that you can control how you’re presenting yourself to prospective romantic partners to begin with.

It’s OK to be ambitious about love!

Give yourself permission to be ambitious about love. It's important for us to normalize women's ambition, and it’s okay to take proactive measures to reach your professional and romantic goals. 

One last snippet from my book in which I talk about the in-person training programs that we've hosted at Bossed Up, and how many women who have very clear goals in their professional lives struggle. On the personal front I write: 

“ I'm struck by how many of our ambitious attendees –who are happy to rattle off the audacious goals they have for their careers–are sheepish when it comes to articulating what they want out of love. It's like we've been told not to ask for what we really want out of our relationships, or it's as if saying it out loud might jinx our chances, or maybe just maybe so many of us carry with us the wounds we've suffered from past experiences and know only what we don't want in our lives and lose sight of what we would love in our love lives. Either way. At the end of the day, it's hard to be goal oriented in this arena because it's not all on us, right? We can't predict what someone else is gonna do or want, or how he or she might evolve or what might change. But hold up–isn't that true about all of our other goals, too? Our careers? Our health? See, those excuses don't hold up for me anymore. I think it's time for us to give ourselves permission to explore and articulate what we really want out of our love lives, especially in terms of how they relate to our professional ambitions.”

The bottom line is that we need to give ourselves (as ambitious) women permission to actively pursue the kind of relationships that we want in our lives, and to actively pivot away from relationships that aren't meeting those expectations. 

This is a conversation that we all need to be having - men among men, especially. Women need to be talking about this, too.  I’m no expert, and I’m always cautious to speak humbly about all things relationships - but it’s part of how I approach my own marriage. If I am humble about the strength of my own relationship, it prevents me from taking it for granted.

How do you keep a healthy balance between your love life and your ambitions? Is it easier said than done these days or is this healthy balance possible? I’d love to hear from you! Let’s keep the conversation going in our Linkedin group!

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