How To Work Together Without Wrecking Your Marriage
Tina and I have worked side-by-side for years. People often ask us, “How do you do it? I’d kill my spouse if I had to see them at the office AND at the dinner table.”
I get it. On paper, it can sound like the dream– sharing the goals, the vision, and the daily wins with your favorite person. But in reality, it’s a balancing act. On one hand, you’re a powerhouse team. On the other, every disagreement about a spreadsheet can bleed into your evening Netflix session, and an argument about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher can show up in the middle of a business meeting.
When you work together, the boundaries can blur or even disappear. Suddenly, it feels like you’re never off the clock. If you aren’t careful, your business will grow while your relationship slowly starves. And let’s be real: Nothing you create professionally matters if it’s built on the back of a failing relationship.
If you want to keep the “partner” in both business partner and life partner, you need a strategy. Here’s how we make it work.
Create a Work-Life Separation
You need a hard stop. Work ends at the door. If you work from home, work ends when the laptop shuts. You have to protect your personal space with the same ferocity you use to protect your profit margins.
Don’t let emails, deadlines, or office drama follow you into the bedroom. When you’re “home”, be home. If a work thought pops up at 8:00 PM, write it down and save it for 9:00 AM. Your spouse deserves to have the person they married, not the project manager they work with.
Respect the Role, Not Just the Person
You married a partner with their own unique skills, perspectives, and voice. When you’re at the office, you have to respect their expertise. This means trusting their decisions even when you might have done things differently.
Collaboration only works when both people feel valued equally. If you’re the CEO at work and you try to be the CEO at home, you’re headed for a power struggle that ultimately no one is going to win. Recognize that your spouse brings something to the table that you don’t. Honor that.
Radical Clarity in Communication
Stop assuming that your partner knows what you want or need just because you spent eight hours in the same room. Mind-reading is not a business strategy. You have to say it. Discuss it. Keep the lines open without judgment or blame. When a mistake happens– and it will– focus on the solution, not scoring points. In a “business as usual” relationship, it’s easy to start keeping a tally of who messed up. In a healthy marriage, you’re on the same team. If one of you loses, you both lose.
Shared Space is Not Intimacy
This is the big one. Just because you spend all day together doesn’t mean your relationship is healthy. There is a massive difference between proximity and connection.
You can sit three feet apart for ten hours a day and still not have that emotional connection in your relationship.. Date nights, deep conversations that have nothing to do with the business, and emotional check-ins aren’t “extra”, they are essential. You have to consciously transition from “coworker mode” back into “spouse mode.”
The Bottom Line
If your business becomes a success but your marriage becomes a casualty, you’ve lost the game. Your relationship is the foundation; the business is just the house built on top of it. If the foundation cracks, the whole thing eventually comes down.
Are you feeling the tension of the business relationship vs. your personal relationship? Is the “office version” of your spouse the only one you see lately? It might be time to bring in a third party to help you redraw those lines. Follow the link to book a time to chat. I’d love to hear more about how you and your partner work together and how we can make it work even better.
