Partners and colleagues at once: how to work with your partner and stay a couple

It is nearly eleven at night. The children are asleep, the dishes are done, and he finally sits down on the sofa, phone in hand, to see what his friends are up to. She comes out of the bathroom and, before she even sits down next to him, asks: “Did you send Kovač the quote? He said he needs it by tomorrow.”

She has said nothing unkind. The question is reasonable, the client matters, the deadline really is tomorrow. Yet he feels his chest tighten. Not because he forgot the quote. But because this moment on the sofa is the last part of the day that belonged only to the two of them — and the business has just moved into it.

This is what everyday life looks like for couples who are also colleagues. A shared company, the same practice, a farm, a hair salon, an architecture studio, a restaurant, or simply the same team in a larger organisation. Love and work, which for most people are separated by miles and hours, are woven into a single thread for them. In this post I would like to look at what happens in such a relationship from a systemic point of view, why the line between “us” and “the business” matters so much, and how a couple can draw it without giving up what working together gives them.

Two systems in one kitchen

In family therapy we see the family as a system: a whole in which everyone has a role, in which there are subsystems (the couple, the parents, the children, the siblings) and boundaries between them. The psychiatrist Salvador Minuchin wrote that a healthy family is one in which the boundaries between subsystems are clear — not rigid, not blurred, but distinct enough for everyone to know where they stand.

A workplace is a system too. It has a hierarchy, roles, unwritten rules, alliances and tensions. When a couple works together, these two systems overlap. The same two people are partners, lovers and perhaps parents in one system, and in the other a managing director and a head of sales, co-owners, or colleagues on the same shift. In the late 1980s the American authors Frank and Sharan Barnett coined the word copreneurs for couples who run a business together. The word stuck because it captured something essential: these people share not only a bed and the bills, but also risk, decisions and responsibility.

The overlap in itself is not the problem. The problem begins when neither of you knows which of the two systems you are in at a given moment. When the question about the quote on the sofa is asked by a colleague, but he hears it from a partner who does not trust him. Or the other way round: when a remark made in a meeting was meant as business, but the other person hears it as part of yesterday’s argument.

Five to one: why the working day drains the reserves

John Gottman and his colleagues spent decades observing couples as they discussed topics on which they disagreed. One of the best-known findings from this research is a ratio: in couples who stayed together and were satisfied, there were roughly five positive exchanges for every negative one during such a conversation — a smile, agreement, a joke, a gentle touch, as against criticism, ignoring or eye-rolling. In couples who later separated, the ratio was considerably worse.

For couples who work together, this finding is especially telling. Work by its very nature calls for many exchanges that are not pleasant: “This isn’t good.” “Why haven’t you done that yet?” “No, the price has to be higher.” At work such words are necessary and nobody takes them personally — at least not when a colleague says them. But when they come from the person you lie next to in bed at night, the body cannot file them under “business”. They pile up in the same account as everything else.

A couple who work together therefore has a double task. Not only must they say what needs saying at work, they must also make sure that the kind, warm, playful moments do not vanish from the relationship — because the working day will not bring them on its own. For couples who each have their own job, the evening often begins with “How was your day?”. A couple who have been together all day do not have that question. They know how it was. And precisely for that reason they can forget that they have not seen each other as partners for a single minute.

A hierarchy that doesn’t exist at home

In most businesses someone is above someone else. Even when both are owners, one usually runs the finances and the other the clients; one has the final say on some things, the other on others. At home, though — at least in the ideal most modern couples aim for — the partners are equals.

When one of these logics spills into the other, things start to creak. If she is the managing director and he runs production, will she also be the one who decides where they go on holiday? If he brings in most of the income, does he also get more say in how the children are raised? Few people would answer “yes”, but in everyday life these things are not settled by a vote. They are settled by small habits.

In the 1990s the researcher Kathy Marshack compared couples who run a business together with couples in which each partner pursues their own career. She found something that surprised many: copreneurial couples often kept a more traditional division of roles at home and in the business — more of the housework stayed with the woman, more of the leadership power with the man. The idea that a shared business automatically brings equality, then, does not confirm itself. If a couple does not talk about it, roles settle along old tracks, often the ones both partners saw in their own parents.

That is why, in my work with couples, I always ask: which of you decides what — in the business and at home? Has anyone ever said it out loud? Often it turns out that nobody has. And that each of you carries a map in your head that only partly matches the other’s.

Triangles: when a third party enters the relationship

Murray Bowen noticed that two people between whom tension rises almost always turn to a third. The tension is then spread across three points and becomes more bearable — but it also stays unresolved. We call this triangulation, and in couples who work together it takes many forms.

• An employee as an ally. A colleague who finds the boss exasperating goes to complain to his wife, because “she understands”. The wife finds herself in the role of go-between and comforter, while the husband senses that something is happening behind his back that shuts him out.
• The business as the third. Sometimes the third party is not a person at all, but the business itself. The couple does not argue about feeling neglected, but about stock, schedules and strategy. Business topics become a safe substitute for the ones that would feel too vulnerable.
• Children in the business. When adult children start working in the family business, they may side with one parent — and old family alliances put on business clothes.

Not every third party is a problem. A business partner who tells both of you the truth can be a great source of stability. The trouble comes when the third becomes the place where you put what the two of you ought to be saying to each other.

How not to take work to bed

Psychologists who study the boundaries between work and private life distinguish two styles. Some people segment work and home: the work phone stays at the office, and they don’t talk about work at home. Others integrate them: they answer emails over dinner, get an idea for a project in the shower, and that suits them fine. Neither style is better in itself. Trouble arises when partners have different styles — and nobody says so.

As far back as the late 1980s, the researcher Rena Repetti followed air traffic controllers and their families. After days with a heavy workload they withdrew more at home — they were quieter and less talkative — and the withdrawal was more pronounced when their partners offered more support. Withdrawal, in other words, was a way of recovering, and the partner at home was the one who made it possible. In couples who each have their own job, one partner often acts as a buffer: when one has a bad day, the other may have had a good one and can catch them.

In couples who work together, there is no such buffer. A bad day at the business is a bad day for both. A lost client, a payment problem, a mistake in a delivery — both bring all of it home at the same time. If they then talk at home only about how to fix the problem, the business spreads across the whole evening. I have written more about how stress from a company spills into the family in A crisis at work and at home: the stress you carry through the door.

So one of the first things a couple can do is agree on where and when the business ends. That does not mean you can never talk about work at home. It means both of you have the right to say: “Not now. Tomorrow at nine.” And that the other hears it as a boundary, not a rejection.

This is what a conversation can sound like when there is no boundary yet (composed, not a real person):

“Did you send Kovač the quote?”
“Not now, please.”
“I just want to know. The deadline’s tomorrow.”
“I know it’s tomorrow. I’ve known all day it’s tomorrow.”
“Why are you being like this? I only asked.”
Silence. “Because I wanted to be just your husband for five minutes. Not your head of sales.”
She sits down. “I didn’t know that’s how I sound to you.”

Everything is in this short scene: she asked as a colleague, he answered as a partner. Neither of them was in the wrong. All that was missing was an agreement telling both of them which role applies at eleven at night on the sofa.

Exercise: a boundary in five steps

You can do this exercise together this week. Set aside half an hour at a time when neither of you is tired and nothing at work is on fire.

1. Each of you writes down three moments from the past month when work broke into private time in a way that didn’t sit right with you. Be specific: where, when, what was said.
2. Read what you wrote to each other without defending yourselves. The other simply says: “I hear that at that moment you felt …” Explanations and apologies come later, if at all.
3. Choose one place and one time without the business. For example the bedroom and dinner, or Sunday morning. Small is better than big — a boundary you can keep is worth more than an ambitious one that collapses in three days.
4. Agree on an exit sentence. For example: “That’s for tomorrow at nine.” When one of you says it, the other respects it, and the topic gets its own slot.
5. Check in two weeks later. What worked and what didn’t? Where is the boundary too loose, and where perhaps too rigid? A boundary is not a rule carved in stone but an agreement you adjust together.

If you want to take the exercise further, you can use the questions in the Questions for a couple’s conversation tool — they open up topics beyond everyday logistics.

When things go badly — in the business or in the relationship

For couples who work together, every crisis carries double weight. If the business goes through a bad year, it is not only the income that suffers, but the relationship too, because the relationship is the same place where decisions about redundancies, loans or closing down are made. And if the relationship goes through a crisis, it shows in the business: in meetings, in how employees are treated, in decisions made out of resentment rather than reflection.

It is hardest when a couple is considering separation. Then they are deciding not only whether they will go on living together, but also what will happen to the business, to their jobs, sometimes to everything they own. This post is not legal advice and I won’t go into legal details. What I can say is that couples who set down and arranged ownership, roles and how to leave the business in good times, with the help of a lawyer or accountant, are as a rule in a much easier position in bad times. Such an agreement is not a sign of mistrust. It is a sign that you take seriously both systems you live in.

Psychologically, though, something else matters at such moments: that the partners separate which part of the tension comes from the business and which from the relationship. It helps if each of you can stand on your own feet — think your own thoughts, feel your own feelings, make your own decisions — and still stay in contact with the other. In family therapy we call this differentiation, and I have written about it in Differentiation: how to stay yourself and stay in the relationship. A couple who work together are often fused on several levels at once, which makes this capacity all the more important for them.

When arguments at work and at home become intertwined, it also helps to have a few basic rules for arguing — not as a recipe, but as a fence that stops a discussion about a supplier turning into a reckoning with everything that has ever gone wrong. I have gathered some of them in How to argue with your partner: rules that actually work.

When working together is good for the relationship

So far I have written mostly about where things can creak. But it is only fair to show the other side too, otherwise this post would sound as if working with your partner were nothing but a risk. It isn’t.

Many couples who work together say that a shared project gives them a sense of meaning they didn’t have before. Your partner understands why you are tired, because they were there. You don’t have to explain who is who and why the meeting was so draining. Success is shared, and so is failure — which can be a great support. Some couples who integrate work and home are content precisely because the integration suits them; strict separation would take away something they value. I describe similar stories in Creative couples: when you are both artists, where creating together can bring partners closer just as much as it can pull them apart.

It also matters that not every tension in such a couple is a result of working together. Sometimes the business simply reveals something that was already in the relationship — an old pattern in which one leads and the other follows, or a resentment nobody ever voiced. If the couple each went to work for someone else, the pattern would find another route. And the reverse is true as well: a boundary can be too rigid. A couple who never mention the business at home may lose a part of themselves that matters to them. The aim is not the strictest possible separation, but a separation you both choose.

If in your relationship the business feels like a third partner that always gets the most attention, you may also want to read The entrepreneur and the relationship: when all the energy goes into the company. And if you are a couple with two separate careers who have to negotiate whose comes first, Two careers, one home: whose job really counts for more is the better fit.

How couples therapy can help

In couples therapy, which I practise under supervision along the lines of relational family therapy, conversations with couples who work together often begin with the business — and then fairly quickly arrive at what lies beneath it. Which of you grew up with parents who shared their work, and what did you see back then? Which of you feels at work like a child who isn’t taken seriously? Which of you carries more worry than you have ever put into words?

Therapy is not a place for drawing up a business plan or settling an ownership dispute. It is a place where each of you can say what it is like to be in both roles at once, and where the other can hear it without needing to defend themselves straight away. When that happens, business conversations often become easier too — because they no longer carry a weight that isn’t theirs. Understanding boundaries helps here: not as walls, but as agreements that tell each person where they stand.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work in English. If you feel that your relationship has turned mainly into a working arrangement, that is a good reason to talk about it — on your own or as a couple.

What to remember

• A couple who work together live in two systems at once — the couple and the business — and need to know which one they are in at any moment.
• Work brings many necessary critical exchanges; to keep the relationship warm, it also needs feeding with kind moments that the working day won’t bring on its own.
• The hierarchy of the business easily spills into the home; it helps to say out loud who decides what — at work and at home.
• Watch out for triangles: employees, children or the business itself can become the place where you put what you ought to say to each other.
• The line between work and home is not a rule but an agreement you set and adjust together.