Dads Who Are Equal Partners Aren’t Overachievers — They’re Doing Their Job

For women, the most important decision we make for our career might be who we decide to marry.

Today is my ninth wedding anniversary, which has sparked a little reflection, as these milestones tend to do. When I think about my marriage, I immediately feel grateful for my husband. He’s been a supportive partner who makes both parenting and my professional success easier.

But in the past nine years, his support hasn’t come as a surprise to me. What has surprised me is the realization that for women, the most important decision we make for our career might be who we decide to marry. And that as a professional woman, if you don’t have a supportive partner, you’re better off not getting married at all.

This is something Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first one of the world’s leading gender consultancies, points out in the Harvard Business Review. “Professionally ambitious women really only have two options when it comes to their personal partners — a super-supportive partner or no partner at all. Anything in between ends up being a morale- and career-sapping morass,” she writes.

In other words, if you’re a career-oriented woman, and especially if you’re a career-oriented woman with kids at home, a supportive spouse isn’t just a “nice-to-have” — it’s a must-have if you want to succeed professionally.

Not your grandmother’s marriage dynamics

Part of the reason for this all-or-nothing dynamic is that marriage today looks very different than it did in previous generations.

For one, millennials are more educated than prior generations. This means that we’re now in relationships where we have common life visions and are mapping our lives to accommodate dual-career aspirations. We also live during a time where the steep cost of living, which continues to outpace inflation, often necessitates two incomes. Accordingly, most kids today are raised in households where both parents work — with increasingly more women becoming breadwinners, which marks a significant shift from the past where it was more common for only the father to be employed.

But as the roles at home have changed, cultural expectations haven’t kept up.

Despite the fact that women are more educated than men, they’re still earning less, due in part to the motherhood penalty. While more women are working outside the home, they take on more unpaid work at home than men and are typically the sole keepers of the family calendar. And even as women are entering the workforce in greater numbers than previous generations and are climbing the career ladder, society also continues to frame mothers as the default parent.

With all of these pressures and penalties that disproportionately affect moms, it’s not enough for dads to simply chip in when they can. Instead, it requires sustained commitment, constant monitoring, and frequent recalibrating to enable both partners to thrive at work and at home. A mother’s career depends on it.

As marriage has evolved, partnerships must too

The mutually supportive relationship I have with my husband is not all sunshine and rainbows. It has taken work. Getting to the point we are now has taken countless conversations and a lot of mistakes.

It still does, even nine years in.

We’ve been very intentional with how we divide the workload of parenting and support one another’s professional success. We’re both ambitious high-achievers in our careers, but we’re also ambitious high-achievers in raising great kids. We want to be present for our children. We know we can’t both do full-on parenting work without someone’s career suffering.

So we take turns.

I typically take mornings, while my husband takes afternoons. He handles dentist appointments, while I’m the point-person for the pediatrician. We have a house rule that only one of us can travel for work at a time. And then sometimes we’re taking even more of a long view, and are having conversations where we have to establish that for the next three weeks — or the next three years — one person’s career takes precedence. For example, while my husband was in the Navy, I held down the house. And now, as I’m immersed in start-up life as the co-founder of Motherly, he’s doing that for me.

Even with these plans in place, we frequently need to do a mental reset regarding each of our roles. One of us will notice that someone is taking on disproportionately more, and we’ll rebalance. We’re constantly rebalancing the workload.

We need to shift our expectations of our partners — and ourselves

Although my anniversary has prompted feelings of gratitude for my husband, I want to be careful not to gush. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful. But I don’t want to be over-the-top in my appreciation for him doing what all partners should be expected to do. I don’t want to hold him to the standard of men who do not rise to the challenge.

In our society, we tend to expect so much of women and so little of men. There’s a low threshold for what it takes for a man to be considered a ‘good father’ and an equally low threshold for what it takes for a woman to be labeled as a ‘bad mom’.

As women, we have to demand more for ourselves, but we also have to demand a lot more from our spouses. There are times that by agreeing to take on the mental load of motherhood, we disempower our husbands along the way, and make it harder for them to be a true partner.

I know that’s the case for me. There are moments when I know I’m an active participant in adding to my mental load, and I have to lift my own head up, and we have to work together to reset. Sometimes that means being okay with letting him handle the dentist, even if it means I feel a little out of the loop or worry that he needs a reminder.

But I know that this ongoing work and this constant recalibrating are essential not only to our marriage but also to our success professionally.

To take ourselves seriously, women have to start expecting more from our partners.