Business Partners or Life Partners? - Working Mothers, Working Fathers

We’ve all heard the tired, “We’re just roommates now” to describe a marriage that has gone cold. Another version of this is the “it feels like we’re business partners not lovers.”

On the plus side, business partners seems to imply that you’re getting along, each pulling your weight, and pulling that weight in roughly the same direction.

I probably don’t need to explain the negative side.

I’m also not going to pretend to be something I’m not. I am not a marriage counselor.

So instead of try to give you some formula for keeping the spark alive or some recommendation to have a date night every week or two, which I’ve never managed to do with any consistency, I’m going to stick with an observation.

Even the best relationships take maintenance and work.

Caleb and I miss serving in Afghanistan where we saw each other for multiple meals a day and for several hours each evening without the interruption of chores or commutes or kids. We had long conversations. We planned full vacations curled up around one laptop. We went running Christmas Day around our base dressed in all black with Santa hats just to be funny. We played pranks.

We had fun.

Now, we work roughly the same hours, perhaps a few fewer, but with all the other trappings and obligations of suburban home-owning two-parent, two-career living, we can’t remember the last time we had a two hour conversation alone in our home. There are entire work weeks in which we see each other awake for fewer than a cumulative five hours.

We have built two serious careers and an enviable family complete with two picture-perfect, healthy munchkins. We have a lot to be proud of.

But we are always trying to find time for us to recapture—or at least get back closer to—the simpler, early times when connecting didn’t take effort.

Relationships evolve as time passes and circumstances change. At any given time, you’ll find yourself somewhere on the lover-business partner-roommate continuum that wasn’t where you started or where you will be a year from now. And being at any point on the continuum can be perfectly fine, even great, if both partners are consciously choosing or happy with that place.

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