Article by Topics 50-50 marriage The Mental Load Relationship Advice Dating Advice
Hi! I’m Anusha, and I’m so glad you’re here!
I got engaged in April 2017 while living with my now-husband, Jason. Less than a month later, I did something I never expected: I accepted a promising job at Facebook 3,000 miles away and moved across the country to the suburbs of San Francisco, while Jason stayed on the East Coast. Before Facebook, I’d worked all over the entertainment industry, specifically around new business models in online video. I graduated from Harvard College and later added an MBA from Harvard Business School.
We got married in May 2018 and after almost 2 years of long distance, I moved back to the East Coast at the beginning of 2019. Ending the long distance phase of our marriage has been awesome (highly recommend living with your spouse!) but the challenges of managing two careers have persisted.
Why I’m writing this blog:
As I mentioned in my introduction, the book Lean In profoundly influenced how I think about my life - both my career and love life. I like to tell people that I “came of age” professionally right around the time the book came out - I was exactly one year into my MBA program at Harvard. I devoured the slew of articles and books that followed. There was so much fascinating data, and two general observations in particular stood out to me:
1) My career would be greatly impacted by who I chose to marry.
2) Building a 50-50 partnership with that person would be crucial for my career success.
While many books and articles spelled out how women could date intentionally to find a partner, I didn’t see advice on how to figure out (1) whether a guy would be supportive of my career or (2) once I found a guy, how we could both be intentional about creating a 50-50 partnership. In the early days of dating Jason, I tried a bunch of tactics to answer the first question. Once I realized Jason was exactly the kind of supportive partner I wanted, I solicited his help in figuring out how to build an equal partnership based on all the data available, from the very start of our relationship. A quantitative financial modeler, Jason is even more data-driven than I am, and he eagerly took up the challenge. This blog details the strategies we’ve come up with to answer the second question and are trying out in real-time. A caveat: this blog is about the journey! I’m not the expert - we’ve barely been married two years, and we don’t have kids (yet). I don’t have the answers, but I have lots of questions - this is where I try to figure them out.
“What is intentional dating?”
It sounds more formal than it is in reality! For me, it means taking a measured and deliberate approach to dating, which begins by identifying key values and qualities you are looking for in a life partner. Taking time to make a list of values and qualities allowed me to think carefully about what I wanted from a partner before I actually met him. Whenever I met a guy, I'd be careful to balance my emotions in order to determine - early on - whether he shared my values before becoming seriously involved with him. By specific values and qualities, I don’t mean whether he’s a tall brunette or makes a fantastic coq au vin (although, as to the coq au vin, I can’t say I’d have any complaints!); I mean qualities along the lines of: great potential parent, flexibility, loyalty, patience, emotional and financial stability, and, of course, whether he’d support his partner’s career wholly. For more on the subject, I can’t recommend the book First Comes Marriage by Reva Seth highly enough.