How do you initiate conversations - early on - to figure out whether a guy will be a 50-50 partner?

Sheryl Sandberg wrote that the single most important career decision a woman can make is whether she has a life partner and who that partner is. I took this advice to heart. I had trouble putting it into practice, though: how do you figure out - early on - if the person you’re dating will be a supportive partner? In Lean In, Sheryl mentions a trick one of her friends used - she’d cancel a date at the last minute for work-related reasons and see how the guy reacted. But my need for assessment went deeper than that - I didn’t just want someone who would be cool with my unpredictable work schedule. I wanted a guy who would make career and life sacrifices of his own for my career, learn about the challenges women face at home and in the workplace, and work to fight those challenges.

What I tried:

I initiated the “hard conversations” about marriage, values, relationships, and careers early on. I didn’t sit my then-boyfriend Jason down for a long talk, though. Instead, a few weeks into dating, I suggested that I thought it’d be fun to try reading the same book together. His choice was Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, and mine was - of course - Lean In. Full disclosure: I never made it past the third chapter of Brian Greene’s book (oops!), but I made sure Jason got through Lean In in its entirety. Every day, I’d ask him what he’d learned and what surprised him. The book served as the basis for all kinds of conversations.

Here are a few of the conversations we ended up having:

· Managing dual career schedules: Figuring out when our next date would be was another opportunity to have conversations around managing dual careers, time-wise. For example, Jason has the hardest work ethic of anyone I’ve ever met - at the time, he worked every Sunday and, often times, Saturdays as well. When we started dating, Saturdays became date days (mostly) and Sundays became work days. As a tradeoff, we’d both (usually) get up fairly early in the morning - 7 or 8 a.m. - and get home fairly early during the week - 6 or 7 p.m. - and have breakfast and dinner together (nearly) every day.

· Kids and parenting: Eventually, we started conversations around how we would parent together (at a high level, of course, since we clearly don’t have kids and have no idea how well this will play out). I could tell he was excited about being a parent; for example, sometimes when we’d be hiking, he’d come up with a cool problem or trip (dismantling a computer and putting it back together, figuring out how far away the moon was based on our angle, going for a multi-day camping trip) that he couldn’t wait to try with our future kids (while assuring me that I could stay behind and get massages instead because I am definitely not a camping person). We also discussed whether each of us would ever consider being a stay-at-home parent, and he expressed enthusiastic about potentially being a stay-at-home father.

· Values: These talks led to broader conversations around our fundamental values - for example, Jason mentioned that one of the parts of parenthood he was most excited about was teaching his kids about coding and physics and taking them hiking. We talked about how close his parents lived to us (at the same, they lived in Manhattan) and how we wanted them to be involved in our kids’ lives. We discussed how we would afford the childcare we would need to support two careers in an expensive city and set financial goals as a couple. Also, we talked about the importance of getting outside and into nature. These conversations confirmed what I’d already suspected: that Jason and I had similar values - education, family, frugality, hard work, and a strong appreciation of the outdoors.

· Women in the workplace: About a year into our relationship, Jason was looking to hire someone to join his team at work. He emailed a few of his college friends to see if they’d be interested. I offered to send the job description to an all-women group I was a part of from college, in part because he’d previously remarked at how male-dominated his firm was. He declined, saying that he didn’t want to circumvent the recruiting process at the firm by sending the job posting over a huge, anonymous list-serv. I explained the list was for a small group of Harvard women and wouldn’t go beyond that, but he was still skeptical. Finally, I pointed out what was bothering me:

“Jason,” I said. “How many friends of yours did you email about the job?”

“Around five or so,” he replied.

“And how many of those friends were women?” I asked, gently.

“None. None of my female friends are quants or computer scientists,” he said.

I delicately suggested that even though he was an ardent supporter of women in the workplace, he was engaging in inadvertent gender bias. He was essentially giving his five male friends a leg up in the recruiting process (because he didn’t have quant/technical female friends), but wasn’t extending the same opportunity to women by actively seeking out qualified female applicants. I explained to him that this was how all-male workplaces started - people naturally refer their friends and if you’re a guy and all your friends are guys, well, it’s pretty likely that your office will soon be mostly (if not all) guys. Jason got it - we had a long talk about the incident afterwards - and I think it left him with a much better understanding of the career obstacles women face, some of which are ones that supportive, feminist men don’t even realize they are putting up.

· My own career: Because I work in entertainment/online video, I was always learning about cool jobs on the west coast. The first few times, I turned them down (mostly because they weren’t the right fit, and I was happy with my current job), but I also made it clear to Jason that I was turning them down, in part, because of him. These discussions led to conversations about our future and how we might handle an opportunity that I couldn’t turn down. When I found an amazing job opportunity at Facebook, just a year after we’d moved in together, the question wasn’t “should we make this work?”, it was “how can we make this work?” I was stressed about how much money it would cost: Flights back and forth! Two apartments! A car! He replied, “Even if you spend 100% or more of your salary, it’s an investment in your career. You should take it.” It was in that moment that I knew I’d found the right guy.

Did you initiate conversations early on with your SO about career and family? How did you do it?