Matt Rivers became an entrepreneur at age 17 when his favorite surf shop went out of business and he used his dishwashing money to buy it. “At first there was only one T-shirt rack and one shorts rack and when I sold a T-shirt I bought two more.” Today his Cape Cod-based business has one of the most recognized names in east coast surfing thanks to his sponsorship of the Pump House surf team. And of course, Rivers surfs every day.
It used to be that people started out in a large company, and after ten or fifteen years of little fulfillment, they tried entrepreneurship as a way to get out of a bad spot. Today many young people recognize right off the bat that corporate life will not be fulfilling, and according to the Entrepreneur's Organization, the most common age for starting a business has shifted from 35-45 to under 34.
A new view of entrepreneurship has swept through a generation that has seen their parents' loyalty rewarded with layoffs and their parents' pensions destroyed with impunity. The goals and values of today's younger workers make entrepreneurship look more appealing than ever as the bad rap of the twentieth century fades. Consider these comparisons:
Twentieth century: The hours of an entrepreneur are insane and you live at your office.
Millennial: Entrepreneurship provides flexibility necessary for a balanced life. Harris Interactive reports that men in their 20s and early 30s value making time for their family more than they value landing a powerful job. For women, the numbers seeking a career with flexibility are even higher.
Twentieth century: Entrepreneurs need a trust fund or an appetite for living on the edge.
Millennial: Working for yourself is not that risky. Dun & Bradstreet estimate that 76% of new businesses survive more than two years, which is hardly high-risk odds. Andrew Zacharakis, professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, says, “You can make a nice living,” and besides, “there is no longer such thing as a stable, corporate job.”
Twentieth century: Entrepreneurs are self-aggrandizing. (Think: Colonel Sanders on all the buckets.)
Millennial: Starting a business provides a way to give back to the community. Ask Nate Wolfson, founder of Thrive Networks, what makes him most excited about this IT consulting firm and he says, “We're a two-time winner of the fifty best places to work in Boston.” Ask Rivers how many employees he has grown to and he says, “It's not like that. We're a family here. Each year the store grows, the surf team grows.”
Most of you under the age of 34 have contemplated, at one point or another, the idea of starting your own business. Rich Farrell, founder and CEO of Boston-based technology company FullArmor, says it's easier if you do it earlier. He started his business right out of school, when his parents' basement seemed like reasonable living quarters. “I couldn't do that now. My wife wouldn't live in the basement and my parents wouldn't live with my two-year old 24/7. If I were starting today I'd have to raise money from angels or VCs.”
Do you wonder if you have the entrepreneurial chops to forward? Andrew Zacharakis, professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, cites three traits that make successful entrepreneurs:
1. Strong knowledge base in the arena you want to enter. Rivers, for example, grew up working at the very store he purchased. On top of that, as an expert surfer he's able to build a surf team that garners national attention for the store.
2. An extensive network both inside and outside of your field. A strong network can give you leads to customers, suppliers, and partners. Networking is something you need to feel comfortable doing every day. Don't underestimate the value of a surf team, but don't overestimate the value of knowledge you cannot leverage at a cocktail party.
3. Commitment. As in Ramen noodles every night. Zacharakis' warns, “you need to be prepared for some lean years during which you draw little or no salary.” Wolfson adds, “When you're an entrepreneur you're never not working. You're always trying to think about what you can do next. I drive my fiancé crazy because I talk about it nonstop.”
Do you think you have what it takes? Not so fast. The first step, for everyone, is finding your passion. According to Zacharakis, “Passion is something you have to look for every day of your life. It’s likely to change over time, but finding your passion is good practice.” It’s the first step to finding a balanced life, and the first step on the path to a committed career.
Kristen Ryan graduated a year ago and accepted a position in public relations. After two months on the job, she started having anxiety attacks, and after six months on the job, anxiety attacks were almost daily. Ryan says the anxiety was from the “pressures of life changes: Moving away from family, staring new job, transitioning to a completely different life from school to work. And,” she says, “I broke up with my long-time boyfriend.”
The most common age to experience depression for the first time is in one's twenties. Typical triggers are those Ryan cited, resulting from the stress of entering the workforce. Recently, these triggers have been exacerbated, as the new generation of workers takes for granted that challenging and rewarding work will come their way. This is a generation whose parents oversaw each moment of their schedule to ensure proper mentoring and enrichment. So a job standing at the office copier is a big comedown that many new workers are not prepared to accept. For those who have no choice, the result can be depression.
Depression is serious: Fifteen percent of clinically depressed people die by suicide. The illness is more common in women than men, and according to the Canadian Mental Health Association, one in five working women has suffered from depression or anxiety.
The good news is that depression is very treatable, so getting help is important. Dr. Stuart Koman, president of the mental health clinic Walden Behavioral Care, says there is a preponderance of scientific evidence to show that a combination of medicine and talk therapy can solve most cases of depression.
Ryan found that sessions with a social worker helped her to get back on track. But not everyone recovers so quickly. Like Ryan, Rachael Chaump joined a public relations firm last year, and after a few months, she realized that she had a severe problem. She says, “I was crying at my desk every day for no reason. And finally I called my dad and told him I hate my life and I can't go on like this.” Chaump ended up on temporary disability in a treatment program that included drug therapy to treat what was a chemical imbalance.
Both women had to move carefully in order to keep the jobs they had. Ryan took meditation classes and then, when she had an anxiety attack she “went to a secluded place at work to meditate.” She also took long walks outside in the middle of the workday. Chaump was not able to hide her depression as well, but she says that even with all her crying, “People just got used to it. As long as I kept answering the phone no one said anything to me.”
If you think you're depressed, you need to do two things: Figure out how to keep your job, and figure out how to get help. According to Jonathan Alpert, associate director of the Depression Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital, “One of the most difficult calls is to recognize depression in oneself. This is true even for people in mental health fields. Often the first step is getting feedback from someone else.”
Enter the employee assistance program — EAP — that helps workers confidentially identify mental illness in themselves. Denise Curran is a therapist at ComPsych, an employee assistance program serving six thousand organizations. She describes her role as sort of a referral service. Curran, like most EAP therapists, can give you advice over the phone or online as to whether you seem depressed, and who you can go to, locally, to get help.
The EAP process is completely confidential, but crying at your desk is another story. Chaump's company, FCF Schmidt Public Relations, was incredibly supportive and gave her paid leave even though that is not the company policy, per se. Other companies are not likely to be so gracious, so be careful. A good resource is the book Working in the Dark: Keeping your job while dealing with depression. Author Beth Gulas, a specialist in corporate critical intervention, says the book can help you determine if it's a safe environment to tell your boss about your depression. The book also gives advice on how to keep working through depression if you have to (example: set fifteen-minute goals for yourself.)
Before you curse the fact that you have to show up for work every day, consider that work might be a godsend for someone who is depressed. According to Gulas, “One of the typical symptoms of depression is choosing to be alone. But it is likely that depression will be exacerbated if you stay at home.”
In response to my musings about what it means to be a blogger who is just a blogger, Alexandra Levit sent me an article about bloggers who support themselves blogging. I read it twice. Then I started checking out all the blogs, trying to uncover the secret of the million-dollar blog.
Here is what I uncovered: Heather B (who is truly a wonderful writer) is cited in the article as “bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably.” But it turns out that she and her husband recently participated in a study where they get injected with whooping cough so that they can get $50 and a free tetnaus shot.
I know that everyone has a different idea of living comfortably. But I happen to know the guy who wrote the article for Business 2.0 — he’s my old editor. And I’m certain that he would not be comfortable in the whooping cough study.
This reminds me of something I hate: Articles about women that focus on the dual acheivment of doing well at work and with kids. We never hear from the kids. We never see the inner workings of the household. What does it mean to do a great job with kids? It’s all relative. All self-reported. It’s all BS.
In fact, I did a followup on one of these stories. I looked up an article from Working Mother from a few years back — one of those articles about “How I successfully balance home and work.” I called the woman to find out how things are going with her business and her three school-age sons. I interviewed her and her teenage son.
I was appalled at how little time she spent with the son. And then he said he’d never want to be like his dad because his dad (Fortune 500 COO) was always at work. I couldn’t even bring myself to write about the family using their names because it was so bad. And the woman continues to believe that she’s doing a great job balancing work and family.
I put these topics in the same category: Reports about bloggers who live comfortably and women who do a good job at both work and home. It’s all subjective and relative and hearsay. Useless information.
Yep, it’s true. This week TIME Magazine quotes me, tells tidbits of my life, and pretty much makes it sound like my job is blogging.
So next time someone asks me that all-important question, “What do you do?” I’m thinking of saying, “I’m a blogger.”
Right now, when someone asks me what I do, the conversation goes like this:
“I’m a career columnist.”
“Oh. Where is your column?”
“I write for the Boston Globe, and my syndicated column has appeared in about 100 publications.”
“Oh.”
That’s it. No fireworks. Maybe a nod. And then I ask the person what he or she does.
But if someone asked me what I do and I said, “I'm a blogger,” we’d talk about it. They’d remember me. And maybe they’d check out my blog. To most people, being a blogger for a profession is like being an astronaut: Shockingly cool.
But I’m starting to think that no one really is a blogger. In my quest to understand the blogsphere, I have easily spent 100 hours combing though Technorati to understand the ranking system. (I have a spreadsheet full of stats on all career-related blogs like I am playing fantasy baseball or something.) I have a good understanding of who the top bloggers are, and let me tell you, they are not blogging for a living. They are using their blog as a tool.
For example, Guy Kawasaki’s blog is part of his venture capitalist brand: He is in the know and you need to know who he knows to be in the know. Curt Rosengren’s blog, is a platform to launch a book career, speaking career, one of those multi-pronged adventures in passion that he promotes through his writing. Seth Godin’s blog, fuels his book sales which fuel his consulting business.
Let’s look outside the work world, though. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who writes DailyKos is not a blogger per se, he’s a political pundit, and maybe a political fundraiser, or political gate-breaker. But you can’t just be a blogger and get all that attention. Cory, at BoingBoing, quit his day job to blog. Maybe is the closest thing we have to blogger, only blogger. But really, he is a cultural critic. Maybe a community organizer. Or, you could argue, blogging gatekeeper, since it’s hard to hit blog paydirt without getting a link from someone like BoingBoing. (HintHint)
But I don’t care that blogging is an amorphous job. I want to call myself a blogger because I want to see what happens when I do that. The way you answer the question, What do you do? tells the world how you see yourself and what’s important to you. And the world responds differently, depending on what you project. Maybe I’ll think of myself or my career in a fresh light. At least I will get to talk to people about blogging, which is what is at the front of my mind right now.
But one thing is for sure: My syndicator will tell me this is not a good idea. He is adamant that my blog is an offshoot of my print columns and not the other way around. I am not so sure. But, as always, it comes down to this: I get paid for the columns, not for my blog. So I’d be hard-pressed to talk about my blog if the question were not “What do you do?” but, “How do you keep a roof over your head?”
Now that there is a baby boy in the Japanese royal family of little girls, the movement to allow a girl become queen will end.
It’s a good time to tell the story of Crown Princess Masako, wife of the Crown Prince Naruhito, who struggled unsuccessfully to have this male heir. (Her sister-in-law delivered the baby boy today.)
Masako is Harvard educated and had a successful career as a diplomat before marrying the man-who-would-be-king. She thought she’d buck tradition and continue to be involved in aspects of her career even after she got married. However strict government oversight of Japan’s royal family made that impossible.
Masako capitulated: Abandoned her career, had a daughter, and then a nervous breakdown. She is a reminder that while women struggle with the wide range of choices we have, without the opportunity to craft our own lives, most of us also would have nervous breakdowns.
Every time I read something about the Japanese royal family I get sad about Masako. In an attempt to find something to do with her intellect that would be acceptable to the powerful organization that manages the royal family, Masako translated Japanese poetry for children into English. Here is one of the poems:
Zebra
In a cage
Of his
Own making
For those of you about to start another year at school, here’s a list of things to keep in mind: Twenty things to do in college to set yourself up for a great job when you graduate.
1. Get out of the library.
“You can have a degree and a huge GPA and not be ready for the workplace. A student should plan that college is four years of experience rather than 120 credits,” says William Coplin, professor at Syracuse University and author of the book, 10 Things Employers Want You to Learn in College. Many people recommend not hiring someone with a 4.0 because that student probably has little experience beyond schoolwork.
2. Start a business in your dorm room.
It’s relatively easy, and Google and Yahoo are dying to buy your business early, when it’s cheap. Besides, running a company in your room is better than washing dishes in the cafeteria. Note to those who play poker online until 4am: Gambling isn’t a business. It’s an addiction.
3. Don’t take on debt that is too limiting.
This is not a reference to online gambling, although it could be. This is about choosing a state school over a pricey private school. If that’s still too tough financially, then consider starting at a community college or look into online degrees vs traditional ones. Almost everyone agrees you can get a great education at an inexpensive school. So in many cases the debt from a private school is more career-limiting than the lack of brand name on your diploma.
4. Get involved on campus.
When it comes to career success, emotional intelligence — social skills to read and lead others —get you farther than knowledge or job competence, according to Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School. Julie Albert, a junior at Brandeis University, is the director of her a-cappella group and head of orientation this year. She hones her leadership skills outside the classroom, which is exactly the place to do it.
5. Avoid grad school in the humanities.
Survival rates in this field are very close to survival rates on the Titanic. One in five English PhD’s find stable university jobs, and the degree won’t help outside the university: “Schooling only gives you the capacity to stand behind a cash register,” says Thomas Benton, a columnist at the Chronicle of Higher Education (who has a degree in American Civilization from Harvard and a tenured teaching job.)
6. Skip the law-school track.
Lawyers are the most depressed of all professionals. Stress in itself does not make a job bad, says Alan Krueger, economist at Princeton University. Not having control over one’s work does make a bad job, though, and lawyers are always acting on behalf of someone else. Suicide is the leading cause of premature death among lawyers. (Evan Shaeffer has a great post on this topic.)
7. Play a sport in college.
People who play sports earn more money than couch potatoes, and women executives who played sports attribute much of their career success to their athletic experience, says Jennifer Cripsen, of Sweet Briar College. You don’t need to be great at sports, you just need to be part of a team.
8. Separate your expectations from those of your parents.
“Otherwise you wake up and realize you’re not living your own life,” says Alexandra Robbins, author of the popular new book The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. (Note to parents: If you cringe as you read this list then you need to read this book.)
9. Try new things that you’re not good at.
“Ditch the superstar mentality that if you don’t reach the top, president, A+, editor in chief, then the efforts were worthless. It’s important to learn to enjoy things without getting recognition,” says Robbins.
10. Define success for yourself.
“Society defines success very narrowly. Rather than defining success as financial gain or accolades, define it in terms of individual interests and personal happiness,” says Robbins.
11. Make your job search a top priority.
A job does not fall in your lap, you have to chase it. Especially a good one. It’s a job to look for a job. Stay organized by using Excel spreadsheets or online tools to track your progress. And plan early. Goldman Sachs, for example, starts their information sessions in September.
12. Take a course in happiness.
Happiness studies is revolutionizing how we think of psychology, economics, and sociology. How to be happy is a science that 150 schools in the country teach. Preview: Learn to be more optimistic. This class will show you how.
13. Take an acting course.
The best actors are actually being their most authentic selves, says Lindy Amos, of communications coaching firm TAI Resources. Amos teaches executives to communicate authentically so that people will listen and feel connected. You need to learn to do this, too, and you may as well start in college.
14. Learn to give a compliment.
The best compliments are specific, so “good job” is not good, writes Lisa Laskow Lahey, psychologist at Harvard and co-author of How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. Practice on your professors. If you give a good compliment the recipient will think you’re smarter: Big payoff in college, but bigger payoff in the work world.
15. Use the career center.
These people are experts at positioning you in the workforce and their only job is to get you a job. How can you not love this place? If you find yourself thinking the people at your college’s career center are idiots, it’s probably a sign that you really, really don’t know what you’re doing.
16. Develop a strong sense of self by dissing colleges that reject you.
Happy people have “a more durable sense of self and aren’t as buffeted by outside events,” writes Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California-Riverside. When bad things happen, don’t take it personally. This is how the most successful business people bounce back quickly from setback.
17. Apply to Harvard as a transfer student.
Sure people have wild success after going to an Ivy League school but this success is no more grand than that of the people who applied and got rejected. People who apply to Ivy League schools seem to have similar high-self-confidence and ambition, even if they don’t get in, according to research by Krueger.
18. Get rid of your perfectionist streak.
It is rewarded in college, but it leads to insane job stress, and an inability to feel satisfied with your work. And for all of you still stuck on #6 about ditching the law school applications: The Utah Bar Journal says that lawyers are disproportionately perfectionists.
19. Work your way through college.
Getting involved in student organizations counts, and so does feeding children in Sierra Leone or sweeping floors in the chemistry building. Each experience you have can grow into something bigger. Albert was an orientation leader last year, and she turned that experience into a full-time summer job that morphed into a position managing 130 orientation leaders. A great bullet on the resume for a junior in college.
20. Make to do lists.
You can’t achieve dreams if you don’t have a plan to get there.
Donald Trump fired Carolyn Kepcher, which is obviously big news if you watch The Apprentice, and still big news, though in a less obvious way, if you don’t.
Kepcher started her career as a waitress and she worked her way up in his organization. Recently she has become a counterpart to Trump (and generally more respected than he is) as the sidekick on his TV show the Apprentice. More importantly, she is a widely listened to speaker and author about how women can maneuver in the workplace.
But Carolyn will be fine. She’s talented and smart and she’s probably fielding great offers as I type.
The important thing here is nepotism. Donald fired Carolyn because he realized that he gave her a spotlight to run with (which she did, good for her), but he would rather be giving it to his kids – Ivanka and Don Jr. No big surprise. Most people with power want to give it to their kids. And most powerful people are white males, so white males are busy distributing power in an unequal way. Sure, Ivanka Trump benefits too, but only because she’s the daughter of a rich white man.
What about the people who are not children of rich white men? They do not receive as many opportunities to become powerful. Just look at the admissions process for top universities. If you are an alumni (and a majority of Ivy League alumni with college-age kids right now are rich, white men) you have a much higher chance of being accepted to a top university.
Everyone who complains that affirmative action is unfair should take a look at how Trump is running his organization. Because it’s not unique. And he is using a tried-and-true version of affirmative action for his family.
Affirmative action for minorities in the workplace is not a way to give minorities an advantage. It’s a way to counterbalance the combination of a concentration of wealth among white men and a strong history of nepotism in American institutions.
I’m happy that Donald fired Carolyn. It’ll give everyone a great example to point to when we talk about unfair advantages in the workplace.
If you have not seen the video of the Lockheed Martin whistleblower, here it is.
It’s a great video, and you really need to stay for the end when, after laying out his accusations and the lists of Lockheed and government people who have not paid heed to his warnings, he asks for a lawyer.
Of course a million will be calling because he has a wrongful termination suit against Lockheed.
But look, I have said this before, and I’ll say it again, (with less patience, no doubt): Don’t be a whistleblower. It’ll ruin your career.
Don’t talk to me about the rare circumstance when you are at dinner with the Secretary of State and she admits that the US government is systematical killing small children in a European country. This is the exception to the rule. Yes, of course if this happens to you, call the Washington Post or your favorite subversive blogger.
But 99% of you work in situations where the world does not care about your employer’s ethical transgressions. And many of you are so low level (sorry) that the stuff you’d whistle blow about is not nearly as significant as you being unemployable in your industry, which is what will happen.
I’m all for being an upstanding citizen. But we each have a lot of methods for doing that. Each day of your life you could tutor an underprivileged child and make the world a better place. But most of us choose not to do that. So get off your high and mighty stance about how you absolutely must be a whistleblower because of a moral obligation.
Just get out of the company. Find a job somewhere else, skip your exit interview, and make sure that you are never the person using your power to force unethical behavior on someone else.
As more men call themselves stay-at-home dads, they redefine for both men and women what it means to stay home with kids. Men have learned a lot from watching women struggle with home life. The super-woman syndrome of the 1980s has squashed the desire to juggle committed parenting with a sixty-hour workweek, and Rolling Stones lyrics about Valium as “mother’s little helper” do not fall on deaf ears; 24/7 with kids for eighteen years is too hard.
So today’s stay-at-home dad probably has some kind of work outside of the kids. He might not be earning much money, but he has the wisdom of generations before him to know that the money isn’t what matters. Ted Castro is a stay-at-home dad with his daughters, Giselle, six, and Claudia, eighteen months, while his wife, Nicole Faulkner works full-time managing a genetics lab. But if you ask Ted, “What else do you do?” he’ll say, “I’m an artist.”
Since the onset of feminism, stay-at-home moms have been incensed by the question, “What else do you do?” as if being home with kids were not a full-time job. But today, few people question how difficult and full-time taking care of kids is. So stay-at-home dads welcome the question. “I think the question really means, What did you do before you had kids?” says Castro. “Everyone went through a certain amount of schooling. So the question really means, What was your other choice?”
Castro’s other choice was making stained glass. After a degree in fine arts and an apprenticeship, he built up a business making stained glass commissioned by architects. Now he “makes only two or three pieces a year,” but he still calls himself a working artist.
After at least a decade of feuding between stay-at-home moms and working moms, the argument about which is better is dissipating. And in part, this is because men add a fresh perspective to the decision-making process. For dads, staying at home is not so much political as practical. “It just grew that way,” says Castro of his family setup.
In fact, most men do not set out to be stay-at-home dads. They just want to make sure they get to spend time with their kids. A survey by American Demographics revealed that eighty percent of men ages 18 to 39 said that a flexible job to accommodate kids takes a higher priority than doing challenging work or earning a high salary. The new stay-at-home version of dad is how they reach this goal.
On web sites such as slowlane.com, which cater to dads who put family first, stay-at-home dad and work-at-home dad are used almost interchangeably. And it’s a gray area as to how many hours per week a dad needs to work outside the home to disqualify himself as an at-home dad. (Stay-at-home dad Jeff, for example, designs stay-at-home dad apparel and operates the store that sells it.) Most significantly, though, the dads don’t seem to care about that number.
Some people will say, “Big surprise. Men staying at home with kids is just like men vacuuming — they do the living room and bedroom and never get to the kitchen and den before they get distracted.” But others will see a synergy of the sexes: Just as women in the workplace show men how life can be better there, men at home show women a few means of improvement as well.
So both men and women can benefit from learning how to create a life that is conducive to the new stay-at-home and accommodates a new sort of work.
1. Think part-time. Lisa Levey, Director of Advisory Services at Catalyst says, “Usually you have to earn the opportunity to work part time. Work at the same company for a while, and develop a certain niche. Over time, you can craft something that will work for you.” She would know: For years her husband has worked an abridged work schedule so he can be home with the kids.
2. Aim for high-level. “We have in our mind that lower status or lower paying would be easier to balance, but this is not the case,” says Phyllis Moen, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. “If you think you are taking a job that would give you more time, talk to people in that job.”
3. Save, save, save. Castro buys clothes at thrift shops and even frequents garbage dumps. “I got a Concept-II Rowing machine off the street,” he says. “I’ll never pay for a piece of exercise equipment again.”
4. Have faith. “People say my husband is so lucky,” says Levey, “But he negotiated and made compromises. Fear dominates the work world now. People need to push back and try to get what they want.”
Men should not marry women who have careers, according to an opinion piece at Forbes.com. The statistics are clear:
“Marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).”
There is a response from a woman, who, big surprise, has a big career. But to me, she just sounds like she’s whining. And she’s definitely missing the point.
The point is that marriage and family work best when one person is taking care of them full time. Duh. Everything in the world is best off when it is cared for very carefully. I wish everyone would stop trying to deny this. It’s barking up the wrong tree.
There is little evidence that the role of housewife is any more frustrating than the role of housewife and careerist rolled into one. (I have done both roles and both are very difficult and not totally satisfying.)
The conclusion, that marriages and families work better with a full-time housewife, is hard to swallow but hard to deny. It’s just that not every woman wants to take care of a family and marriage full time, and even fewer men do. And increasingly few people want to give up almost all child-rearing responsibilities in order to be a single breadwinner. So this is a piece of advice that’s useful to only the small percentage of households in the world. But still, the advice is good.
Many people will say they’d rather face the challenges of a dual-career marriage than the challenge of a stay-at-home-spousedom. Fine. Just know the statistics are not in your favor.
Before I get accused of throwing stones from a glass house, let me come clean with the fact that my husband and I are constantly restructuring our work life in response to these statistics. Also, I believe that the woman being the primary caretaker of both family and marriage is BS, but I don’t see many marriages working any other way, even with two, powerhouse careers.
Please, do not send me emails about your perfect marriage because I don’t believe it. In my marriage we have tried everything, and everything is hard in its own way.
Meanwhile, it’s good advice to men to pick a woman who will be a full-time housewife, but I have some advice for women who are shopping for husbands: To find a partner who will support your choices both financially and emotionally and who will be around enough to participate as an equal parent, marry someone with a very large trust fund.