 The research is clear. Couples who make it their business to fairly share the responsibilities of work and home life are happier and healthier, and they have better sex. Unfortunately, the research also shows that it's really, really hard to live out this ideal of an egalitarian partnership. From New America and Slate, this is Better Life Lab. I'm Bridget Schulte, and in this episode, we're going to hear some remarkable stories of couples struggling to be equal partners, supporting each other at work and sharing the load at home. It is really tough, even if you are arguably one of the most enviable working couples on the West Coast, like Amy and Carl Nelson. You shouldn't have to strive to make hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to have a family and have jobs that you like. Before we get to the Nelson's, though, I want to bring in Jennifer Petra Gliari. She's a Harvard-trained professor at the Powerhouse European Business School in Seyad. Jen's forthcoming book, Couples That Work, draws on her research into egalitarian relationships, where they go right and how they go wrong. It's a pleasure to be here. And talking about it, is it possible to have an egalitarian partnership? The question is, can you really, I hate to say this, have it all, all the time, but that is sort of the question, isn't it? Can you really share work equally and home life equally? It looks to me from the data, even though we say we want that, so many of us say we want that, it's really not that easy to do. So we're going to play you a couple different stories of people who are in very different situations as they struggle to have this kind of equal partnership. And the first story is sort of surprising. He's a man named Sam Goshu. And I met him when I got into an Uber. He was my Uber driver. But it also turns out that he's also a registered nurse, and he works this incredibly long shift at the hospital, at Washington Hospital Center. He's been there nearly 20 years. So here's a little bit of Sam. When I get off my work, I do Uber for a couple of, like, a few hours. Me and my wife, we have two kids. My daughter right now is 20 years old. She is in William and Mary. I see the bumper sticker there. They're a proud dad. And my son is 16 years old and he's 11 years old now. So Sam's story is that before he and his wife emigrated to the United States, they'd both been working in Ethiopia as nurses. That's how they met. And that when they came to the United States, they wanted to have an equal partnership. They wanted to both be nurses and both be involved in their family life. But the diseases were so different. In Ethiopia, a lot of the diseases are malaria. And in the United States, it's more like cancer. And so they had to go through training. And so they decided that they would sort of take turns because they needed somebody to support the family. So he decided to go first. And then when it became her turn, she became pregnant. And she had been working two and three jobs to support him. And the whole idea was that they would swap roles, but it really didn't turn out that way. So here's Sam, how he explains how they kind of veered off that egalitarian path. When I looked back, you know, how we did it, I couldn't believe it. It was tough. It was really tough. Yeah, it sounds like it. When she was trying to take the exam, by that time she became pregnant, our first daughter. And it's hard for her to focus on the study. Her pregnancy was not easy. It was complicated enough. It was a whole stressful situation. She ended up taking care of our kids. And in the meantime, she became a nurse aid. So they started out with that goal, but it didn't go as planned. And it was her career that took the back seat. I wanted to ask you, Jen, what strikes you about their story so far? So this pattern of things getting tough when the first child arrives, or the first pregnancy arrives, is very classic. And this is a classic time when women drop off their career paths and egalitarian couples turn into, you know, less egalitarian couples, even if the real intention and desire is there. And obviously there are some contextual factors. I mean, some things not in their favor. Obviously she had a difficult pregnancy. Right. So a lot of the research on this shows that at these pain points, we turn into very short-term thinking. And of course this is natural. You know, it's not to blame anybody. And we've all been in these situations when we're faced with those difficult times, are thinking horizon shrinks. Often what happens is people will do a kind of back-of-the-envelope calculation. You know, how much money would go on childcare and, you know, in this case, what would it cost to retrain, et cetera. And in the short-term, those calculations rarely add up. But if we take a long-term view, those calculations always add up. You know, it may have been a decision for Sam and his wife. It sounds, though, that there's some regret there. Well, you know, when you say that it doesn't add up in the short-term, but over the long-term it does, what do you mean? So both financially and career-wise, if we think financially, oftentimes I'll hear people say, well, almost all my salary is going on childcare when the kids are young. Right. That may be true for a period. And if we have two or even three children, that may be true for five, six, even seven years. The reality is, if we drop out of the workforce, so, for example, Sam's wife, she could have been a nurse, but now she's a nurse aide, and I'm assuming nurse aides get paid a lower salary, have lower job prospects, et cetera. Much, much lower, right. Much lower. When you take into account those things, it's worth spending almost all your salary on childcare for five or six years because the benefit you get of sticking out will cumulatively outweigh that over your careers. Now, of course, we don't just care about money. We care about other things as well. You know, many of us care deeply about our profession, our career identity, the egalitarian-ness in our couple. If we can bear pain over the short term, we can get the gain in the long term. So if we can bear slogging through, which tend to be those baby and toddler years, really, until the kids get in school, if we can slog through those, at the end we come out with a good career, and it may have slowed down a bit, but we're still on that career track. So it's not just financial. It's also, what kind of couple do we want to be in five, 10, 15 years' time? That's interesting. You talk a lot about assumptions. So let's listen to a little bit more the last part of my conversation with Sam because he said something that was really surprising. So do you feel like the way that you divided up work and family responsibilities is fair? Do you think she would feel it's fair? I don't think it's fair, but if I come from work after 10 hours, she don't even want me to go to the kitchen and she don't let me to do that. Do you ever do that for her when she comes home from her two jobs? No. If I wish, I'd probably... Do you feel like you should? Yes. I'm kind of feeling like maybe you should. Yeah. That's true. I tried one time. I learned a nice breakfast, and I told them, hey, guys, I'm going to have breakfast. And my kids soon after they come, I run to her mom. She said, they tried to kill us. The other when she was little, I was taking care of her hair. You know, nobody believed that. I was out washing and getting her hair. Now she don't let me touch it, but... But when she was little, you took care of her hair. Yes. So do you... Because mommy's not home. Right. Well, I was wondering, you know, when she was at work, did you have to take on some of those caregiving responsibilities just because she wasn't there? Yes. Then you got to turn right up here. My daughter actually, she was playing violin. Yeah, so your daughter was playing the violin. And I take her for practice all the time. So it sounds like you were really involved, especially when your wife was at work, because you kind of had to be, right? Yes. When I was little, I missed my childhood, so I didn't want to be with my kids all the time. My daughter is in second year, she's still in neuroscience. She wanted to be a doctor. That's great. And my dream is to be a doctor all the time. It's volunteering in all the different places. It's not like other kids, you know, they're not crazy about video games or fancy shoes or fancy jacket. We actually insisting, you know, what do you want? Do you want this? Do you want that? No. Do you think that it's kind of the influence of home that men are supposed to work and that women are supposed to take care and care of other people? Is that a pretty powerful motivator in your own relationship? That could be true, but what I'm thinking is, I don't know, even the angels they come and take care of their kids, I don't think it's enough. She would really want to do it. She wanted to do it. She felt like she had to do it. Yes. When I think about that, I've failed in some part. Probably if I try hard, I can learn how to cook and stuff like that. Yes. I'm telling the truth. Maybe you could take lessons from your son. Yes. He is good. Jennifer, here you have a couple and they have very traditional views on what they each should do, even though they had wanted to kind of share that role. What was surprising is that Sam actually was doing quite a bit of caregiving, but granted he wasn't cooking. But he was doing things that he didn't give himself credit for or didn't see. The fact that he did his daughter's hair, that he took care of the kids while his wife, she was working two and three jobs herself, so she wasn't physically there and he had to do that kind of work. And that he didn't even see that about himself. Yes. So the narrative rarely matches reality, right? And I think this is true in all couples. We tell one story and we do something else. And yet what I heard him saying was a bit mixed, right? On the one hand, he was saying, you know, she does everything. And then at the same time, he was saying, you know, I didn't get that stuff in my childhood, so I wanted to be more involved. So I think there's some kind of ambivalence in what he was saying, but I think there's two things going on here. One is clearly the gender narrative, which even if on the surface we say adamantly we're an egalitarian couple, it's hard to escape, right? Women usually fall into certain roles and men fall into others. So even if women and men split the tasks roughly 50-50, often men take the traditional male tasks, you know, be that mowing the lawn, taking the trash out, you know, sorting out the family finances, this kind of thing. There's also something about patterns ingraining in a couple. And this often sparks off when children are little, especially when one partner takes either a maternity or a paternity leave. So we get into habits of doing a certain role, be that cooking breakfast, which was obviously his wife's role. And what happens is these roles get reinforced. So the children expect it from us, our partner expects it, and then it's hard to get out of those patterns even if there's a desire there. You know, it'd be interesting to hear his wife's side of the story, wouldn't it? But oftentimes, those of us in certain patterns can say, oh, well, you know, my husband or my wife never helps out with this. But likewise, we tend to be quite wedded to those roles we have. And you were saying that in some of the research that you've done, you've found similar patterns with people who might have those very traditional views, and yet in reality were actually, as you say, the reality was very different from the stories they were telling themselves. Absolutely. And what's really interesting is I see the inverse too. So there's one dynamic around people from traditional societies, whether that's cultural for, you know, the Middle East, Southern Europe places like this, which have a very strong gender dynamic. These couples have a very strong narrative that they're a traditional family, even if they're actually not when we look at the tasks they do. Likewise, if we look at, you know, you can imagine a modern young couple in New York, for example, both high-flying businesses, they will have a very strong egalitarian narrative. But when you look at the tasks they actually do, they're likely to be not as 50-50 as they think. Very interesting. That brings me to the next story that I want to talk to you about. It's a young woman. She asked me to go for coffee a few months ago because she was going off to Germany with her husband, who's in the military, the U.S. military. She's really driven and ambitious and to survive and thrive in the military, you have to move every two to three years. It's sort of an upper out very strict system. You know, she's the classic example of the trailing spouse. How do we stop calling ourselves that? How do we stop feeling like the plus one or the appendage? The other word is dependent, which is even more minimizing. I depend upon you. I would not be here were it not for you, which is a little minimizing, but it's also true. What would your ideal work-in-life situation look like for you? I definitely had to be thinking about that because I got my degree. I did an undergraduate in international studies and then I ended up getting two master's degrees actually. I have one in communications and one in international business and policy. When you educate yourself, you build up your potential, don't you? And it's almost like you have all these shiny degrees and you don't use them. It's almost like Google built this amazing office building and never moved anybody into it. It's such a sort of a feeling that you've got this glittering shiny thing that the longer you don't make use of it, the less useful it becomes and it can be really kind of frustrating in that way. The term trailing spouse is tough and I think that a lot of us have started to think more about calling ourselves tandem or tandem couples and I think what the image that brings along is kind of a bicycle, at least where it takes both of us pushing to get us going, it takes both of us heading in the same direction, but at the end of the day someone's sitting in the front seat, right? Hopefully in a tandem couple that what ends up happening is that you're at least communicative about it, you know, hey, stop this bike I want to get off or it's my turn to ride in front for a little while rather than always being in back. But in the military, absolutely, I mean yes, I chose my husband with my eyes open, I knew he was a military man, but within the military community that sort of having choice sort of circumscribed for you all the time can be a real challenge. The tough thing in the military is that they're sort of like incapable of giving any less than 120%. That that's not an option, you know, that the stakes are high and the honor of it and the privilege of it to serve means that you are always going to be 100% at your best. But at the same time, I think that that can also be a bit of an excuse and a bit of a crutch to not necessarily give 100% at home. So Jennifer, this is an Italian rank in Galloway, what do you think of Natalia's story? So I love her image of tandem couples, that's great, isn't it? This is a rather common story and not just with the military, there are a lot of corporate roles as well where people are on some kind of lockstep rotational thing and it is very tough being the partner of someone who's on one of these rotations. And I think she's very upfront because she's saying, look, I knew what I was getting into, but of course until we're in that situation, we don't realize how tough it's going to be. Oftentimes people in that situation who are on the back seat of the tandem craft some kind of career that's mobile. So that may be some kind of freelancing, something that's, you know, very transferable is a great opportunity, but of course that's not what everybody wants to do. And I think the key thing is in what she said around, you know, when is it my turn on the front seat? For an egalitarian couple, it's just not sustainable for someone to be on the front seat the whole time, literally driving the other person hither and thither all the time. I think there has to be a very explicit agreement in the couple around, you know, how long is this for? And when is it my turn? And that's when these couples do well, when there's a sense that, okay, it may even be eight to ten years and that's the kind of time frame we might think of for the military. And then it's my turn, then I get to decide. And I think that's really critical in this kind of couple. And yet, you know, when you're talking about if you're on the back seat and it's going to be eight to ten years or in a corporate case, it may be longer than that. And, you know, one of the things that Natalia said later is that maybe she's a little comfortable on that back seat since she's not sure or she doesn't have that same kind of lockstep career. She's a little hesitant about taking the driver's seat. There's two sides of me. There's the side of me that is a mother and would love the idea of, you know, super flex time, you know, working time, doing a little bit of this and then being home in time to give the kids the snack. And then there's the other half the Instagram and the half that really wants to be doing sort of the high flying international business consultant work. So I'm really jackal and hide about it. Do you think there will come a time or do you hope there will come a time that you are in the driver's seat and that your husband would willingly be in the back seat? I don't know how well he'd do in the back seat. I think that would be a challenge for him. I don't know. I mean, could I be in the front? I think that the difficult thing at the moment would also be that I've spent so many years taking the back seat that if I jumped to the front, my earning potential would certainly drop our earning potential as a couple significantly. We've put our bets on one horse, so to speak. My husband has had the opportunities and now probably if he were to leave the military would have earning potential at a certain level, which I at this point probably would not. So putting me in front would be a calculated gamble. I'd be interested to try it. I would be pretty rusty up there. I'd have to build up some muscle whereas he's got the muscle memory. But I think the other reason that it's maybe not possible to have an egalitarian partnership is that how can a marriage be egalitarian when the society exists within is not? There's just an awful lot surrounding a marriage in the institution of marriage that makes it hard. So I guess what I wonder is the evidence shows it's usually women who are the trailing spouse. It's usually women who take the flex role or the backseat role that is very difficult than to switch gears later on and you've lost a lot of ground. Yeah, it is and it isn't. It's very easy for us to fall into a pattern and a set of assumptions and I totally understand her point of view. Well, I've not seen in the leadings, you know, can I even do this? But I think there's a couple of things going on. One is, careers are long and increasingly they're getting longer and longer. Very few of us will retire at 55, 60 anymore. We're all going to be working through into our 60s, 70s and beyond. And so if we start thinking about this span of our career horizon, even 8 to 10 years, it's nowhere near even half of it. Maybe it's a quarter of it, not even that. So I think part of it is reframing this. And I also think what's interesting is organizations are wising up to this. If we think back 30 years ago, it was very common for someone with a higher degree to marry someone with a high school degree. That just almost never happens anymore. So sociologically we have this phenomenon which is termed something awful, associative mating, which sounds awful but it essentially means we're much more likely to partner with somebody of our same level of talent and education. And organizations are wising up to this. They're thinking of, okay, there's a tag along talent here. And how can I make use of it? Particularly in big cities across the globe. So for example, Geneva is a place where a lot of expats rotate through Dubai. And they are having an internal talent market fill these tandem couples because they know what they're getting at people with as much talent as the people they've moved. And seeing these tandem couples as an asset. Now I know that's a little bit outside the military context, but maybe the military will wise up to this as well. Gone are the days when these people are tag along spouses. Although it's interesting, for the last vignette that I want to play for you that I want you to listen to, it's the story of a couple who are in a position you think that they might have figured all of this out. Amy and Carl, they don't lack for money. They don't lack for training. They don't lack for social privilege. And they don't lack for commitment to each other or their partnership or this caregiving or this kind of egalitarian ideal. And yet for their partnership to work, their kind of egalitarian ideals, she had to leave a very high-profile job as a lawyer and start her own company. Yeah. So very different situation and yet he did not. I think through the four and a half years that we've been parents, we've kind of just been reactive a lot in how we figure out how we put the pieces of the puzzle together. From the beginning, I did take six months off with our first child. I was practicing law. I was with a law firm. I had four months of paid leave and then two months of unpaid leave. And I know that's such a rarity in America, but that made a really great entry into parenthood. I was like, that was our first, when we made the first big choices. Do we do day care? Do we do a nanny? How do we figure this out? And Carl, at the time, I wasn't traveling a lot. Carl has always traveled a lot. And so we knew that would be part of the equation. What we've found, I think is that parenting and being and working and all those things just require flexibility. And so when we got into this, I certainly, I was not as in tune with what Amy was going through as I am now. I guess it's the best way. What I think part of that is because when I left lawyering to start the Riveter, I really had no idea how much I would have to travel. I was a litigator for 10 years. I worked both at law firms and in-house. I was a litigator when I had our first two daughters. And I found it really hard to be in a traditional work setting and frankly see my children because little kids wake up a little bit later and they go to bed a little bit earlier. And when you have a commute and you're at your desk nine hours a day, it's frankly, it's just hard to even see them. And I hated that a lot. And I tried to push for flexibility in my workplace and couldn't get it. And so necessity breeds invention. And I thought about going out on my own as a lawyer, started looking at co-working spaces and actually figured out I thought I could build something better than what already existed and so decided to start a company, which is the Riveter. It's a network of work and community spaces built by women for everyone. And I work so hard. I work so many hours, but I do have flexibility. But over the course of the four years we've used so many different solutions, so many band-aids, basically moved my mother out here to live with us. She's with us about 75% of the time, which we're incredibly lucky to have her. And it's messy. It is so messy. And acknowledging that I think is really important because I think for me when I first became mom, I had this idea like I was supposed to be a lawyer, like I wasn't a parent and supposed to be a parent, like I wasn't a lawyer. I can't be a startup founder and not be a mom. And I can't be a mom without acknowledging that I'm a startup founder. And those things are a big part of my life. And I think Carl is the same way with his work. Even Carl and I have an enormous amount of privilege. We had parents that paid for us each to go to college. And we are really, really lucky that my mom has been able and willing to step in and leave her own life. And she is, ultimately, it shouldn't be this hard, right? Like, you shouldn't have to move parents across the country into a bedroom in your house. You shouldn't have to strive to make hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to have a family and have jobs that you like. It's crushing, right? And even though we have all these pieces in place, it's still incredibly hard. And I think so many things need to change for all of us to be able to put these puzzle pieces together. I mean, I think, you know, one thing at the beginning of our conversation is that I took six months off with my first child and that was life changing because if I had had to go back to work two weeks later, which is the situation of one and four American women where they're back at work within two weeks of having a baby, that would have made things very rough and very hard, both emotionally and physically. And so I think paid parental leave, not just for mothers, is the lowest possible thing we could do and we should absolutely do. It's ridiculous that we don't have that in this country. And also, you know, you paid leave for elder care and I think that we need to create workplaces where people acknowledge that you're a human and that you have these things in your life and that you can have flexible schedules, whether that's working from home or working alternative hours. You know, if you could work seven to three instead of nine to five or six, that could be monumental for a lot of people who have children in schools that end at three, right? We just need to be more creative about this. We have all of this amazing technology. Why aren't we leveraging it to change the American workplace so that people can be with their families? Bottom line is if we as a people are going to do anything about this, to me, that's the front line, is starting to focus on those traditional roles and say, you know, those don't have to be that way and there's got to be places where people can explore other avenues. But it's like you talk about gender roles and it is interesting because you, one of the Fridays you worked from home and you went to pick up Reese, our middle daughter, from preschool and you were the only dad, right? And you commented on it to me that, you know, why am I the only dad that's there? That's true. Amy Sternner Nelson and her husband Carl. She's the founder and CEO of The Riveter and he works in real estate for a little outfit called Amazon. So Jennifer, why aren't we looking at how we organize work and workplaces? You know, why aren't we looking at policies that could really help working families and help this gender equality? Yeah, and it's a very such situation, isn't it? You know, the wealthiest country in the world almost is so far down in terms of these structural things which help working families so much. But if we think of America, it's very much an individualistic society. You know, if we think of the American dream, etc. And if we think about that narrative, it very much, you know, feeds into a focus on work and then the family will sort of take care of itself and we see that in healthcare as well, we see that in family care, in elder care, we see that across all the domains. So we can see this lack of focus really stemming from the way we think about almost what it means to be an American, right? And I think that focus, quite frankly, is very very hard to change. And this is where organizations, some organizations are starting to step up and say, okay, if society and politicians aren't going to do this on mass what can we do? Well, the problem is, firstly, that only the big, rich corporations can afford to look at this, which most of the people don't work for them. Right. And of course, that change is very, very slow. So then there's the question, well, what can I as an individual do in the meantime because most of us can't afford to wait for that change. Exactly. And I think they were pointing to some of the answers in there, which is, there are solutions available technologically, but many people don't use them. Or many people are afraid of using them for fear of backlash. You know, for many of us, there's no reason we couldn't work seven till three apart from what other people might think. It's usually what the boss thinks, you know? Yeah, exactly. Because the crazy thing is, we've got all this technology, but instead of releasing us, it's made things harder. We now have these expectations of 24-7 working, et cetera. And yet the evidence is very, very clear that people who work flexibly are more productive than people who are in the office for 9, 10, 11 hours straight. You know, for people who are in more senior positions, this is a question of role modelling. For those of us in more senior positions, if we do this, we implicitly give permission to do the same. For people in more junior positions, it's a case of banding together and asking and showing the evidence. There is ample evidence out there which is very easy to find on the internet. And very persuasive for bosses that this isn't time wasting, this isn't shirking, this is actually going to benefit the organisation, the business. And so give it a try. You know, if I can do this for two months and it works out, great. If not, then I'll come back as usual and we'll get revert back. You know, it's so interesting in reading some of your research. You know, you open one of your papers and you talk about how having an egalitarian couple where both share work and home in the 1970s was called the new deviant. You know, as seen as like so weird and so, so odd. You know, and you've addressed some of this but how are we really going to get there? So in the 1970s, when I was growing up, my parents were a dual career couple and this was very odd thing to be. You know, it was really the deviant position from a society wise. And now as you say it's what everyone or very a lot of people are striving for. And there's very much been this tipping point in social opinions and the question is why and what we find is that in times gone by, if we think of love and work, we've really split them that men are in charge of the work and women are in charge of the love if I can put it that way, the family and things like this and increasingly, neither men or women are happy with that. Men and women both want loving relationships and they also value a career. And they value a career not just for money but because it gives them as you said a sense of identity, a sense of a purpose, a sense of meaning in the world. It's very important to people to work. The desire to have these two pieces has really swept through and changed this narrative. Of course it's not going to be easy and that's not actually a bad thing. You know, the paradoxical thing about challenge and struggle is it tends to be where we derive the most meaning and the most joy. If you look back across your life at those the periods which were most meaningful, there are often periods which contain a bit of struggle which were pretty tough going when you're in there but when you look back it's like great. So if I look back to when my children were young and that period of my career, I mean it was pretty awful if I'm honest. And it was a case of get up every morning and slog through but when I look back now you know the kids are in a great space and it's amazing looking back on that. And what tends to happen and where dual career couples trip up is they focus on these short term surface issues. The thing I hear time and time again is, you know, how do we split household responsibilities etc. And in one way, splitting tasks is easy, right? We get a joint Google calendar, we both sign up to it and we write everything down. But of course if it was that easy none of us would be talking about it. Right, exactly. It's when you do all the work and you put the Google calendar together and then your husband never ever accepts the invitation. Exactly. I've been there. And of course what's happening is your tension is not around who does the washing up or who picks up the kids. That's not the issue. The issue is a deeper issue around power struggles, you know, whose career has priority and the mistake most couples make is they keep arguing about who's picking up the kids without ever going that level deeper and really looking at their relationship and saying, okay, how much do we value each other's careers? How are we going to fit these things together? And I think when I look at couples who really have made this work over the long time they're couples who day to day aren't focusing on that surface level stuff. They're really focusing at that more psychological level and looking at how can we really, truly support each other and build this joint partnership. I love that. I'm going to go home and see if I can work on that in my own sort of egalitarian relationship. What about in your own life? Do you have an egalitarian partnership and how, if so, how? So, yes. The quick answer. I think where people trip up with egalitarianism is thinking that every single week everything needs to be divided 50-50. That's certainly not how we've operated and not how couples I know have done well have operated. It's this idea that there are times when I will need to carry a lot more weight than my husband and that's okay because I know there are other times when those tables are reversed. And so I think it's that real flexible egalitarianism as opposed to almost keeping a spreadsheet every week and ticking off who does what. And then the question is like, well, how do we do this? And it's the old adage that it's about communication. People just say, you know, couples who do well are those who communicate a lot. I totally disagree with that. So it's not about how often we communicate. It's what are we talking about? What are my expectations from our relationship? What are my concerns? And what am I going to do to support you and obviously vice versa? Because it's very easy to point the finger of blame our partners and say, well, they're not doing this and they're not helping this. But if we turn the tables on our cell and say, okay, what am I committed to doing that's going to help my partner succeed, then it really changes that conversation into a much more egalitarian conversation. You know, I guess ultimately it's about respecting each other's time as well as each other's dreams, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Jennifer Petrick-Leary, she's a professor at the European Business School in Seade based in Paris. Her forthcoming book is called Couples That Work. Natalia Rankin-Galloway also joined me this episode. She's the military spouse who's writing in the back seat of that tandem bicycle, for now at least. We also heard this episode from Sam Goshoo, registered nurse, Uber driver, doting dad and very bad cook. And we heard from Amy and Carl Nelson. You know, it's messy. It is so messy. David Shulman is producer of Better Life Lab. Hailey Swenson provides research assistance. Our project is a collaboration with Ideas 42, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Better Life Lab is produced by New America in partnership with Slate. For more resources on working healthier, go to newamerica.org. Click the link for Better Life Lab. If you like the show, review us on Apple Podcasts, tell your friends, and maybe you can also tell you're not always completely egalitarian life partner. Like I said at the top, couples who share the responsibility of work and home are happier and healthier and they have better sex. From New America's Better Life Lab, I'm Bridget Schulte.