Blossom Ukoha
What happens when two people fall in love, but neither is willing to make their career the smaller dream?
“The more you win, the more I lose” is the familiar fear that can quietly enter a relationship when both partners are ambitious. But research on dual-career couples suggests that love and ambition do not have to operate as a zero-sum game. Jennifer Petriglieri, an associate professor at INSEAD who has studied highly educated couples with demanding professional goals, argues that thriving couples can move beyond the idea that one partner’s success must come at the other’s expense.
That shift matters because dual-career relationships are no longer unusual. According to McKinsey research involving more than 35,000 workers with spouses or live-in partners, 89% of women and 70% of men were part of dual-career couples. The numbers tell a story about modern ambition: for millions of couples, both partners are building professional identities at the same time. Yet having two careers does not automatically mean having two equal amounts of freedom, support or responsibility.
For high-achieving women, that imbalance can become particularly visible when success accelerates. A promotion, a CEO appointment, an international posting or a demanding new leadership role can change the rhythm of a household almost overnight. Swedish economists Johanna Rickne and Olle Folke found that married women who became CEOs were more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to divorce within three years of promotion. Their research does not establish that becoming CEO causes divorce, but it does reveal a striking gender difference surrounding major career advancement.
The finding becomes more complicated when we look beyond the boardroom and into the home. Who cooks when both people have late meetings? Who handles the children when both have an important presentation? Who rearranges a career when an elderly parent needs care? These questions may appear ordinary, but they can determine whether two ambitious careers feel like a partnership or a competition.
McKinsey has described this as the “double shift” experienced by women: professional responsibilities followed by disproportionate unpaid work at home. Its research found that women globally perform around three times as much unpaid care work as men. Even among primary household earners in the United States, women were considerably more likely than men to report doing all or most of the housework.
That is why the question of money can become surprisingly emotional. When a woman begins earning more than her partner, the financial difference may be manageable; what it represents can be harder to navigate. It can challenge assumptions about masculinity, authority, identity and who is expected to sacrifice when the family faces competing demands. Career success does not necessarily create those tensions, it can expose expectations that were already there.
Yet the story does not end with conflict.
Petriglieri’s research offers a different model: mutual support and shared ambition. In relationships that thrive, one partner’s success is not treated as a threat to the other but as something that strengthens the couple. Her research on more than 100 dual-career couples found that successful partnerships navigate major transitions by deliberately working out how their careers, identities and family lives can develop together.
That support also has to be practical. Telling a woman that you are proud of her promotion means little if she is still expected to manage every school run, household task, family emergency and social obligation around it. Harvard Business Review’s discussion of Petriglieri’s work highlights an important distinction: high-achieving women need not only emotional encouragement but also material support, help with laundry, errands, children and caring for ageing parents.
The strongest partnerships, therefore, may not be those that divide everything perfectly down the middle. They are the ones that recognise changing seasons. There may be a year when one partner travels constantly and another carries more of the home. Later, the arrangement may reverse. Equality does not always mean identical contributions every day; it means that both people’s ambitions and sacrifices are treated as legitimate.
This is particularly important for women who have spent years being told that leadership requires sacrifice. The question should not be whether an ambitious woman can “have it all” in some perfectly balanced arrangement. A better question is whether the people and structures around her allow her to build a meaningful life without having to permanently shrink one part of herself.
That requires conversations long before the pressure arrives: Whose career takes priority if an opportunity requires relocation? How will childcare be handled? What happens when one person earns substantially more? How much travel is acceptable? What does success look like for each of us, and what are we unwilling to give up to achieve it?
These are not unromantic questions. They may be some of the most romantic ones a couple can ask, because they replace assumptions with intention.
In the end, two big careers do not have to produce two separate lives. They can produce a stronger partnership when both people understand that ambition is not a competition for the larger share of the relationship. It is a shared negotiation over how two individuals can grow without requiring the other to become smaller.
Love in the age of ambition may not be about choosing between the relationship and the dream. It may be about building a relationship spacious enough for both dreams to thrive.
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