Can You Have It All?
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Conventional wisdom says you can't succeed in a fast-track career and excel as a spouse and parent. Either you settle for middling professional achievement in favor of a superlative marriage, or you commit to your career at the expense of your home life. It makes sense that something has to give.
"Hogwash!" says California-based family therapist and corporate consultant Alan Loy McGinnis. In The Balanced Life: Achieving Success in Work and Love (Augsburg), McGinnis argues that rather than competing, work and marriage actually benefit each other. The working world provides valuable lessons for your family, he says, while your family serves as a needed base of support to help you succeed at work.
It sounds too simple to be true. He must be describing those rare, but highly successful, career-and-family stalwarts, the ones who get everything done by surviving on four hours of sleep. Nope. He insists he's talking about ordinary mortals like the rest of us. In an effort to win over skeptics such as myself, McGinnis outlined his "four laws of success" for career and marriage. Here's how they work.
Your first law of success is commitment, but the working couples I know are pulled between dual commitments. They feel as if they're constantly deciding what to neglect, work or family. But in your scheme of things, they've missed the point.
Most people don't realize that work and family is not an either/or proposition—you need to be committed to both. If you want to succeed at work, you'd better take care of your marriage and your family. That runs counter to much that is being written about work and home. A cover story in Fortune, for instance, concluded that if you devote yourself to the people you love, you won't remain on the career fast track very long.
The best research I've seen shows just the opposite. One study has followed nearly 300 men since the 1940s, when they were college-age. Some became CEOs; others died as alcoholics. There was no correlation between their college academic performance and their eventual level of career success. What did make a difference was their ability to develop and maintain intimate relationships. The people who were unable to establish close friendships and maintain long-term marriages never even made it to middle management.
But what about a guy like Donald Trump, who's on his third marriage?
There are exceptions, of course. But God made us with a need to be loved and to love others. The people who live only to work may excel for a short time, but they will burn out because they lack a support network. You can endure a lot of stress in a highly intense work situation if you have a deep set of relationships outside the office. For most people, that's a family to go home to, which becomes the keel that keeps them steady.
Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 1998, Fall
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Average User Rating:
Nkeiru
I think this article is most unrealistic and that many people struggling with work and marriage and parenting will find it does not translate to the practicalities of real life.
H
Thank you for this article. I became engaged and was accepted into a Ph.D. program within the same week. During what should have been a happy time in my life, a woman from my church asked me, "How are you going to have a career AND family?" She then proceeded to tell me essentially that if I was married, I should not pursue higher education. Since that time other members of my church have said that I must be "more career oriented than family oriented" since I am earning an doctorate. That is very degrading and hurtful. As a female, I believe there is still a stigma within the church against working women, particularly those who pursue a graduate level education. The truth is that I could not have survived the past 4+ years of graduate school without the love, support, and commitment of my husband and I am incredibly thankful for him. He makes me a better person, and he will always remain more important than any career I have.
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