Partner or Husband?

On love, ambition and how one word can flip the answer to the same question.

You’ve just landed your dream job. It’s an early stage role, but the founders are absolute legends with a track record of big successes. The role is something you’ve always wanted to work on, and would potentially have a lot of fun doing - and succeeding. The money will be good, but it’s too early to say if it will be life changing. The only catch is that you’ve to move cities, which means you’ll have to uproot your partner (who is also working) and your kids.

Would you say yes?

I’m going to rephrase the question. Pay close attention.

You’ve just landed your dream job. It’s an early stage role, but the founders are absolute legends with a track record of big successes. The role is something you’ve always wanted to work on, and would potentially have a lot of fun doing - and succeeding. The money will be good, but it’s too early to say if it will be life changing. The only catch is that you’ve to move cities, which means you’ll have to uproot your husband (who is also working) and your kids.

Yeah. Hold that thought.

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As Valentine's day approaches, we're coaxed into thinking about what love means to us. For those who are freshly in love - congratulations! - it might look like prose on whatsapp, freshly cut lilies, shared photos on instagram or just the inability to stay physically apart.

For those of us who're wading in the deep end, however, love looks more like a series of annoying and difficult conversations we never wanted to have, but do anyway. And perhaps the one that will make or break your relationship is around your ambitions - not as a couple, but as individuals.

See, when you're a couple who's ambitious, and in it for the long run, your careers will move in seasons. When one surges, the other builds the shore. When one's on a meteoric rise, the other will be clearing the ground. I will go so far as to say that even if you’re in the same field, same niche and same organization, your careers won’t grow at the same speed. And for those of us who fell in love with people with jobs we’re still not able to explain fully, asymmetry is the default.

Another example is where one has a predictable, incremental and steady salaried role, and the other is on a more volatile, entrepreneurial ride which is slow for years before it gets explosive. Some depend on geography. Take Chennai for example. It’s great for conservative careers like law, finance and manufacturing, but opportunities in advertising and marketing are scarce. Others depend on timing. And once children enter the picture…you can comfortably take whatever bandwidth you thought you’d have for your career and reduce it to 0.

So what happens when you’re at a fork?

In theory, decision making should be simple. You look at the numbers. You look at the location and the opportunities it will bring the family as a whole - if it means a better job for your partner, a better school for your children, better living spaces, better air…you want to ask if it makes sense not just today, but five, ten years from now. Does it make sense? Yes? Then you move.

But that’s not how it works, does it?

It ends up boiling down to your gender. The household, by default, is arranged around male ambition. And that’s why we need to go back to the thought I asked you to hold.

Nothing about the job changed. Only the framing did. But just like that, the decision felt more substantial. Like it needed more thought.

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Whatever the answer, the issue I really want to point out isn’t the asymmetry of male and female careers or even the compromises that are needed to have a happy marriage.

It’s the fact that couples and families aren’t really evaluating these decisions as a shared balance sheet problem. It’s based purely on our own biases of what a breadwinner and a home maker look like. Apparently only one can go full throttle while the other manages their job with running the home.

There are numbers to back this up, of course.

According to Census data, women constitute the largest share of internal migrants in India. Women move across the country - not for work, but for marriage. 72% of female migration attributed to marriage. In comparison, only 15% of Indian men have moved from their place of birth - and employment has almost always been the reason.

It doesn’t stop there.

Despite making up half the population, and despite holding more advanced degrees compared to men, women only make up 25% of India’s workforce in an urban setting. And after childbirth, it drops further.

When you step off the earning curve, compounding works against your favour: in income, in assets, and in influence.

But the tides, they are a-changin’.

The Honeysuckle Bower (c.1609) by Peter Paul Rubens

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Urban India does not look like the India of the last Census. Today, we have more female graduates, across disciplines. And in dual-income households in metro cities, women’s ambitions aren’t hypothetical. There are studies now to show Indian women typically have more money in the bank than Indian men AND in India’s booming tech industry, women earn more than men (Marcellus).

And despite the two steps forward that we’ve taken as a gender, the moment we want to rearrange the family around our ambition, we take a step back.

We instinctively protect male ambition. Which - forget gender roles and cultural inertia - doesn’t make much financial sense either.

Women’s incomes are just as capable of exponential growth, which is why not thinking through these decisions can actually have a negative impact on our family’s finances. And this is the conversation that couples need to have.

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I’ve been married for 13 years now. I know how important compromise is, in maintaining a healthy, loving and happy relationship. I’d go so far as to say that it’s a necessary ingredient to a healthy, loving and happy relationship.

But compromise, is not the same as sacrifice.

The problem is that for generations, compromise has been distributed unevenly. We’ve been bending, relocating, pausing, stepping off ladders and settling into our roles as the ones who “run the house” for so long that compromise and sacrifice have become indistinguishable. Compromise is a choice, and builds partnership. Sacrifice is assumed, and only breeds resentment.

In my own marriage, we decided early that Chennai would be our base. I wanted to be salaried and he was setting up a law practise that would bring in non-linear growth. That was the compromise. Geography had to anchor somewhere.

But anchoring didn’t mean erasing and compromising didn’t mean I had to contract. I never had to quit working. I took on roles that needed intense travel, I wrote a book and I’lll probably continue to chase the next big meaningful thing — on terms that work for our life.

When you decide to be a unit, income is shared capital. Your ambitions are collective and your decision making should come from the lens of what’s best for all of you, and not what’s convenient for one of you.

Love, in its most durable form, is not about grand gestures. It is about choosing, again and again, to look at ambition from the same lens - no matter whose name is on the offer letter. So when the question comes - partner or husband - the answer doesn’t change.

Happy Valentines Day.