A year ago, my boyfriend and I were attending two different post-secondary institutions full-time with separate part-time jobs. We saw each other roughly two or three times a week.
Now, we own an incorporated business together with another business venture opening up soon. We quit our old jobs to work at the same place because it gave more hours and benefits. We are also out of school. We see each other roughly six out of the seven days of the week – if not more.
Seeing your significant other so much is ideal to a lot of couples, but when it comes right down to it, a lot of people are hesitant when it comes to the idea of working together.
But why?
Here are some of my thoughts on what people think working together will be like:
“You’re gonna get tired of seeing them.”
Although I can’t speak for the couples who have been working with each other for decades, my experience has been exactly the opposite of this. We love working together because we have complementary energies that bounce off of one another so we can work fast and motivated. That doesn’t get old. And even when work becomes stressful and things don’t go our way, we typically feel the same way about wanting to wind down and relax with each other. We enjoy curling up and relaxing even more than we like working with each other. When our energies aren’t matching up, there are ways around it. When he wants to work and I don’t, he motivates me or we do our own thing that day. We all need our alone time, and identifying that is a great step to have in a relationship. However, I wouldn’t say my need for “alone time” has increased since I started working with him. I don’t look forward to escaping his company. I know he feels the same, too.
“You’ll need to separate your work and love life.”
I believed this going into the whole thing. “We will need date nights,” I told him sternly. I was worried our romantic affections would dwindle the more we talked about business and that there would be no time to just be the mushy gushy 20-something-year-old couple we are. Rarely, but sometimes, I want to relax and he’ll bring up a business topic and I go “ugh.” (Can you tell I’m the lazier one of the two?) I thought there was a clear line you had to cross from work life to love life. This isn’t the case – but that’s okay. On a dinner date, you can talk about business and it’s okay. Before going into a meeting, you can say an inside joke and kiss and hold hands and then kill it in the office. A power couple is so much more than the power plus the couple. It’s learning to appreciate both work life and love life and blend them seamlessly together.
“What if you break up?”
Okay, fair, but why limit my success with that vague and irrational fear? Obviously you have to know and trust ANY business partner fully before committing to them. We have plans to stay together. If all that fails? Deal with it. Fear is not an excuse to limit your chances in life. It might get messy. It might mean switching jobs and finding alternative ways to handle the business together. Do I focus on that? Of course not, because I really don’t focus on the fear of us breaking up. My thought is: I trust him now, we’re doing well right now. I’m gonna kill it right now. Who knows what the future holds, but we all should have big dreams and plans, and I’m gonna do everything in my power to fulfill my goals. And however long this dream of mine plays out, I’m gonna learn everything I possibly can so that when I move onto the next thing, it’s gonna be way better than the situation I’d be in if I didn’t try at all.
The most beautiful thing I’ve learned from working with my boyfriend is that I can appreciate way more about him than in a traditional relationship. I understand how he works and can fully love every aspect of his work ethic along with everything else I already love about him. Our negotiation skills, how we motivate each other, and how we share the same goals and visions are just some of the things I don’t think I could have learned about to the extent that we have if we didn’t start working together. It’s opened up a whole new part of him that I love and admire and am inspired by.
If you’re thinking of working with your significant other, just remember that at the end of the day, a relationship is really just two best friends who love each other and are learning to work with each other in the world. Even if you don’t “work” together, couples have to work through normal life things anyway. Working with my partner has given us way more patience and understanding when dealing with daily life things because we’ve dealt with more important and significant business stresses before. And we cope with it well. You can only learn more when working with your partner. There are so many things to gain from it.