Love & Marriage- Careers & Success

Success is something that I have talked about a few times in my blog. What it means to me and my husband and the everyday struggles we face of balancing demanding careers with our home life. My husband and I are both very career driven and we have high expectations for our careers, because of this we work very hard and often. Out of our core group of friends we probably work more often than almost all of them, not to say harder, just more often. We not only value our own careers, but eachothers as well, because that is what marriage is all about, right. My husband would never ask him to be a stay at home wife or mom, because he knows how hard I have worked to get where I am and that I have big plans to get even further. I would never set an expectation for Allan to be in bed with me everynight when I fall asleep, because in his industry his career can be even more demanding and I very much appreciate how he balances his time by spending the evenings as a family, then finishing up items later in the night, even though this sometimes allows him very little sleep.

I love that we both have successful careers and are such driven people. I love that we share common goals. Your career or even your day at work affects your mood and for us to feel fulfilled and challenged in that aspect of our life allows us to come home and be more fulfilled as well. What is best about marriage and having common goals is when one of us needs advice or even when one of us has constructive criticism about the other, we can share and not feel threatened. I know that other than myself, Allan has the best motives in my career and vice versa. This is hard in the corporate world sometimes to know who you can trust and even sometimes with your friends, but as husband and wife we know we would only offer eachother advice or criticism that we think would be a positive perspective.

I sometimes talk too much and I am grateful when Allan points that out. Allan sometimes needs help writing emails, which is one of my strengths. Allan is great at working a room and socializing with anyone. I am a more direct, get to the point, stick to the schedule type of person where he goes with the flow. Much like our personalities our business styles are quite different, so it is great to be able to talk things through and get eachother's advice. One thing that is very important is when you give eachother work advice, do it in a nice way, this is something , share professional struggles and successes and respect your spouses opinion, even when it is not the same as yours. Worklife balance is something Allan and I have struggled a lot with during our first year of marriage, wether it is putting the blackberry down during dinner or just feeling like work is taking over our lives, but when this happens we are trying to talk about it and bring ourselves back down to earth. We want to work hard right now while we have the time and the energy, but we also want to keep our marriage our #1 priority so that when we do get to play hard we have someone special to do it with. We haven't mastered this by any means, but it is definitely one of our biggest challenges during this last year of our marriage.

We aren't really sure yet what will define our success in the future: we want to work hard, but also play hard. No matter how much we complain about it, we enjoy having deadlines and important meetings and having something to strive for. Retirement is something very important to us as well. We have been contributing to our retirement plans for a while and constantly talk about our goals and the future. I think we will feel successful when we pay for our kids college, we have a retirement home somewhere on the beach or in a little town in Italy, we drive matching fancy sports cars, and retire under the same roof loving eachother and loving our lives.