So You Think You Can Work With Your Spouse . . .

A woman wrote to me asking: “Under what conditions should I definitely not consider partnering with my husband? What are some dead giveaways for a losing partnership?”

Good question. You might love your husband with all of your heart and yet working together may not be a good idea.

Here’s a quiz of 25 statements to help couples identify potential sources of conflict as they sort through whether they want to work together. Take the quiz individually, then discuss your answers together.

1. My spouse and I have very different interests and hobbies.

2. We depend on at least one of us to bring in steady income and benefits from a job, so working together in the same business would be a problem.

3. I have trouble taking criticism from my spouse.

4. I like my privacy and independence. I fear that spending too much time with my spouse could feel invasive for me.

5. My spouse and I fight a lot over the same unresolved issues. We have a number of power struggles in our marriage.

6. I don’t have a lot of respect for my spouse’s business skills.

7. My spouse and I both want to be the boss. It would be very difficult to share power and control unless we divide up responsibilities carefully.

8. I worry that working with my spouse could kill our sex life and hurt our marriage.

9. The last time my spouse and I worked on a household project together, it didn’t go well.

10. I don’t like the way my spouse operates in a business setting. I would feel embarrassed or judgmental if we worked side by side.

11. My spouse and I worked together in business before, and it was not a positive experience.

12. We have trouble asking for professional help, so if we got in trouble, it could be difficult for us to get the counseling we need.

13. People who know us well have told us we’re crazy to try working together.

14. This is a difficult time in our marriage, and we were hoping that working together might fix some of the problems we’ve been experiencing.

15. I have trouble making the commitment “for better or worse” to my spouse. I’m not sure how solid our commitment is to staying married no matter what.

16. I love spending time with my spouse in small quantities, but extended periods of time, such as on vacations or weekends, tend to get on my nerves.

17. I think working with my spouse would be fabulous, but he or she doesn’t agree with me.

18. I don’t have any good role models for this type of working arrangement. Everyone we know is either divorced or working separately.

19. We don’t have a very wide circle of friends or family in our lives to support us should we run into trouble.

20. My spouse and/or I don’t cope well with stress. It makes us lose our tempers, get depressed or make irrational decisions.

21. My spouse and I handle money very differently. We’d probably fight a lot if we had to discuss or agree on money issues too often.

22. My spouse and I have divergent life and business goals. One of us wants to work a lot harder and make a lot more money than the other. We’d have trouble in business together because we are in conflict about the kind of business we want to create.

23. I keep secrets from my spouse because it’s easier than having a fight.

24. As soon as we start getting ready to work together, one of us gets cold feet and makes up an excuse not to.

25. If I’m feeling this much doubt about whether to work with my spouse, I think we shouldn’t do it.

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Remember, this quiz is intended only as a guide. What the two of you believe about your marriage will be a much better predictor of success or failure than anything an outsider can suggest.

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Azriela Jaffe is the author of “Starting From No: 10 Strategies to Overcome Your Fear of Rejection and Succeed in Business” (Dearborn, 1999) and other books. She can be reached at [email protected], or visit her Web site at https://www.isquare.com/crlink.htm.