@Lisa – yep, the second transition can be an interesting time! I didn’t write much about that in my post, but certainly it can be a rough time for everyone as they figure out their lives. The good news, as Jennifer said, is that once you come through that you can have a real honeymoon period!

@Anu- this sounds great that you’ve had these hard discussions about how you want life to look. A lot of us do wind up talking a lot about logistics, and not about philosophy, and that can lead to problems. Not that logistics don’t matter. They do! But they aren’t all that matter.

@Anne- so glad you found this podcast thought-provoking. And yes, it sounds like you two are due for a discussion!

One insight I particularly enjoyed was the part about how couples who survive the first transition are really explicit about their principles, and not just the logistics. I felt that this really helped my husband and I when we navigated the transition from graduate school to finding a job in “industry”. We were both agreed that we were going to be a dual-primary couple, to use Petriglieri’s terminology, and so we decided to restrict our job search to two areas that we knew would be fertile for both our industries – around NYC and around Boston (there were other personal reasons why we ruled out the West Coast). And we just stuck to that and only applied to companies that could offer us jobs in one of those places, and it’s worked out great.

That initial agreement actually flows into the way we manage a lot of day-to-day stuff. We each treat the other person’s career as important and think constantly about how a particular work or personal decision will impact the other person. It’s a lot of give-and-take: for example, on Thursday I have a quiet day at work, so I’m working from home, and that will allow my husband to attend an early meeting rather than having to wait for the nanny to arrive. On the other hand, next Wednesday I have a meeting I have to attend in person, so my husband is going to cover our nanny taking a day off by taking some time off himself. And actually in neither case did we resent the other person – we just accept it as a natural result of the way we’ve chosen to build our family and often proactively offer up solutions.