When working with your spouse is… HARD.

When my most recent (and most recently-beloved) TV job ended last year, I floundered. That was the job for me at this phase in my life… the job I’d imagined creating when I started this blog back in 2011. The. Job. That I. Loved. The topic. The schedule. The ideal realization of who I am meshed with what I do. And in 2 years, it was gone. Poof. So I questioned and struggled — what to do NEXT? Trudging thought the delicate aftermath of a life-changing time [at the time] froze me from dusting myself off and forging towards another job. I needed time to be, I wanted time to be. To heal, to figure things out, to possibly change towards a purpose-driven next-thing.

So, when my husband found himself needing extra hands with changes in his plastic surgery practice I stepped in. “This will be great!” I was suspiciously eager to tap into my other skills outside of being on-camera. I jumped to become his go-to assistant — a media rep, marketing assistant, office decorator and seminar co-planner. Working from our home, I split my time between freelance media jobs and ‘his stuff.’ The past 4 months consisted of organizing his conference in New York City, shopping for his new office furniture, managing his social media, creating materials to notify local doctors of his new office location, writing and sending press releases about his upcoming not-for-profit surgical mission to Armenia with a group called Mending Kids (while also seeking donations for it)… I didn’t realize how much I volunteered for.

I also didn’t realize that working with a spouse can sometimes be… difficult. My husband is smart and successful, but we function very differently. He’s conscientious and steady, I’m wham-bam-hurry-up-and-finish-it-already. He’s deliberate, I’m let’s-move-faster-so-we-can-check-this-off-now. There were times when we’d have heated rants in our kitchen, in front of our kids, about whether or not it’d be a couch or chairs in his new waiting room. We’d bicker about how I wanted different kinds of before+after pictures [from his surgery cases] for posting on his social media — he’d push back saying, “The ones I sent you will work fine, just use those!” Push and pull. Up and down. That not this. At one point, I told him us working together was “not positive for our home life.”

And then, after months of squabbling, all things that were stressing us got organized, settled and successfully completed. And we both felt great.

I’ve since stepped back and taken a deep breath. We are different people. We work in opposite ways. We are married first, part-time colleagues second. Discussions about business cannot happen at the dinner table right after our daughters tell us what happened during recess. And, as much as it makes me squirm to say this: He is the boss when his office is concerned. I can make suggestions, but he decides the outcome (because if he were to start instructing me about how to format my website or write one of my columns, I’d flip out).

For all spouses who work together — I see you, I’m taking notes and I am giving you a standing ovation. It isn’t easy, but teamwork can make the dream work. As long as both parties remember to thank the other one for all they do…