No matter what your career dream, it will at some point cause conflict in your home life. It is easier to pretend these conflicts do not exist or to dodge the matter whenever possible. But ignoring conflict doesn’t make it go away; it just feeds the conflict and makes it worse.
Discuss conflicts between your work life and your home life because that is the only way you can make the situation better.
The Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education teaches people that the surest path to resentment, strain, and relationship disaster is the complete absence of disagreements. Having no disagreements means you aren’t saying what you think and feel and that emotions will simmer within you until they reach a boil.
One of the coalition’s main lessons is that in any relationship there are “ten irreconcilable differences.” According to Dianne Sollee, the director of the coalition, “The problem for most people is that they don’t recognize that differences are inevitable and should be talked about, and they instead seek refuge from another relationship. Of course, their new relationship will have ten new irreconcilable differences, and the pattern will just be repeated.”
Healthy relationships are successful, not because people have fewer disagreements, but because they apply problem-solving skills to arguments. Dianne says, “Instead of an emphasis on who is right and who is wrong, the underlying emphasis in healthy relationships is on what can be done to improve the situation for everyone involved.”
Two-career couples were 56 percent more likely to express satisfaction with their marriage when they did not avoid dealing with conflicts and disagreements brought on by their work schedules.
Howell 1999