When Jobs Clash

By Jill Smolowe

Meet Kendall Crolius, 36, an account director at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Manhattan. Every day, Monday through Friday, she awakens at 6:00 a.m., prepares for work and, if two-year-old Trevor stirs, snatches a few minutes of "quality time." At 7:10 she walks to the train station near her Connecticut home; by 8:30 she is in her Lexington Avenue office. During the next nine hours, she juggles the demands of clients and researchers, creative teams and media people. But no matter how hectic it gets, Crolius usually manages to catch the 5:18 train. When she reaches home, Trevor is waiting for her. By 10:30, she is asleep.

Meet Stephen Stout, 38, an actor currently understudying in the Broadway hit The Heidi Chronicles. Each day he gets up at 7:15 a.m. If it is not a matinee day, Stout spends the next ten hours with his two-year-old son, playing and running errands. At 5:15 he leaves his suburban home to catch a Manhattan- bound train, allowing ample time to meet his 7:30 call at the Plymouth Theater. On the nights that Stout does not appear onstage, he heads for home at 9:40, after the second act is safely under way. When he walks through his front door at 11:15, he is greeted by silence; both his wife and son are asleep.

Stout and Crolius are happily married, though they spend only a few minutes together on a standard workday. Both agree it is not an ideal arrangement. But this is the most compatible meshing of schedules in their eight-year marriage -- and it beats the 18 months they spent on opposite coasts when Stout was pursuing television work in Los Angeles. "This is as good as it gets," says Crolius. "We're both working -- and we're both living in the same city."

Welcome aboard Marriage Flight 1990, and fasten your seat belts: it's going to be a bumpy ride. Today's typical marriage is a dual-career affair. That means two sets of job demands, two paychecks, two egos -- and a multitude of competing claims on both spouses' time, attention and energy. The two-job flight path is marked by demands for fairness and parity that require some mobility, a dose of originality and a high degree of flexibility.

Dual-income marriages are not unique to the '90s, of course. But as America heads into a decade that will see increasing numbers of women enter the labor force, career collisions promise to become more common and more acute. Among married couples, 57% of wives work, up from 39% two decades ago, and the number is expected to keep rising. If money is power, as family therapists warn, then some vexatious power struggles loom ahead: 18% of working wives earn more than their husbands. After two decades of toppling barriers, professional women are now reaping promising promotions.

But those new opportunities may mean longer hours or a relocation -- demands that can conflict directly with a husband's needs and strain the fabric of a marriage. It is probably no coincidence that even as women make gains in the workplace, more than 50% of new marriages today end in divorce. The corporate restructurings of the 1980s have also contributed to a sense of instability as couples realize that no job is truly secure and long-term planning may be all but impossible. The result is a feeling shared by many couples -- that they are out there, all alone, with no precedents to guide them. "This is a transitional generation, in the middle of changing values and roles," says Betty Lehan Harragan, a career consultant and columnist. "Each couple is forced to make it up by themselves."

The upside of transition is that society's expectations no longer bar men or women from assuming any role they choose in either the home or the workplace. The downside is that those choices often prove costly. Many couples are discovering that the fierce careerism and materialism that drove the past decade are now exacting a steep toll in terms of personal satisfaction and relationships. If the 1980s were the Decade of Greed, the 1990s may well turn out to be the Age of Need -- a time when quality-of-life issues triumphed over the quantity of material success. Already there are signs that people's priorities are shifting away from the workplace and back to home and community.

Yet couples are not having an easy time striking a healthier balance between the demands of home and workplace. "Everything has to be negotiated, and that's difficult for us," says family therapist Anne MacDowell. "We tend to want our way to be the right way and the other person's way to be wrong." Perhaps that is not so surprising, given the climate that spawned many of today's working couples. "We really are the Me Generation," says Karen Burnes, 34, an ABC-TV network correspondent, who admits that every day she must balance her job against her marriage to Rudy Rodrigues, 49, a consultant to the United Nations. "We were raised to do what we wanted to do."

In attempting to shift into the We mode, many couples find their biggest challenge is simply finding time together. Work hours conflict; travel demands interfere. Even relatively compatible schedules do not guarantee couples a daily hour of uninterrupted time together. Accommodation becomes all the harder when jobs land couples in different cities. Air Force Major Suzanne Randle, 44, was handed six weeks' notice to transfer from Nebraska to California, a move that will lengthen the commute to see her husband, a first officer for TWA who is based in St. Louis. "It comes down to, hey, it's tough making a living," Randle says. "You have to do what it takes."

Others are less sanguine. For almost two years, venture capitalist Ben, 35, and Elaine, 35, a marketing vice president, shuttled between Baltimore and Manhattan. "On weekends we were always trying to catch up," he says. "It was like a Slinky, underdoing, overdoing, underdoing, overdoing." When Elaine became pregnant a year ago, Ben quit his job to join her in New York. Ben, who has since found new work, says, "We discovered telephones are not like being there."

Maybe not, but fax machines and phones have become the lifeline of many a modern marriage. Burnes and Rodrigues speak by phone six or seven times daily. When Rodrigues recently traveled to the Afghanistan countryside, the lack of a telephone link-up threw the relationship off balance. "I felt like our whole foundation was shaken," says Burnes. "I had no feeling of control, no feeling of contact." Their new resolution: no more trips that place either one more than a phone call away.

Resilient couples have learned to find some advantages in their constant separations. Many speak of having more time for work, friends and hobbies; others point to their newfound self-sufficiency. Shelly London, 38, an AT&T district manager of public relations in Atlanta, and Larry Kanter, 38, a radio news anchor in the same city, find that incompatible hours help keep the romance in their relationship. "We're sort of always newlyweds," London says. "We're real jealous of our time on weekends."

Colliding agendas inevitably throw up questions of whose job is more important and who's in charge. Often the struggle for answers plays out in tussles over house chores. Women frequently -- and justifiably -- complain that most of the drudge work falls to them. The view from the male side, however, can be revealing. Ellen Galinsky, who as co-president of Manhattan's Families and Work Institute often attends corporate seminars, says that when women complain that their mates don't help, the men seethe. "The men say, 'Every time I help, she tells me I'm doing it wrong. I quit. I'm not interested in being criticized all the time.' " Such conflicts often reflect deeper issues of power and expectation. "There's a lot of denial around the issues of envy and competition," says family psychotherapist Emily Marlin. "Who's doing better? And what does that mean?"

Therapists warn that often it means money. "In our culture," says therapist MacDowell, "power goes with money." Many women who earn less than their husbands admit to unease, citing the "dominance" enjoyed by the spouse. Those who make more typically wish that the breadwinning field was more level. Men, by contrast, tend to deny any feelings when they are outearned by their wives. They dismiss their wives' higher earnings with phrases like "I say more power to her" and "I don't feel threatened by it." Inevitably, such statements are followed by the words "I have a strong ego," a defensive refrain that seems to betray a discomfort not yet resolved.

That discomfort is certain to deepen as more working women find their career paths leading to a relocation. Women are still the "trailing spouse" in 94% of all job transfers that involve couples. But that is changing rapidly. By the end of the decade, almost a quarter of all transferees are expected to be + women, up from 5% just 10 years ago. Feelings of resentment, helplessness and dependency that have long plagued displaced working women promise to be harsher for men. While potential employers rarely find it odd that a wife has given up a job to trail her husband, they often question the dedication of a candidate who puts his wife's career first. Friends betray their prejudices and heighten anxieties with questions like "But what are you going to do?" Moreover, most men are ill prepared to take a backseat role.

Men who have braved the trailing route know it can be rough. Last February, Ray Victurine, 35, left a job with an international agency in La Paz, Bolivia, to follow his wife to Seattle, where she had landed a job with a family and health organization. Four wageless months passed before Victurine found consulting work and settled on entering a Ph.D. program. "You begin to question your self-esteem," he admits.

As transfer options open for women, many couples are adopting a your-turn- my-turn strategy. Grace Flores-Hughes, 44, gave up a government job to follow the career of Lieut. General Harley Arnold Hughes, 54; she no sooner settled into an academic post in Omaha than her husband's career relocated them back to Washington. "I knew that one day if I needed something, he would support me," she says. That day came in 1987 when she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to be director of community-relations service at the U.S. Justice Department. Harley Hughes, who faced yet another reassignment, possibly to Europe, decided that this time his three-star career would give. He retired five years ahead of schedule.

Given the emotional and economic toll, an increasing number of couples are simply choosing not to transfer. Confronted with the mounting resistance, companies are beginning to respond. Fully 75% of the 1,000 companies that belong to the Washington-based Employee Relocation Council offer services designed to make relocation more attractive to spouses, from writing basic resumes to pooling job listings with other companies to expedite a spouse's employment search.

The relocation backlash is just one symptom of the gradually changing attitude toward work. Employees are also beginning to balk at the long office hours that are the legacy of the '80s' corporate retrenchments that pared staffs and deepened the work loads of those who remained behind. Corporate loyalty is further strained by the growing realization that no matter how hard an employee works, no job is truly secure. "People feel 'the hell with it,' " says consultant Harragan. "They've had it with being overworked."

At the same time, people are growing disillusioned with the rewards of high- powered, high-profile careers. "People are asking, 'Where am I really going on the fast track?' " says psychotherapist Marlin. "They aren't dropping out, like in the '60s, but they are more introspective about the kinds of things they feel are ultimately going to be satisfying." Increasingly, couples speak of "quality-of-life" issues, as they weigh the demands of work against the desire for more family and leisure time. Worship at the career altar is becoming passe.

All this means a new array of choices for dual-income couples. As they sort their way through the maze of opportunities, therapists advise a high degree of communication and flexibility. Decisions that may bring careers into collision should be negotiated carefully, with both spouses voicing their feelings and misgivings. When exploring a job decision, worst-case scenarios should be addressed. Once a decision is reached, it should be reviewed periodically to make sure both partners are satisfied.

Discussion and sacrifice may not always alleviate conflict, but then the challenges of fitting two careers into one marriage never promised to be easy. "Each has got to pull some weight and make some compromises," says Johnnetta Cole, 53, who balances the demands of a marriage and five grown sons against her duties as president of Atlanta's Spelman College. "There's got to be an awful lot of dialogue because the rules are new." And they are always changing.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: NO CREDIT

CAPTION: Percent of married couples with wives who work

With reporting by Karen Grigsby Bates/Los Angeles, Ted Gup/Washington and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago