After the hugs, champagne-popping, and congratulatory messages, what comes next after a promotion? For the person who got promoted, there’s a LinkedIn announcement, a new level of responsibility in the office, and potentially added stress or longer work days as they adjust to a new role.
For their partners, it might be a different story. After seeing a spouse go through the many trials and tribulations a career can bring, there’s no doubt that spouses share in their excitement, but they might also feel burnout from taking on more household duties, or neglect as their significant other logs long hours—and guilt for feeling any of those emotions at all.
“Any kind of change in either partner’s work role is going to have fallout at home,” licensed clinical psychologist and marriage expert Dr. Alexandra Solomon explains. Solomon, who is a professor at Northwestern University, translates research findings on relational self-awareness and improvement to couples and individuals via her podcast and new book Love Every Day.
“Any change that happens to you, is a change to the entire system,” she says, which is especially complex for families with two full-time jobs and kids. And these dual-career couples are more likely to pursue job advancement, with a McKinsey study finding both partners (and especially women) are more eager to be promoted than those in single-career relationships.
The inevitable changes to the family system after a promotion don’t bode well for every couple. A Forbes Advisor report finds some 46% of divorced couples cited career choices as the most prevalent kind of conflict they experienced while married, while a Swedish study finds that after a promotion, the risk of divorce nearly doubles for women who initially took on more traditional gender roles in the relationship.
What can couples do to prepare for the inevitable impacts of new work responsibilities? Solomon offers three methods for partners to anticipate and address any promotion-related tensions—helping both their marriages and professional success in the process:
1. Anticipate a promotion’s probable and possible impacts, together
Solomon suggests couples consider the impact a promotion will have, might have, and that we’re afraid it will have. “We can avoid some of the pitfalls of defensiveness and blame when we are anticipating something rather than reacting to something,” Solomon says. Since most of dealing with the real impacts will be trial and error, Solomon says this conversation mostly establishes a precedent for checking in on how both partners are dealing with a promotion, and reassures both partners they will navigate any challenges together.
As for how to actually bring up this kind of conversation, Solomon said it’s important to “celebrate and savor the news” beforehand, and that the partner with the promotion should take the lead. “If the other spouse brings it up, the one who got the promotion might feel undermined,” she says.
Replace ‘sorry’ with ‘thank you‘
Often, as the partner with a promotion spends longer hours at work, their partner might pick up the slack with household chores or childcare. Studies suggest this effect could be greater for female partners: Women in senior leadership positions who have male partners are still five times more likely than their partners to do all or most of the household work, according to a report from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
And that unequal burden at home applies to parenting, too. In dual-career couples with kids, 41% of working mothers say that being a parent has made career advancement harder—more than double the 20% of working fathers who say the same, according to Pew Research Center. The study says these women are more likely than their partners to manage children’s schedules and care for children when they’re sick.
Yet regardless of who got the promotion, Solomon says the other partner needs to be careful not to burn out from the added responsibility at home, especially if they already feel left behind or fear their partner no longer needs them as they climb their career ladder.
If a partner is already prone to feeling this fear of abandonment or neglect, and then starts overdoing support, it primes that person to feel resentful, angry and neglected, Solomon says. “Accommodation and picking up the slack has to be tempered with self-care,” she adds.
And while the promoted partner might feel guilty and tend to apologize for being busy or preoccupied, Solomon says it’s actually more beneficial to reframe their feelings as gratefulness. Saying sorry “keeps all eyes on the one with the promotion,” Solomon says. “If they say thank you, it puts the attention on the partner,” helping them feel seen at a time when much of the couple’s conversation might be focused on the new role.
The promoted partner needs to be mindful of their own burnout
The promoted partner has to check in with themselves, too. “Sometimes the way we cope with imposter syndrome or novelty is to put our pedal to the metal and push the accelerator so hard, and overwork ourselves as a way to manage anxiety and insecurity,” Solomon explains. This stress can impact daily marital functioning by draining emotional, physical, and cognitive resources, which makes the partner with a promotion more likely to “act aggressively, interpret ambiguous situations negatively, and be more likely to respond with confrontational behavior,” a study from the University of Southern California says.
Solomon suggests that after getting a promotion, workers should continuously check in with themselves to make sure they get enough sleep, are eating well, using alcohol and other substances responsibly, taking time with friends, and stepping away from work to recharge.
“The person with the promotion has to remember they are still entitled to rest and play and distraction and pleasure,” Solomon says. The easy part? Much of those rewards come with spending time with a partner, Solomon says. Going out to dinner together or spending any quality time together won’t just make the other partner feel less abandoned; It will also help the partner with a promotion to relax, and return to work a more refreshed version of themselves.
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