How do couples who work together keep their shalom bayis intact?

“OH my gosh, you guys are just the cutest!”

“It must be so much fun to work with your husband every day.”

Sari and her husband often hear those comments when clients watch them working together. And they smile and nod. But the truth, Sari says, is more complicated. “There’s nothing cute, cool, or fun about working together as a couple. You can be an incredible team and your workday can contribute to your marriage. Or it can be an utter disaster.”

For most of human history, it was the norm for couples to work together. They ran family farms or businesses in or close to their homes. Professor Glenn Musk, a professor at North Dakota State University who has spent the last 20 years studying couples who work together, writes that about a third of businesses in the US are run by couples he calls “co-preneurs.” Many more aren’t officially manned by family, but receive regular, often uncompensated help from spouses or partners.

Spouses have always had to work together as a team to ensure the running of a well-functioning bayis ne’eman. But that teamwork intensifies when they choose to work together professionally. How can couples learn to negotiate working together in the smoothest, most productive way?

Then and Now

Half a century ago, most Jewish women were homemakers and/or teachers. Businesses were dominated by men, but when necessary, wives would play a supplementary role. They ran their husbands’ medical offices or stood at the cash register.

That model is still the case for many couples today. Yocheved Frischman, for example, married a primary care physician trained in holistic healing and acupuncture. She describes herself as the “chief operating officer” of his practice.

She runs the business end of the practice, keeping records and the books. She began her involvement when they lived in the US, but since their aliyah the practice is much busier, and she manages employees who deal with the Israeli record-keeping needs.

Rachel Sarway started out helping her husband with secretarial tasks when he opened a business in judgment enforcement (helping people recoup money the courts have determined is owed them). “It involves a lot of nitty-gritty information that has to be entered into the system — subpoenas, court documents, bank information,” she says. “But my husband isn’t the type to sit at a desk all day and has less patience for details than me. I’m more organized, and little by little, I started taking over a lot of his administrative tasks.”