DOUBLING DOWN

A guide to work-life balance advises professional couples.

Dual-income households have long been the norm in the United States, with women increasingly enjoying professional careers that rival or surpass their husbands’. Even so, succeeding as one of these “dual-career couples,” as Gordon and Bluestein call them, is not just a matter of landing the right jobs. It’s necessary that couples find a workable equilibrium so that the partnership can succeed at home while each of its members thrives professionally. When kids are thrown into the mix, it can get even more complicated. “Especially after they have children,” note the authors in their introduction, “couples often negotiate career decisions and work-life balance in response to short-term pressures rather than stepping back and constructing a sustainable framework for their lives. Some of those decisions cause later regrets.” With this book, the authors use their own experiences as a high-powered, professional couple to advise members of the next generation on how to achieve the careers they want while successfully building lives with the partners they love. They explain the best ways to be a supportive partner, manage money, negotiate compromises, and maintain an independent professional identity while sharing a unified domestic one. The authors can certainly claim to have dealt with these issues at the highest level. Gordon was a CEO for a Fortune 500 company while Bluestein worked as a consultant to some of the world’s largest corporations. Together, they raised two children. Though the majority of the guide concerns their own experiences, the prose reads more like a polished bit of copy than a memoir: “For Ilene, going to London was a way of breaking out of Boston. She loved the fact that it was a high-energy, very global city….Nowadays, when someone says they’re moving to Europe, Ilene advises, ‘do Asia, or else you’re not challenging yourself. Europe is too easy now.’ ” While the tips are fairly conventional, the advice is quite helpful. The presentation, on the other hand, is decidedly dated. There’s little emotion here for a book about relationships, which results in a rather wooden portrait of the central couple.

An informative but stiff manual that delivers well-earned advice on business and marriage.