Jen knew that getting into an Ivy League school was competitive so she took all AP classes in high school and added four years of extracurriculars to get her into Dartmouth.
She knew she wanted a career with considerable financial upside, so she majored in economics. It was a male-dominated program and Jen knew she’d have to be tough to get ahead. She graduated magna cum laude and got a job straight out of school as an analyst for Smith Barney.
Back in the 90’s, it was full-on Wolf of Wall Street, so Jen learned how to put her head down, manage her emotions, and burn the midnight oil. In the first few years of her career, she was routinely clocking 16 hour days with no time to herself and barely any time for sleep.
She made great money and had little time to spend it. Then she met her husband – another mergers and acquisitions guy – in her late 20’s. He made enough for Jen to quit her day job and become a devoted stay-at-home-Mom in her 30’s.
While he paid for everything, she took care of everything else: The groceries. The social plans. The doctors’ appointments. The carpool. The club sports. The vacations.
Their roles became more well-defined and separate. The next thing you know, they had drifted apart. From the outside, they looked like the perfect family. From the inside, there wasn’t much left to them as a couple. Most of their conversations were about money and the kids, and the very things that brought them together no longer seemed to matter.
The 5 Love Languages? Jen’s husband barely spoke one.
Jen summoned the same skill set that took her from high school to Dartmouth and from Dartmouth to Wall Street. She doubled down on hard work. She went to therapy. She tried to drag her husband to therapy. She tried to plan date nights. In fact, at one point, Jen realized she was doing everything to bring them closer together and he was doing nothing.
But that didn’t stop her. As a hard-working, analytical, tenacious woman, she was not going down without a fight. Not with two kids. Not with their nice house. Not with the fear of starting over. Even though Jen would later estimate that they got along less than half the time, she stayed. She ignored her feelings of being unseen and resigned herself to being the best Mom she could be. By the time the kids were in high school, their marriage was a shell of the original thing that brought them together.
In school and your career, you put in the work, you get the reward.
Love doesn’t operate that way.
If it did, Jen would be a success, since no one will outwork her. But love isn’t about work; it’s about listening to your feelings. After two decades of ignoring her feelings, Jen divorced her husband and figured that, because she was a catch, she’d find a new man quickly.
But love is not a meritocracy – and you don’t succeed because you went to a good school, have a healthy bank account, and a well-worn passport. You don’t succeed by latching onto the first cute, rich guy who comes along and holding onto him for dear life, because you don’t like being alone and you don’t like dating.
That is intern behavior. You’re a CEO. A CEO knows that the secret to low employee turnover is to create a culture of accountability. To hire slowly and fire quickly.
This is the OPPOSITE of how most high-achieving, high net-worth women date.
You hire quickly – in the first few dates – but you may take decades to fire. All because of how tenacious you are. That’s the paradigm we have to break.
Jen’s story isn’t unique.
It’s what happens when you apply a success strategy that works everywhere else in your life to the one place where it backfires.
Your ability to push through, to stay committed, to outwork everyone in the room is exactly what made you successful.
It’s also what keeps you in relationships long after they stop feeling good.
If you’re ready to stop overinvesting in the wrong relationships and start choosing men who actually show up for you, I invite you to take the next step.
You deserve to have the easy, lasting relationship you’ve always worked so hard for.
* This article was originally published here
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