Love or Money: Which Is Most Important?

If you have a dream career in mind, being in a relationship might be a step backwards.

Relationships are supposed to enrich your life and add to it. They provide you with a partner who can share your ups and downs and who supports you in everything you do. While relationships also have their good points and their bad points, they should make your life better overall. While these are all great theories about relationships, in truth they can sometimes be more work than they're worth. If you're someone who takes your career very seriously, relationships may limit your success. How so, and how can you get past this?

Time and Energy

One thing to consider about relationships is that they take a tremendous amount of time and energy. This is usually a good thing since you're in a relationship because you enjoy being with the other person, but it also interferes with how much time you can reasonably spend on furthering your career. Your partner may not appreciate your working until six or seven o'clock every night or bringing work home with you, and may want you to spend weekends with them rather than heading back into the office.

There is also a certain amount of energy and emotional attention that a relationship requires that can detract from your career. If you're tired at the end of a long day at the office, you may want to just relax but your partner wants to go out, or they want to talk when you want to shut off mentally so to speak. If you know you need to juggle their demands as well as those of your career, this can cut into the energy you put into your own goals and your career can suffer.

Your Career & Women: Are Women Dream Killers?

Is it possible that being in a relationship with a woman might damage your career? In some cases a woman might push you to find a career that pays well, no matter the vocation. This can cause you to make sacrifices in your career for her. As an example of how this works, you might dream of being a prosecuting attorney but your wife or girlfriend knows that an attorney in private practice can earn quite a bit more money. You find corporate law or other forms of private practice incredibly boring, but she makes life difficult because you're not earning the paycheck that makes her happy.

Some women also need to be the center of attention and get jealous of the time their man spends at the office, and may interfere with this in many ways. She may insist on lunch dates or get upset and suspicious when you need to work late or travel for business. In trying to make her happy, you make sacrifices that could better your career.

When Women are the Breadwinners

There are many ways that men can damage the careers of women, one in particular being when men expect women to stay at home with the children or still do the lion's share of the housework even though she works fulltime. A man might even be jealous or upset when a woman earns more money than he does or has a career that is seemingly more prestigious than his. Some men handle this situation in very immature ways, such as insulting her and her profession or even resorting to infidelity to "make himself feel like a man". A man too may get upset or jealous of the time a woman needs to spend in the office to better her career and he may make things difficult for her.

When Your Partner is Successful

While your own career success can be threatened by your relationship, what about when your partner is more successful than you? As said, men especially can find this difficult but women may also have concerns about the relationship when with a very successful man. She might feel insecure or jealous of his coworkers and assume that he finds her boring. Either partner might find that it makes them frustrated, as they try to better their own career but see their partner have more success than them. Any of these scenarios can put a strain on a relationship.

Juggling Relationships and Careers

Often there are no easy answers to how a person might juggle a relationship and a career, but hard work and sacrifice are often the answer. If you feel your relationship is in the way of your success, you need to ask yourself which is more important, and consider the risks versus the rewards. You might risk being alone for the reward of career success. In some cases you might meet someone who is more supportive of your career, or you might find that your success was worth every sacrifice. In other cases you might feel that your life is unbalanced and that career success means nothing without someone at home to be happy for you. Only you can decide what's best for you when it comes to careers and relationships.