The Fishbowl MBA

You want to take an MBA; but you also want to keep your partner. Not an easy feat to accomplish. What can you do? Here’s four pieces of advice that will increase your chances of making it through the MBA with your relationship intact.

This is from the blog of a fellow MBA student:

Today I officially got dumped. Over email. While I was in class, and just before I was supposed to give a little speech in front of my entire class. [...] Mine is the latest in a string of MBA relationships to fall apart. Several people in my class have returned home for a weekend to try to fix a relationship, only to come back single, or get a phone call and find out the other person doesn’t want to be with them anymore. I guess it’s a risk you take when you go away, but I know I’m not the only one who wasn’t expecting it at all and who had hoped theirs would be one of the ones that worked out.

If you start the MBA with a relationship, there are plenty of reasons to be worried. Many a promising long-term relationship has come to an end against the ragged, unforgiving shores of the MBA program. According to a Financial Times survey done in 2004, if you start the MBA with a girlfriend, there is a 50 percent chance that she will not be with you at graduation. Each break-up story is different in the details, but it all comes down to this: The MBA is a scaringly efficient relationship-killer.

There are, I suspect, many different reasons for this. The main ones are, in no particular order:

• No time and energy for each other. The MBA will take up all the time you let it take and then some, and it takes an extraordinary effort to make sure that you don’t neglect your relationship. Most days, an MBA student will come home late, gobble down dinner, and then immediately start preparing tomorrow’s homework until late in the night. On weekends, you will lose your partner not to school, but to sleep as he or she tries to catch up from the long nights during the week.
• MBAlienation. Time isn’t the only issue. The MBA experience is immersive, to say the least, and as a partner, you can quickly start feeling adrift on foreign seas, hearing only the unintelligible murmurings of MBAs talking to other MBAs about their MBA experiences. Maintaining a bond can be harder when you can’t laugh at the same jokes or rage over the same unfairnesses.
• People change during an MBA. Many people feel they develop during the MBA, not just professionally but also as persons. Not surprisingly, this means that many relationships fall apart as your partner sometimes does not develop along with you, or develops in a different direction.
• The MBA is a meat market. The MBA marketing brochures won’t tell you this, but especially for women, the MBA is a dating market filled with gifted, exotic and interesting people, several of whom are either single or soon-to-be single. (It has jokingly been said that MBA stands for ‘Married But Available’.) Unsurprisingly, some relationships fall apart because the partner in the MBA falls for a classmate.

Of course, knowing that the MBA presents a risk to your relationship, it is tempting to adopt a fatalistic approach to the situation: “If my relationship doesn’t hold, it probably wasn’t meant to be anyway.” This way of thinking may give you a certain measure of consolation after the break-up. But there is a danger in adopting this kind of thinking before the MBA, as it may lead you and your partner to ignore the problem. My guess is that some of the couples that fell apart probably were ‘meant to be’ (whatever that means), only the MBA came between them.

The good news is, there are things you can do to increase the chances of making it. Here’s four suggestions.

1. Clarify expectations in advance

The most important part is that you are both clear about what the MBA entails for the relationship. In terms of spending quality time together, an MBA is about as far from a honeymoon as you can get. Make sure your partner understands and accepts this, and that he or she does not habour unrealistic expectations about how much quality time you will spend together. Have this conversation as early as possible, and don’t fall for the temptation to downplay the problem. It is far better to be pleasantly surprised by the occasional windfall than to be sorely and repeatedly disappointed by a hopeful promise that never materialised.

2. Make sure your partner is as busy as you are

You are going to be seriously busy during your MBA, no matter which type it is. It is tempting to think that your relationship will do better if your partner has lots of free time. According to my observations, though, this is not the case; having a busy partner working in a challenging job is a good thing. If you are both busy, you may have trouble getting the household to function – but frankly, the occasional messy sink or the overreliance on fast food is far less dangerous to your relationship than a partner who sits around all day with nothing to do.

3. Involve your partner in the MBA

Your partner should try to attend as many MBA activities as possible – team evenings, ski trips, sitting in on classes, joining the Theater Club, starting a soccer team and so forth – even if it sometimes means going on her/his own. (In some of the couples I knew, the partner started working with a professor on a research project or a case study.) As a partner, the more you can become part of the MBA experience yourself, the smaller the risk of mutual alienation – and, you get to make some friends of your own, instead of just being a sidecar to your partner.

4. Systematically set aside time for each other

It is pretty basic, but hard to do in practice: make sure to set aside a fixed time every week to do things together. For instance, you can decide to make every Saturday your relationship day. Or if your partner will live in a different country during the MBA, you can plan and budget for taking regular mini-vacations together. It only works, though, if you truly defend this time with your life, not letting other priorities take over no matter how pressing they may seem in the moment. Also, remember to inform your MBA team about your ‘relationship time’ from the very beginning, so they don’t get surprised when you refuse to attend all-weekend work sessions (yes, these will occur regularly.)

The reality is, prioritizing your relationship WILL mean compromising on other areas – say, accepting that you won’t make the Dean’s List grade-wise, or that you will make fewer friends because you opt out of many of the social events. It can work if you are willing to make some hard choices. If you are NOT willing to compromise, though, thinking that it’ll all work out, be prepared to run into a very hard brick wall as the world starts prioritizing for you.

For more on this, see my advice on prioritizing your time, Rule no. 1: Know your priorities.

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